Plunder by Menachim Kaiser

I read a review of this book which had a quote from the book that more or less sums it up. "Family stories are poor preservers of history: they’re fragmented, badly documented, warped by hearsay, conjecture, legend — of course errors are going to creep in. This seems somehow wrong, even blasphemous, at odds with the private sacredness we impute to our origin stories. But most stories in most families aren’t meant or relied on as preservation of hard information, they’re meant and relied on as preservation of soft information, of sentiment, narrative, identity, of who someone was and, subsequently, who you are." The author is the grandson of someone whose property in Poland was seized when the family was sent to a concentration camp and all the rest of them died. It was by family lore a modest property--they were middle class not wealthy and when he decides to try to get it back, he knows that it is a long shot and that there isn't much bang for the buck, in that he is going to spend time and money on this project, and that it is not the destination so much as the journey. There are a lot of surprises for him along the way, and the book takes us through it in an almost thrilling sense, that we quickly learn that there are many corners to turn on this adventure, and that there are quite a few interesting people who get involved as well. I would recommend this for many reasons, because many of us know our histories only through stories, and some of those stories might very well have surprise endings too.