Review by Booklist Review
When you go adventuring, you never know what you may find. Fulbright fellow Kaiser invites the reader to share his journey to reclaim family property lost during the Holocaust. The twists and turns are many and complex, primarily involving dives into Jewish culture and history, treasure hunters, a Jewish survivor's memoir/diary, and the bureaucratic nightmare of the Polish legal system. Family is what holds all of these threads together, and what makes Kaiser's account so engaging is the skill with which he weaves everything together in multiple dimensions; even the title has many meanings. Consequently, this is much more than a legal case to assert ownership of an apartment building or a grandson continuing his grandfather's quest. Tragedy, regret, loss, the desperate struggle for survival, and despair saturate this Holocaust story, but Kaiser renders them carefully, so as not to overwhelm his findings about myth and meaning in memory. This exceptional book will deeply engage readers interested in Jewish, Polish, and WWII history, especially the Holocaust and its aftermath, including the redemptive hunt for family treasures stolen by the Nazis.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kaiser debuts with a spellbinding account of his quest to reclaim an apartment building that was once owned by his grandfather but taken from him by the Nazis. Kaiser is frank about the context of his reclamation. For starters, he'd never met his grandfather. But after a visit to Sosnowiec, Poland, in 2015, Kaiser took it upon himself to repossess the property his family lost during the Holocaust. Hiring a lawyer (called "The Killer") to represent him, Kaiser set out on a twisty path as shocking information on his lineage came to light--namely, that his grandfather's cousin, Abraham Kajzer, wrote a secret memoir while working as a slave laborer on the Nazi's mysterious Riese project. This revelation caught the attention of a group of eccentric Silesian treasure hunters who believed Kaiser was Abraham's own grandson, suddenly turning him into a pseudo-celebrity. Meanwhile, the complicated legacy of WWII haunts Kaiser: the people who lived in his grandfather's building "benefited from the wholesale murder of my family," he writes. ("Let's embrace the stereotypes, I'll be the Jew coming back for his property and you be the fearful Pole.") Yet at the same time, he wonders if, by upending people's lives with his claim, he's complicit in the problem, too. Superbly written, this page-turner reads like a gripping adventure novel. Agent: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this debut, journalist Kaiser recounts undertaking the recovery of property lost to his family in the Holocaust, and reflects on what he hoped to find. His grandfather, who died before Kaiser was born, survived the Holocaust and resettled in Toronto. However, he was unable to reclaim ownership of an apartment building in Poland, leading Kaiser to take up the claim during a research fellowship in the country in 2010. In the process, he experiences the vagaries of the Polish legal system and the fraught history of Poles and Jews. His narrative describes his common interactions with residents of the town the building is in, as well as the uncommon ones with treasure hunters searching for a mythical train that is rumored to hold hundreds of pounds of gold hidden by Nazis in the nearby mountains. The treasure hunters believe Kaiser is the grandson of a man (with the same last name) who wrote about his slave laborers digging tunnels for the Nazis in these mountains. This coincidence leads him to another branch of living relatives. Occasional family photographs are an added bonus. VERDICT 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.--Laurie Unger Skinner, Highland Park P.L., IL
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In a literate, constantly surprising quest, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor returns to Poland to lay claim to the things of the past. Early on, Kaiser writes of the "pit stops in the obituary" of his late paternal grandfather, who died in 1977. The author knew that he was born in Poland, survived the Holocaust, and was the sole member of his family to have lived through the terror. Kaiser traveled to Sosnowiec, in south-central Poland, not just to search out family history, but also to explore his grandfather's claim to family property seized by Nazis. The latter journey took him deep inside the workings of the Polish legal system, with numerous false leads and misinformation throwing him off the trail. It didn't help that the Kraków lawyer he hired, nicknamed "The Killer," wasn't exactly deft with the requisite paperwork. When the author located what he thought was the family property, he encountered a longtime resident who told him, "This is my family's house." Kaiser thought to himself, "it wasn't said defensively or threateningly, he only meant to show off his English," but it became clear to him that a successful claim would displace others, presenting one of many moral quandaries. Along his path, the author learned about his grandfather's cousin, who also survived the Nazi occupation, working as a slave laborer in a mysterious tunnel complex that the Nazis had built even as World War II was turning against them. Kaiser's parallel quest then took him into the concentration camps, sometimes accompanied by treasure hunters who used his relative's memoir as a guidebook to hidden Nazi loot. Of a piece with Anne-Marie O'Connor's The Lady in Gold (2012), Kaiser's story approaches the conclusion on an unsettled note that, he laments, would be simpler to resolve if he were writing a novel and not nonfiction--though it does end on a cliffhanger worthy of a thriller. An exemplary contribution to the recent literature on the fraught history of the Shoah. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
