Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

and less the original misdeed that was unforgivable. My father, leaning against the counter, was orderly, detailed, impassive. He presented all this almost like a case study: I could discern no animus in him toward his brother. But I remembered, even if I’d been young and uninformed—​I’d seen up close the anger and heartbreak.

Fifteen years after that day in the kitchen I met with The Killer and took those first steps toward reclamation and understood that this story of inheritance could hardly be isolated from that story of inheritance. I looked up the publicly available court documents, followed the Apex lawsuit as it snaked for more than a decade through the Canadian justice system, tracked the judgments and appeals and decisions and further appeals, hundreds and hundreds of (surprisingly lively) pages. I had, then, two piles of documentary evidence pertaining to my family and family property. There was that of my grandfather’s building in Sosnowiec, a thin, haphazard, scattershot pile of sources that offered not much more than an outline of an outline of a story, with so many aching gaps and questions. And there was that of Apex, an easily downloadable two-foot-high superabundance of material, the story of a family’s dissolution told in glaring detail.

Only in 2011, when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the case, did the lawsuit finally wind down. This didn’t mean, of course, that the parties were ready to reconcile. But it was a necessary starting point—​the ordeal could now be moved into the past tense. And a few years later my father and Hershel did in fact reconcile, somewhat. With Hershel’s wife acting as an intermediary, the brothers reached an agreement: they could be in touch, there could be a relationship of sorts, they could reenter each other’s lives, but neither would mention the past. No accounting, no questions, no confrontations, no clarifications, no apologies demanded and no apologies given. The past was to be put away. To celebrate, my mother, father, Hershel, and Naomi went out to dinner. By all accounts they had a nice, normal time.

Thus their relationship entered a third phase—​cordial, friendly, stable, undramatic.

In 2015—​right around the time I met with The Killer—​Hershel fell ill, and in the span of a few months he lost something like half his body weight. Gone was that huge, hard belly. Even more unnerving was the change in persona. He had always been so quick, so garrulous, all this coiled energy; now he was slow, spacey, quiet, glassy-eyed, helpless. My father checked in on Hershel regularly. He helped with errands, took Hershel to doctor’s appointments, pushed him in his wheelchair to shul.

In September 2015 I went to Toronto and sat down with my father and Leah and her husband, Mordy. I explained what I’d learned: Zaidy’s father and uncle had jointly owned the building in Sosnowiec; the documentation was actually pretty good; the lawyer I’d retained was confident we could get it back.

“It seems like it’ll be a relatively straightforward process,” I said.

Overall they were bemused. Sosnowiec was a million miles away, in a left-behind and intentionally forgotten world. They had no sentimental ambition there. Mordy asked me how much the building was worth.

“Four, five hundred thousand dollars, maybe more.”

The figure surprised and impressed them, but I wouldn’t say it excited them. Any windfall was still very abstract. They were of the opinion—​and in this regard they were much more perspicacious than I was—​that this process wouldn’t be so straightforward. They had no faith in the Polish legal system—​to their ears the phrase “Polish court” sounded like a punch line—​and believed that the average Pole, judges not excepted, was, if not necessarily an out-and-out anti-Semite, then certainly not rushing to help foreign Jews take back ancestral property, and was probably also an anti-Semite. But here I was, having spent all this time in Poland, saying we had a shot. They were game.

“What I need now,” I said, “is your power of attorney. This is your inheritance, not mine.” Yes, of course, they said. No problem.

“And you have to decide what you want to do about Hershel.”

“What does Hershel have to do with this?”

“He’s Zaidy’s child too.”

It was unlikely, I knew, that they would embrace the idea of getting involved with Hershel, especially not with something as close to the bone as an inheritance proceeding involving real estate. Even if everyone was now on speaking terms, there was plenty of unresolved hurt and betrayal, and there would never again be a sense of comfort and trust. But I had hoped, given that none of them was really going to be involved past these power of attorney forms, that they’d say whatever, okay, go get Hershel’s signature, what does it really matter. My father and aunt were quiet; it wasn’t so straightforward—​there was no way Hershel would simply go along with it, no way he would simply just sign a paper and let others take control. That’s just not how Hershel, even a weakened Hershel, works.

I proposed to leave Hershel out of it for now, if there was money at the end we could deal with it then, give him his share, it would be much easier that way for everyone. Everyone agreed. So The Killer prepared two power of attorney forms, one for my father and one for my aunt; as far as the Polish courts were concerned, Maier Kajzer had two children. I didn’t give it much thought at the time—​it was a decision of expediency, so as not to have the reclamation fail before it started. But in retrospect it was a shameful, and shamefully ironic, decision: in order to proceed with the reclamation—​which represented a kind of un-erasing of my family—​I had to, or chose to, erase my family, and do so within the official Polish record, no less.

I shipped the power of attorney forms to Kraków and that was that: we’d set the machine in motion and now there was nothing to do but wait, let The Killer