"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