A memoir of an extraordinary journey in present-day Poland and into the past. Menachem Kaiser is a 30-something Jewish Canadian whose grandfather, the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, attempted to reclaim family property in the city of Sosnowiec but was unsuccessful. The grandfather died before Menachem was born, but throughout his childhood, his father, aunt, and uncle kept alive the family's ties to their Polish origin through constant discussion.
Menachem decides to pursue the matter and travels to Poland, does what he can to assemble the required paperwork, and hires an attorney, an elderly woman known as "The Killer" who files claims with the government to go forward in the process. The result is a tale more surreal than any writing by Kafka or painting by Dalí.
The courts and the reparations process lead Menachem through an endless maze of bureaucracy, forms, and documents, and along the way he visits the building bearing the address of the one the family once owned, and meets many of its residents, some of whom have been living there more than 60 years.
Two particular things come to light in this account of endless ambiguity: the building Menachem visits turns out not to be the one his family owned, despite its having the same house number as the documentation and the address the family has always discussed; and, through one of the residents, he hears of an intriguing cult-like, loosely organized small army of treasure hunters, who are concentrating on the Nazis' Riese Tunnels, a vast underground complex in the Owl Mountains in Silesia, adjacent to Sosnowiec, built during the war by Jewish slave laborers who experienced horrendous working conditions and brutality. Rumors had spread that there were vast stores of stolen gold and other valuables hidden there, but Menachem's connection is the discovery that a cousin of his grandfather's generation, Abraham Kajzer, had written a memoir of his imprisonment that has become the stuff of legend among the fortune hunters.
Menachem's book first reads like a picaresque tale of an attempt at the righting of wrongs, but then very gray areas of morality intrude in his thoughts. While it's certainly true that the Kaiser family owned a building in Sosnowiec before the war and that they have never been compensated for what was taken from them, there are others to consider: those that live in the building who are innocent of any wrongdoing and would fear displacement from their homes. The war ended more or less 75 years ago and the world has moved on: how do we balance the wrongs of the past with the needs of those in the present? I couldn't help but think of African-Americans who seek their rightful place in our modern society after their ancestors were brought here as slaves 400 years ago, or of the factions in Israel and Palestine who are at odds over territorial rights, home ownership and ancient claims of a homeland stolen over and over through the millenniums of history. Where does it all end, and what is fair? Does anyone really have the answers to these questions?
I must mention that I was drawn to this book by the author's name and the subject matter. My family includes many named Kaiser/Keyser/Keiserman, etc., and while we didn't originate in Poland, but rather in Moldova/Ukraine, and my great-grandparents fled many decades before the Holocaust, the family suffered the effects of pogroms and other brutalities, and some distant cousins who survived World War II have recently come to light. Nothing is truly clear, and certainly nothing is simple.
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