Join the Montreal Holocaust Museum and Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom for a virtual conversation with author and journalist Menachem Kaiser about his award-winning book Plunder.
- Tuesday, April 18 at 12:00 PM
- On Zoom
- Registration required
- Discussion in English
About Menachem Kaiser and Plunder
Menachem Kaiser is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, NY. He grew up in Toronto, Canada, has a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright Fellow to Lithuania. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, New York, BOMB, Vogue, and elsewhere.
Menachem Kaiser’s brilliantly told story, woven from improbable events and profound revelations, is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer.” A surprise discovery—that his grandfather’s cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret memoir while a slave laborer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex—leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who revere the memoir as the indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder.
Reviews
“This is weird, complicated territory — by which I mean it’s fantastic . . . ‘Plunder’ thrives as a morally complicated travelogue . . . it is original, and it finishes strong. Kaiser chases down the facts (fingers-crossed) of Abraham Kajzer’s story, and they devastated me. It’s not spoiling things to say that Kajzer survived the absolute worst humanity had to offer only to abandon life’s greatest reward. From the distance of all these years his choice is incomprehensible. It’s our duty to try to understand anyway.”—The New York Times Book Review
“With smart, elegant prose, [Kaiser] manages to construct an engrossing chronicle of his foray into an elusive past. His narrative is wonderfully digressive, laced with coincidences and ambiguities, and filled with just enough revelations to keep readers contentedly turning pages.”—The Forward
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