Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) š
- Author: Menachem Kaiser
Book online Ā«Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) šĀ». Author Menachem Kaiser
Itās not the ending Iād hoped for but maybe itās a truer, more appropriate ending. Because at heart this was never really about whether or not I was successful in reclaiming family property; those stakes are hollow. Letās say I did in the end get it back. Then what? Would I have āwonā? Completed my memory-quest? Beaten the final boss? What epiphanies would be suddenly realized, what sentimental circuit would be suddenly completed? I canāt even say for sure that it would have been what my grandfather wanted. Maybe he would have much preferred that none of his descendants ever went back to Poland than that his fatherās investment property be reclaimed. Maybe heād gladly have given up the building if it meant I wouldnāt write about the dispute between his children. Maybe heād have been outraged that I erased his eldest son from the Polish legal record. Itās less about the building than what the building stands for, and in turn what the reclamation stands for; and these are open-ended questions. What matters here is less the name on a deed than trying and failing but trying still to understand what it means to have, to lose, to take, to take back, to intrude, to inherit, to define your legacy, to declare your legacy, to impose your legacy, to misread your legacy, to impute valueāāhistorical, material, sentimentalāāand then immediately doubt that value, to assume the role of the protagonist in a story that isnāt yours and that you can never understand, to unpause someone elseās moral journey, to trace the ouroboric spiral of questions of family, history, justice, money, religion, ego, object, memory, meaning. This isnāt a mission, in other words, that can simply be completed. Yes: the more I think about it the more I think that in the most morally honest version of this story the reclamation would be perpetual, irresoluble, Sisyphean; my children and their children should inherit not the building but the struggle to reclaim it, the struggle to understand what it is theyāre trying to reclaim.
When I first told my father about Abraham, about how Iād discovered this new relative, he was incredulous, he was sure I was making a mistake. āIt makes no sense,ā he said. āHow could it be that my father had a first cousin who survived the war, who lived in Israel, who even published a book, and either my father didnāt knowāāwhich is impossibleāāor never mentioned it, which is just as impossible?ā It was a good question. For a while I wondered if maybe my father was right, if I was in fact making a mistake, if somehow Iād gotten confused. But then I learned that Abrahamās brother, Chaskiel, the one whoād escaped to Argentina before the war, had had a crystal company, Kaiser Crystal, and this jogged my fatherās memoryāāhe remembered that when he was a kid a relative had come to the house with his crystal wares, had offered my grandfather a job; and my father remembered that some of the crystal that he and my mother had inherited from his parentsāāa vase and a set of shot glasses, which Iād always lovedāāwas in fact Kaiser Crystal, samples from Chaskiel. It was conclusive, but hardly comfortingāābecause while it meant that Abraham was in fact who I thought he was it also meant that my father knew even less about his father than heād realized. For months afterwards, every time my father and I talked, heād come up with fanciful scenarios in which his father wouldnāt have told him about Abraham, or, even more fanciful, wouldnāt have known about Abraham. He was rattled, I could tell. And later, after all my missteps, my misconceptions, I could see how this had been but the beginning of a never-to-be-broken pattern: at every step my grandfatherās legacy seemed to retreat. (Here is the building he grew up in but in fact he didnāt grow up here and also this isnāt the building.) I ended up finding, falling into, another legacy entirely: the ease with which I was able to enter Abrahamās story put into relief just how inaccessible my grandfatherās was.
I wish I knew my grandfather. I wish I knew his history. Itās a kind of longing for longing: I want to be able to mourn.
I do not trust the genre I am writing in, that of the grandchild trekking back to the alte heim on his fraught memory-missionāāitās too certain, too sure-footed, meaning is too quickly and too definitively established; there is no acknowledgment of the abyss, the void, the unknowable space between your story and your grandparents' story. (I admit Iām also jealousāāall the other grandchild authors seem to be able to so easily access the memory and the meaning of the memory of their grandparents.) I get why we write these stories this way, why we frame our memory-descents as missionsāāitās whatās expected, itās what works, itās whatās most suspenseful and most accessible and most marketable, and also when youāre in it it does feel like a mission; there are places to go, obstacles to surmount, clues to discoverāābut itās a lie, or at least not the truest truth, because āmissionā suggests the possibility of completion, redemption, catharsis, but there can be no completion, redemption, catharsis, because our stories are not extensions of our grandparentsā stories, are not sequels. We do not continue their stories; we act upon them. We consecrate, and we plunder.
For nearly as long as Iāve been writing this book Iāve been asking myself if Iāve been going about it wrong, if it had been a mistake to write
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