Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

you have their death certificates? No. Do you know Sura-Hena’s maiden name? No. Maier was married to whom? Bertha Kaiser. Is she alive? No. Do you have her death certificate? Yes. Do you have her birth certificate? No. And Maier is dead? Yes. Do you have his death certificate? Yes. Do you have his birth certificate? No. And Maier had how many children? Three—​my father, Michael; my uncle, Hershel; and my aunt, Leah. Do you have their birth certificates? Yes. Are they still living? Yes. And they will sign power of attorney to you? My father will, and my aunt will. But with my father’s brother it might get complicated. It is a very complicated situation. Did Maier leave a will? I think so. I think it was all just left to my grandmother. Did your grandmother leave a will? I think so. Do you have documents that “Kajzer” became “Kaiser”? I think so.

Perhaps as a kind of semiconscious counteraction to the abrupt and total loss of family suffered by their parents, my father and his two siblings never strayed far. They settled down and raised their own families around the corner from their childhood home, where my grandmother lived until she died, in 2005, outliving my grandfather by a lot and her second husband, Chiel, by a little. The entire family stayed unscattered, within a three-block radius. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and Bubby were an omnipresent part of my childhood. Directly across the street from our house were the other Kaisers, Uncle Hershel’s family, whom for some lost reason we called the Kiddies, and one street over were my aunt Leah’s family, the Felds.

Even taking into account the proximity, the families were exceptionally close. Our lives were threaded into one another’s, and Bubby, if not quite the matriarch (she was too fearful, too unself-possessed, too dependent), nevertheless held the affectionate center of our orbit. We were a large raucous lot. There were six children in my family; in the Felds’, five; and in the Kiddies’, seven—​and a year after Hershel’s wife, Sheila, died of breast cancer, he married Naomi, who moved in with her four children, and then, a year later, they had another. Cousins were nearly as essential a feature of my childhood as were siblings. Everyone had at least one cousin who was about the same age and who thus made for a natural companion; we paired up, tripled up, made little interlocking cousin cliques. Up until high school I spent more time with Ari Kaiser, one grade up but only four months my senior, than with any other human being. Sunday mornings Bubby made breakfast, obscenely buttery scrambled eggs, for anyone who showed up anytime between, I don’t know, seven and noon. (A great joy of Bubby’s was feeding her children and grandchildren—​though it was a joy shot through with trauma and fear: if you didn’t finish what was on your plate, she would weep.) You’d roll out of bed, daven, walk down the street to Bubby’s house. An older cousin might be leaving as you arrived. Ari Kaiser might come in just as you were tucking into your eggs, and join you for breakfast, and when Bubby turned toward the stove Ari would slip on her enormous plastic eyeglasses and blink his now giant eyes and impersonate Bubby’s accented sighs and the way she said bubbele and make you laugh so hard snot exploded from your nostrils.

That all three families were Orthodox, that everyone led similar lives and obeyed similar religious strictures and schedules, facilitated—​supercharged—​the closeness. On those long, flat, interminable Shabbos afternoons—​when you can’t drive, can’t ride your bike, can’t use electronics, can’t do homework—​we would drift back and forth between the houses, play Ping-Pong, basement hockey, board games, eat nosh, tease the younger kids, ruin the grown-ups’ naps. My cousins’ homes were an extension of my own. I knew perfectly those rooms, those kitchens, those basements, those closets of toys and games. I could go over whenever I wanted, I could sleep over whenever I wanted. There was enough cousin-traffic between the houses that you weren’t expected to knock; if on the rare occasion the door was locked, then you knew the combination, or where the key was hidden.

On Friday night everyone’s Shabbos meals would end when they’d end and everyone would make their way to one of the cousins’ for dessert. The adults clustered at the far end of the table and argued, kibitzed, joked, talked Torah, talked travel, compared grocery deals. The kids clustered around the other end and did the same thing in their own key. It’d inevitably get very loud—​one argument or bout of hilarity anywhere at the table raised everyone’s volume—​with lots of chaotic cross-talk. You could dip in and out of conversations like they were TV channels.

My immediate family and the Felds were, on the whole, loud and clever, but next to the Kiddies we were downright meek and slow. The Kiddies were exasperatingly quick and intelligent, and unyielding in the extreme. This was particularly true of Uncle Hershel. Hershel had a huge, hard belly, thick plastic glasses, thick dark beard. He was very affectionate, though his affections could hurt: he’d greet you by grabbing the skin beneath your chin and say zeeeeeskeit!; and in the Kiddies’ house you might be subject to tickle torture, wherein Hershel picked you up and put you on the curled end of the bannister and tickled you until you felt you were going to die. Hershel’s debate chops were legendary: the only ones who had the tenacity to keep up were, once they were old enough, his sons. Argument for them was a blood sport. The rest of us would watch, stupefied and amused, as they argued endlessly, inexhaustibly, dazzlingly, over politics, history, halacha, anything. Hershel was also the single greatest Tetris player I’ve ever known, which says something, I think, about his focus, obsessiveness, and stubbornness.

Let me go on about Hershel for one more paragraph, because I want to give