Unraveling a Legacy: A Conversation with Menachem Kaiser, Author of Plunder

Please join us for a conversation with Menachem Kaiser, moderated by Michele Forman (UAB Department of History) and Kerry Madden-Lunsford (UAB Department of English). The panel will discuss his book Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure, which chronicles Kaiser’s journey recovering family property lost during the Holocaust.

The story begins when Kaiser takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Along the way, he discovers that his grandfather’s cousin not only survived the war but wrote a secret memoir while he was a slave laborer in a vast, secret Nazi tunnel complex. This leads to Kaiser being adopted as a virtual celebrity by a band of local treasure hunters, who revere his relative’s memoir as an indispensable guidebook to finding Nazi loot.

Plunder is both an exciting adventure story and a deeply personal examination of inheritance—material, spiritual, and emotional.

A book signing with the author will take place before and after the event.  

Light refreshments will be served. 

About Menachem Kaiser

Menachem Kaiser is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, NY. He grew up in Toronto, Canada, has a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright Fellow to Lithuania. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, New York, BOMB, Vogue, and elsewhere.