Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

you some sense of a very complicated man, because the story is about to turn. Hershel had this great oratorical trick he’d perform at family functions. Everyone would deliver their speeches, which were less speeches than divrei torah: involved hermeneutical teachings that pulled from the Bible, Talmud, any of the thousands of commentaries. Then Hershel, last up, would improvise his own involved hermeneutical teaching that combined all the preceding ones: he’d use all their sources, all their insights and conclusions, and right there in front of us unspool his grand synthesis.

In the mid-1990s the family came apart. For a long time I didn’t know why, didn’t know what the dispute was about. The falling-out, this fight that cleaved the family, that put my father and aunt on one side and Hershel on the other, was, to us kids, very sudden and very mysterious—​we had no idea what had happened, only that it was something exceptionally serious. It had to do with money, we could pick up that much, there were lawyers involved, it had something to do with business, assets, maybe even inheritance, any of the crasser if usually invisible ligaments of Family.

My parents kept us in the dark. They didn’t clue us in, didn’t intentionally explain and didn’t unintentionally let anything slip. But the anger and heartbreak were impossible to miss; it’s atmospheric, your parents’ emotional state. Whatever was going on became one of those adult conversations that’s always under way but just out of earshot. A great invisible monster whose presence we could sense. I remember my father’s face when he’d see his brother on the street—​which happened often, it was unavoidable, our families lived so close, and on Shabbos when you can’t drive, when you have to walk, you and your neighbors will cross paths plenty—​how his features hardened, his brow furrowed and his lips a tight line, how he’d stare or conspicuously not-stare.

Hershel’s kids were as clueless as we were. Ari Kaiser and I, over the course of weeks and then months, tried to figure out what the heck was going on between our fathers, but we couldn’t come up with anything, couldn’t piece together why everything had fallen apart.

For a while the fallout stayed confined to that generation. I and my siblings still went to the Kiddies’; Ari and his siblings still came over to us. Hershel would still grab the skin beneath our chins, would still subject us to tickle torture. I suppose it was a kind of intimacy inertia. My father’s stated position was that it didn’t bother him if we went to his brother’s house, even if he himself wouldn’t set foot there. But animosity gradually seeps down, parent to child, turns into a more benign but still substantial discomfort. Soon enough we were also staying away from the Kiddies. Gradually our lives diverged. Within a few years there was virtually no interaction between the Kiddies, on one side, and us and the Felds on the other. We adjusted to this Hershel-less reality. Yes I have an uncle but we have nothing to do with him. Hershel became more and more abstract, a character from a past story. The falling-out, the fight, the lawsuit hummed somewhere in the far background of our family life.

When my grandmother died, my father, uncle, and aunt had to sit shiva together. They sat side by side on Bubby’s green velvet sofa, minus the cushions—​those in mourning must sit low, close to the ground—​looking calm, projecting an air of composure and normalcy, but it was palpably abnormal and awkward: each sibling-faction was pretending the other didn’t exist. My father sat in the middle with Hershel to his immediate left, but there might as well have been a hundred-foot wall separating them. The room, the crowd, the array of folding chairs, the conversation divided along this fault line. Visitors offered condolences twice. Once to Hershel, to whom they’d relate a memory or sentiment about Bubby, then say the verse traditionally offered as a valediction to a mourner; and then slide over to my aunt and father, to whom they’d repeat the memory or sentiment, and say the verse again.

One afternoon, when I was in ninth or tenth grade, my father and I were alone in the kitchen and, unprompted—​if memory serves this really came out of nowhere—​he explained everything. (I don’t know what elicited this; my father, for all his pragmatism, can be very impulsive.) He leaned over the countertop, chummy, relaxed; I leaned next to him, mirroring his pose and demeanor. “First things first, you have to understand the context,” he said. At the top of a blank sheet of paper he wrote, in his characteristic block letters, APEX. Underneath he drew four lines, radiating outward, family tree–style. “Apex is a real estate company,” he said. There had been four original partners, one of whom was my grandfather. My father wrote KAISER at the terminus of the first line. Each partner had a 25 percent stake. “When my father died that twenty-five percent,” my father said, drawing three new branches under KAISER, “was split into three. So we have eight and a third, Leah has eight and a third, and Hershel has eight and a third.”

During Zaidy’s lifetime, my father said, Apex’s assets, made up primarily of four residential apartment buildings in Toronto, had never been worth that much. But over the years the value had increased substantially. (I asked how much they’d be worth today. My father shut his eyes and nodded. “A lot.”) The Kaiser family had always operated as a single entity.

The fallout, my father explained, had to do with the Apex holdings; I don’t see a need to detail or relitigate the alleged wrongdoings here—​I’ll say only that the general narrative I received that day was that Hershel, true to character, refused to back down, refused to settle, made Talmudic arguments for why he was in the right. That it was more Hershel’s stubbornness and tenacity, the doubling down and prolonging,