A grandson of a man who survived the Holocaust takes up his fight to reclaim a family building in Poland. The journey is arduous, vexing, poignant and bizarre.
Menachem Kaiser documents his journey in Plunder. (Beowulf Sheehan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
When Menachem Kaiser set out to reclaim a building his grandfather’s family owned before the Holocaust in Sosnowiec, Poland, he thought it would take him 18 months at most. His grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, had already meticulously gathered paperwork and the documentation necessary.
Instead, it’s been over six years since Kaiser began the journey and he’s no closer to an ending.
Kaiser documents his journey in “Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure,” out March 16, where his quest to reclaim his family’s building leads him to discover his grandfather’s first cousin, Abraham Kajzer, the closest relative to survive the Holocaust. Abraham, Kaiser learns, actually wrote a Holocaust memoir, “Za Drutami Śmierci,” that in part details his time spent in Riese, vast underground tunnels constructed by the Nazis where many suspect treasure looted during
Kaiser documents his efforts to untangle his family's story in "Plunder," a memoir and a meditation on the ever-changing nature of Holocaust storytelling.
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.- Long overshadowed by the rise of abstract expressionism in the 1950s, magic realisms reputation is on the way up again. The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia is presenting the exhibition Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism from February 27 to June 13, 2021, seeking to reexamine how we define magic realism and expand the canon of artists who worked within this category. The term magic realism was popularized in 1943 during the exhibition American Realists and Magic Realists at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), organized by curator Dorothy C. Miller with assistance from museum director Alfred H. Barr Jr. and arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein. The Georgia Museum of Arts exhibition includes works originally presented in MoMAs show, including paintings by Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, Z. Vanessa Helder and Patsy Santo, as well as other . More