Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

it as a memoir, if I should have written it instead as a novel. That it’s nonfiction made it easier to set the stakes, made it easier to get you to care, but the limitations have become clear: if this were a novel I could have dumped everything into a narrative that could roam, stretch, fabulate, that could assert meaning with impunity. Right now I’m confined to the truth and the truth is that I know very little about my grandfather. If this were a novel I could conjure him.

He would be the protagonist, not me. It’d be him trying to reclaim the building, not me, and it would be his building, or rather his murdered father’s building, though that only makes it more charged. The legal issues and bureaucratic issues and the issues with the residents would be his to deal with, not mine. The stakes and conflict would be immediate and unmediated; the trauma of the war and the trauma of the loss of his family would be immediate and unmediated. His motivations needn’t be qualified or explained, he has to get the building back because he has to, his sense of displacement and vindication is immediately understood and accepted, nothing need be speculated about or presumed. There’d be no need to exhaustingly delineate between what’s known and what’s unknown, to chew these questions of legitimacy until everything’s mush; instead there’d be the expansive solidity of the imagined. I could swap out my real grandfather, whom I do not know at all, and insert my fictive grandfather, whom I know perfectly. And I’d have no need of this stand-in grandfather, the one so revered by treasure hunters (or, of course, I could simply incorporate him into my fictive grandfather).

In the novel that this could have been, I’d almost certainly have the protagonist get the building back, succeed in his mission, taste that victory; in the novel that this could have been, redemption makes sense. But it would be short-lived; before long there’d be intense emotional fallout. Because it’s not in fact a story of reclamation, it’s a story of loss—​and not loss of real estate, not of anything recoverable. The reclamation was but a desperate response to the loss, and the building was but a symbol—​which the protagonist had lost sight of: he’d gotten fixated on the mission itself, had bought into the fiction that if the mission could be accomplished then maybe the loss could be undone. But once he’s successful, once the building has been reclaimed, the loss is re-exposed, and to a certain extent re-experienced. The building now stands for nothing and therefore is nothing, all there is is loss, there’s nothing standing between him and the void. He tumbles in. He drowns in grief, for months, maybe years. And then I think I’d have him burn the building to the ground. Raze it, destroy it, erase it. Maybe you’d read it as an act of madness, maybe you’d read it as an act of perfect sanity; it doesn’t matter, it isn’t an important distinction. Among the ruins he’ll install a memorial to his disappeared family. A tombstone, or four tombstones, in any case something simple, but permanent. And I think in the final scene—​if I’m able to pull it off—​my grandfather places a pebble on top of the tombstone. Perhaps his son is with him.

Epilogue

The last time I was in Poland I met a man I’ll call Steve. Lawyer from the Midwest, mid-sixties, gray goatee, baseball cap. Very affable, a touch cynical, though really only on a midwestern scale. Steve and I had met by chance, or what passes for chance in Kraków—​Yechiel, the local macher who’d introduced me to The Killer, had met Steve at the kosher shop and invited him out for a beer and I happened to walk by.

It was the first day of Steve’s first trip to Poland and he was astonished by all the things that Jews who are in Poland for the first time are astonished by. The architecture; the tourists; the weird Jewish energy. He told us he was here as part of a group of 250 people, all of whom had roots in Sosnowiec/Będzin. Oh! I said, and told Steve that I also had roots in Sosnowiec and Będzin. Well, the truth is, Steve said, it’s not my roots but my wife’s—​her father, my father-in-law, was from Będzin. But he never talked about it with her, only with me, and so here I am. He asked me what I was doing in Poland and I offered the usual spiel—​ancestral property, Abraham Kajzer, treasure hunters.

Hmm, Steve said. That is interesting. That’s very interesting. I have a story for you. You’re talking about buildings and treasures—​I think you’ll find this story very interesting. Steve pulled his chair closer to the table. There is actually another reason I came to Poland, he said.

In Będzin my father-in-law had a jewelry shop, Steve said, right below his apartment, and, long story short, before he was deported, he took all his gold, melted it down, molded it into ten eggs, which he hid in the attic. He never had the chance to retrieve them. He used to talk to me all the time about the eggs. He told me very precisely where they were: in the attic there are two windows facing west, about twenty feet apart, and the eggs are beneath the smaller window, right-hand side, two bricks up from the ground. He even drew me a map, Steve said. He showed me on his phone:

Yechiel asked how much the eggs were worth. Each egg is ten ounces, Steve said, so a hundred ounces in total. Yechiel looked up the price of gold—​around $1,200 per ounce. Gevalt! Yechiel said.

That’s remarkable, I said. It was a remarkable story but also it was another remarkable story. This place is saturated with remarkable stories. I’d been hearing remarkable stories about Polish treasure for years. All my life I’d heard stories of