Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

there wasn’t any choice, only the illusion of choice—​and so it’s where regret settles. So she aches. It isn’t something as simple, as manageable, as forgettable as a past love, because what they had was anchored by her act of salvation, this singular act of courage, something she went nearly her entire life unrecognized for but that nonetheless defined her, and also that counter-defined her as a German citizen. She aches. The pain gnaws, Abraham is gone, but not dead, and this pain beckons and merges with the pain of the incremental loss of her husband; this pain beckons and exacerbates her guilt over her betrayal of her husband. Where is he, she thinks. Where are they? Where is Alexander, she feels she is still allowed to ask, though she knows she shouldn’t. Where is Abraham? He used to write letters. He even visited once. But then the letters stopped, and she no longer knows whether he is alive.

And Abraham, in Holon, taking care of Sophie, trying to soothe her as she raged that they, whoever they were, were watching her through the television. Whenever he has the chance he jumps on his motorcycle and rides to his sister, Necha, to drink tea and reminisce and talk of their life before the war, about their home and parents and siblings and friends, now all gone; or perhaps they didn’t, perhaps their mourning was diffused and spread out thinly over thousands of hours of untragic talk. Does he tell his sister about Gertrud? And if he does, does he tell her the whole story, or a bowdlerized version, a version more in line with prevailing postwar attitudes and sentiments regarding Germans, and Germans-and-Jews, attitudes and sentiments that can include acts of courage and selflessness but not love, nothing like love, because love between those who inflicted the suffering and those who suffered would be too scandalous, disgusting, treacherous? He thinks daily of Gertrud. He aches too. It isn’t something as simple, as manageable, as forgettable as a past love, because what they had was anchored by her act of salvation, her grace and courage and his state of helplessness, his utter dependency. He’d lost everything, he’d lost everyone, but at the end it was love, why can’t it be love, but here comes the pain of the loss of his wife and the pain of the loss of his son: the love of and for the woman who saved him is, always will be, attached to the pain of the loss of the wife he couldn’t save, of the son he couldn’t save, and now here comes the guilt, too, though he knows he should forgive himself, has every right to forgive himself, but how? They’re dead, and he is not. What was this love of Gertrud? Was it a betrayal? And now he loves, or at least is dedicated to, Sophie—​is this in turn a betrayal? Of Gertrud? Of his first wife, Chana? Where is Chana? She is dead. Where is Sophie? Physically, she is at home, but where is she? And where is Gertrud? He used to write letters, he even visited once, but he had to cut her off, for her sake, for Sophie’s sake, for his sake, and now he no longer knows whether she is alive.

18

The Killer assured me a thousand times that once my relatives were officially dead the reclamation was as good as done, the last step was a formality, the judge would walk downstairs and open the Forever Book and confirm that the last listed owner was indeed my great-grandfather and that’d be that, the inheritance would kick in and the building would be ours. Early on there had been some indications that our case was being prioritized, or at least being attended to. A decision was imminent, The Killer said.

A month passed, then two, then three.

I bothered The Killer to bother the courts, find out what the holdup was, see if we couldn’t get this expedited. The Killer did what she could. She sent registered letters to the court, made calls, tried pulling strings. Nothing came of it. We were screaming into a bureaucratic void. There was an enormous backlog, The Killer said, because of the judicial reforms; everything was in disarray. I couldn’t decide if this was a reassuring explanation. Six months passed, a year. I stopped bothering The Killer. Another six months passed. My expectations withered. You get stuck for long enough in a process you don’t understand and can’t see the end of and eventually you just accept your stuckness as the default. The Killer told me not to lose hope, insisted we were inches from the finish line. But were we? The longer it dragged on the less I believed her. Even if and when I got my day in court, why assume it’d go according to plan? Nothing had gone according to plan. Something would go wrong—​a clerical error, a typo, a law we’d misinterpreted, new judicial reforms, The Killer would mess up, we’d get sidelined by some villain or catastrophe we hadn’t anticipated. This was going to go on forever.

I had hoped to conclude my story properly, satisfyingly. Fade out on a successful reclamation of my ancestral property, a triumphant finishing of my grandfather’s unfinished business, hurrah, mission accomplished, how glorious, how touching, with so many beautiful important lessons learned along the way. Or, plan B, I’d fail, come up empty-handed, have my mission crushed (this would probably be a richer, more interesting, more poignant ending, truth be told; certainly there’d also be many beautiful and important lessons learned). But neither of these outcomes has come to pass. It’s been nearly five years since I first sat down with The Killer, since I took those first steps toward reclamation, and I have neither succeeded nor failed; this is an open-ended ending. My lawyer (and the lawyer I’ve hired to explain my lawyer to me) and others who’ve been through this tell me that my case