Kindle
$2.69
Available instantly
Audible Logo Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial
Hardcover
$2.83
Paperback
$9.99
$2.83 with 90 percent savings
List Price: $27.00

The List Price is the suggested retail price of a new product as provided by a manufacturer, supplier, or seller. Except for books, Amazon will display a List Price if the product was purchased by customers on Amazon or offered by other retailers at or above the List Price in at least the past 90 days. List prices may not necessarily reflect the product's prevailing market price.
Learn more
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
FREE delivery Saturday, May 11 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or fastest delivery Friday, May 10. Order within 9 hrs 42 mins
In Stock
$$2.83 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$2.83
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
Amazon.com
Ships from
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Read full return policy
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Read full return policy
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Payment
Secure transaction
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Explore Amazon Book Clubs
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Menachem Kaiser
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure Hardcover – March 16, 2021

by Menachem Kaiser (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 528 ratings
See all formats and editions
{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$2.83","priceAmount":2.83,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"2","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"83","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"AE8dB2XRlyBBNKiz4Grrj5s1O8U9hIdM9hOkj1py4fNuXY0w3rMK5Pjyc9OGdwgdXGlCohbgKOtM%2FodwGY2kqulIxqcRaBtE5BuONYxchu05azxYaCdfcaQCaG0qeo7IPMEOOyFtLSeqRjZjkOx1Zw%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

A New York Times Critics’ Best Nonfiction Book of 2021
Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Biography

From a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family’s apartment building in Poland—and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows 

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. Propelled by rich original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance—material, spiritual, familial, and emotional. 
Previous page
  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Mariner Books
  4. Publication date
    March 16, 2021
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 1.03 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    132850803X
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1328508034
  8. See all details
Next page
The Amazon Book Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now

Frequently bought together

Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure
$2.83
Get it as soon as Saturday, May 11
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
$17.84
Get it as soon as Saturday, May 11
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
A Play for the End of the World: A novel
$10.25
In Stock
Ships from and sold by 8 trax media.
Total price:
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Details
Added to Cart
These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers.
Show details Hide details
Choose items to buy together.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A twisting and reverberant and consistently enthralling story. It’s a weird story that gets weirder … Kaiser is a reflective man on the page, with a lively mind. He dwells on the moral seesaw he finds himself on … Kaiser considers the nature of conspiracy theories, in a way that’s highly relevant to our era. (His thinking about reparations of various kinds is as complex and timely.) … Plunder has many stories to tell … many moods and registers. It acquires moral gravity. It pays tender and respectful attention to forgotten lives. It is also alert to melancholic forms of comedy. Tonally I was reminded at times of Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent first novel, Everything Is Illuminated … Traveling on a private road, closer to the ground, and at a slower pace, [Kaiser’s] walk turns up details that are fresh, unexpected and significant. His perceptions are sharp. We partake of his curiosity.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“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

“Often hilarious, often poignant … A light tone belies the book’s seriousness of purpose: to tease out thorny issues of inheritance, reparations, and what it means to honor one’s dead.” —New Yorker
 
“[Kaiser’s] rabbit-hole quest leads to wild encounters with Nazi treasure hunters, a lawyer named Killer, and plenty of questions. Fascinating.” —People

"A master storyteller embarks on a journey to learn about his grandfather and to reclaim an apartment building that was stolen during the Holocaust. The odyssey is fascinating and thought-provoking."—Christian Science Monitor, The 10 Best Books of March

"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


"A saga of family history and inheritance that reads like a murder mystery, Plunder begins with Menachem Kaiser’s journey to reclaim a Polish apartment building but immediately becomes something far richer and stranger. Probing with unusual insight and humor into questions of memory, loss, and what we owe to the past, this impossible-to-put-down book — part travelogue, part memoir, part meditation on all that history hides from us — marks the debut of a major writer.”—Ruth Franklin, author of NBCC Award-winning Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
 
"Exceptionally well written, this candid and suspenseful work recasts the injunction that one generation of survivors demands of all descendants, never to forget. Plunder is a magnificent and stunning literary debut.”—André Aciman, author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name
 
