Author Menachem Kaiser and Jason Francisco in conversation
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Menachem Kaiser never knew his paternal grandfather, a Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust. But after Kaiser learns that his grandfather had spent decades trying in vain to reclaim an apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland, that had been owned by his family, he decides to revive the long-dormant quest. He hires a colorful Polish attorney known as “The Killer” and begins an occasionally Kafkaesque adventure through Poland’s judicial system.
As his legal struggle proceeds at a slow pace, Kaiser learns that his grandfather’s cousin Abraham Kajzer, heretofore unknown to him, was the author of a Polish-language Holocaust memoir that is valued in Poland for the light it shines on the Project Riese complex—a series of vast tunnels and caverns built by Jewish slave laborers (including Abraham) during World War II. Because of his connection to his great-uncle, Kaiser earns VIP status among the treasure hunters who regularly explore the tunnel network, and gets another perspective on the region’s history.
Recording and reflecting on these experiences, Kaiser explores the moral complexities of finding one’s inheritance in the aftermath of tragedy.
Co-presented by the JFCS Holocaust Center. Program made possible, in part, by Steven and Anita Feinstein.
Menachem Kaiser grew up in Toronto, Ontario and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Lithuania. A recipient of two Hopwood Awards and the Geoffrey James Gosling Prize, Menachem’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, BOMB, Vogue, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Jason Francisco is an artist and essayist. Joining documentary and conceptual art, his photoworks and writings focus on the complications of historical memory, and the inheritance of trauma, specifically concerning the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe. A faculty member of the Emory University film and media department, Francisco co-founded FestivALT, an annual festival of experimental Jewish art, performance, and activism in Kraków, Poland, and served as co-director in its first years.
Francisco received his education at Columbia University, King’s College London, and Stanford University. His large-scale projects include Alive and Destroyed: A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time (forthcoming from Daylight Books, 2021), The Camp in its Afterlives, An Unfinished Memory, After the American Century, Big City, Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory, and The Villages: Rural India at the End of the Twentieth Century.