"Menachem Kaiser is a young writer and storyteller of stunning talent, originality, and wisdom, and his debut book is gloriously impossible to categorize — by turns hilarious and profound, digressive and suspenseful, intimate and sweeping, it stands as an enviable accomplishment.”—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction:  Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful
 
"Reparations and treasure-hunting: I can't think of two better metaphors for memoir-writing, and I can't think of a better recent memoir than Menachem Kaiser's Plunder, which has heart, humor, and intelligence to spare." —Joshua Cohen, author of Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction

"An exemplary contribution to the recent literature on the fraught history of the Shoah."—Kirkus Reviews, starred 

“Spellbinding . . . Superbly written, this page-turner reads like a gripping adventure novel.”—Publishers Weekly, starred 

“This thoughtful and thought-provoking memoir of family secrets and family lore, like Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, will appeal to readers of family histories.”—Library Journal

 

About the Author

MENACHEM KAISER holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and was a Fulbright Fellow to Lithuania. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, New York, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; First Edition (March 16, 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 132850803X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1328508034
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.03 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 528 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Menachem Kaiser

Menachem Kaiser

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
528 global ratings
A Search for His Past and Roots
5 Stars
A Search for His Past and Roots
In PLUNDER, Menachem Kaiser is in Poland and begins a search for information about his Jewish grandfather in this audiobook. The search connects him to treasure hunters looking for hidden plunder the Nazi’s stole from the Jews during World War 2. Kaiser’s search has plenty of twists and turns, false starts and dead ends but is interesting listening. I found the storytelling in this book interesting and listened to the entire audiobook. Worthwhile listening.W. Terry Whalin is an editor and the author of more than 60 books including his latest 10 Publishing Myths: Insights Every Author Needs to Succeed.
Hide
Thank you for your feedback
Sorry, there was an error
Sorry we couldn't load the review

Top reviews from the United States

FanteFan
5.0 out of 5 stars A Family's Revealing Look at its Own Holocaust Story
Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2021
Verified Purchase
It is so much more than a story of a grandson seeking to reclaim a family-owned Polish apartment building lost to the Nazis and eventually to Polish bureaucracy. In fact, that premise becomes more of a footnote to a larger narrative that traces the harrowing escape and survival of another relative interred in several Nazi concentration camps, whose heroics elevate him to mythical status. But even more impressive to me is how this writer allows himself to be pulled into the history of prewar and postwar Poland, from where his family emigrated. And in doing so he fully immerses himself into the mysterious world of historical truth seekers and treasure hunters. Some critics cite a cavalier attitude exhibited by the writer, saying he mocks similar truth-seeking efforts by survivors of the Holocaust, but I didn't sense that at all. In fact, his approach becomes so introspective that he openly questions everything he is doing and believes. And he lays it all out in real time and painstaking detail. It is no ordinary memoir, rather a refreshingly candid perspective on such a historical and personal story.
2 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars A worth while read but...
Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2021
Verified Purchase
"I don't know how to summarize a book like this...in certain ways this is a very notable, strange book." These are the author Menachem Kaiser's own words, describing a long deceased Polish relative's memoir,"Za Drutami Smierci" (Behind the Wires of Death") which can just as well describe his own work, "Plunder."

It begins as an frustrating and ultimately inconclusive effort to reclaim a property once owned by his grandfather in the Polish town of Sosnowiec but becomes a prolonged account of his wanderings in Silesia for nearly a decade. There he meets treasure hunters who seek buried and hidden relics and underground structures of the Nazi era and learns that "Za Drumati Smierci" , written by his grandfather's cousin, is revered as their Bible. What "Plunder" starts out to be is not what it becomes.

The book is particularly relevant today as the Polish government has just passed a highly controversial law which essentially denies further claims for restoring ownership to properties lost or taken during the Holocaust or the Soviet regime which followed. One cannot fail to see this as another attempt to absolve Poland from any complicity in the Holocaust and indeed, an earlier law makes it a civil crime to suggest this. The author's maddening attempts to seek recovery through the courts underscores the current political attitude. He first must establish that any relatives who might have an interest in the property are dead. The court determines that since some few did survive the Holocaust does prove conclusively that his relatives did not survive, and the fact that they would today be 130 and 140 years of age does not qualify in meeting the state's standard of "death." The lawyer he hires to help , referred to only as "The Killer" asks for "a declaration of death" which requires the specifics of that death, i.e. when, where and how, something the Kaiser could not prove. The decision denying him relief is affirmed on appeal. A second lawyer advises that what should have been sought was a "recognition of death", an entirely different procedure requiring proof only of a passage of time since a person went missing, ten years being the maximum. When this motion is filed and argued, no decision from the court is forthcoming and five years later, as book concludes, nothing has still been heard.

While the book is, in its own way, well written, Kaiser's style is at times a distraction. It is almost a stream of consciousness narration with fully a third of the prose in the form of questions--some rhetorical, most questions addressed to himself. Furthermore, where one adjective or adverb might suffice, he constantly uses three. This occurs innumerable times throughout, so that we get on pages 8 and 9 alone his description of his grandfather's hometown. He imagines it as a "coddled,storybook, sentimental " preconception but he finds it in reality to be a grim postindustrial city "historically, aesthetically, atmospherically", the city feeling "grimy,heavy, melancholy", the architecture "low, mean Soviet" and the streets "narrow,potholed, crammed." Where other descriptors are used we read of a "colorless mustache" , "angry cars" and someone sporting "a big leading man nose."
Once one gets attuned to these quirks of style, it is nevertheless a book certainly worth reading.
4 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
gammyjill
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but needed editing...
Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2021
Verified Purchase
“Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure”, by Menachem Kaiser, is a bit of a mishmash of family history and Polish history. Kaiser, who is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, was raised in Canada and currently lives in New York City.

The number of Holocaust survivors is diminishing as time takes its toll. For many years we had the survivors telling their own stories; then their children took over, and now we’re reading the third generation. Many of these authors never met their grandparents who suffered, instead using photographs, written materials, and official documents, they put together a narrative of their ancestors’ lives and experiences.

Menachem Kaiser becomes interested in his grandfather’s story and was determined to “find out more”. This involved research in both mainly Poland and Israel. There’s also - supposedly - a building owned by the Kajer family in the town of Sosnowiec, Poland. Kaiser visits and picks up a crew of lawyers and historians to help him, first, to find the building, and second, to declare the owners dead, so Menachem and his family could take over the building. But, where IS the building, supposedly built in the interwar period. But the building at the site was definitely built in the Soviet era. More problems turn up and Menachem gets involved with a group of Polish treasure seekers, mainly looking in the Silesia area of Poland.

It was then that Menachem Kaiser’s book lost me. The treasure seekers are looking for the often mythical “Nazi Gold” and other wartime souvenirs. They’re wandering around caves and other, secret hiding places. Did the Nazis make a flying saucer in the last days of the war? Maybe...

There’s also a family member - a survivor named Abraham Kajer - who was not Menachem’s grandfather, but a close cousin. He was famous in the treasure seekers community, and Menachem stature within the group was enhanced by this connection.

I never knew where Kaiser was going in his memoir. A good book editor should have been let lose on the manuscript before publication. It could have been a better book.
23 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Loves to read tell-alls
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read, parts like a thriller
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2021
Verified Purchase
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I thought it was going to be only about the process of trying to get the family's property back, but it was much more than that. What I like most was the author was honoring his ancestors, by writing the book, and keeping the names and memory alive. The time and money and effort spent was well worth it, regardless of the value of the property. It was interesting how meeting one person lead him to other people, and on and on. Trying to re-trace the steps a Holocaust survivor took, trying to stay alive, honors his family. Because it wasn't a first person account, it wasn't the typical list of horrific things that happened, but rather, I felt, a noble effort to honor the ancestors.
2 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report

Top reviews from other countries

Yonah Krakowsky
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful book
Reviewed in Canada on April 12, 2021
Verified Purchase
A beautiful book that I couldn’t put down. At the same time meaningful and hysterical. Highly recommend.
One person found this helpful
 Report