Plunder

that twenty years ago, at my grandmother’s urging, he, my father, had had my grandfather’s documents translated, had made some inquiries about reclaiming the building, but had gotten nowhere, everyone said forget it, it wasn’t possible or it wasn’t worth it. All of which was interesting—​I had never heard any of this before—​but incidental. What mattered to me was that I had an address, I now had as my destination a particular spot on a particular street, and not an entire big blank city: my map of Sosnowiec now had a kind of memory-topography. When you seek out your origin, specificity of place matters. You want to know which city, you want to know which block, you want to know which apartment, which room. You want to get as particular as possible.

I took a train from Kraków to Katowice, then a second train to Sosnowiec. From the train station I walked toward Małachowskiego. The streets were narrow, potholed, crammed with small angry cars and recalcitrant streetcars and canopied by what seemed like thousands of overhead wires. Sosnowiec, I could see, was no one’s favorite vacation getaway spot. Sosnowiec was gloomy and worn down and, in color and spirit, gray. Was I surprised? I don’t know. Among American Jews trekking back to the alte heim, cameras slung around their necks and myth-memories ringing in their ears, it’s become somewhat of a trope to be surprised by the city your immigrant grandparents grew up in. (It’s so urban! It’s so modern!) This is a coddled, storybook, sentimental preconception, but it can be hard to resist. While I hadn’t pictured chickens and horses and peasantry, hadn’t imagined finding at Małachowskiego 12 a modest but sturdy wooden cottage with a smoking chimney and a secret cellar, still, you can’t help it, when you imagine your grandfather’s Polish hometown you imagine (we have been conditioned to imagine) rural, green, quaint, old worldly, shtetl-ish. Sosnowiec is nothing like that. Sosnowiec isn’t a village, isn’t a shtetl, and it isn’t picturesque. It is a grim postindustrial city. This is true historically, aesthetically, and atmospherically. The dominant industry in the region for centuries was coal mining, and this can be felt—​the city feels grimy, heavy, melancholy. The city feels like a cough. The architecture is low, mean, Soviet, concrete: most of the buildings were built or renovated after the war and are utilitarian, curve-less, a wrung-out gray or beige.

I found the street without difficulty—​Małachowskiego is a major artery that cuts through the city center, made up mostly of boxy apartment buildings and municipal government buildings. Number 12 was one of those boxy apartment buildings. It was, as is standard in this part of the world, attached—​it would be more accurate to describe it as the last quarter-section of the no-nonsense structure that runs nearly the length of the block. But the address of the adjacent section was Małachowskiego 14, which was not an address associated with my grandfather, and was thus of no interest to me. Number 12 was five stories high, with two rows of shallow white balconies protruding like ribs. Its color was a bleached beige. It was exceptionally plain-looking, if not quite drab.

I stood on the opposite side of the street and studied the façade, the laundry draped over the balconies and the perched satellite dishes. Feeling soft-hearted, feeling like I was inside a significant moment, I gave permission to my grandfather’s history to settle onto, into, this plain-looking building. I confirmed to myself that this must be where my grandfather had grown up. Where else? I didn’t have any other addresses so it must be here. I took some photographs. Passersby eyed me and my camera suspiciously. I understood their wariness. I understood that I didn’t belong here. I felt it. I was an outsider, I was a sightseer, I was the furthest thing possible from a native. I was dancing my stupid nostalgia dance. The fact that I was from Sosnowiec (in a manner of speaking) and had returned only meant I belonged here even less. What I felt most sharply standing there in front of my grandfather’s building was not a connection to this place/that time but a sense of discontinuity with the past. No matter how literary and metaphorical you wanted to get, this wasn’t my home. My grandparents had done everything they could to wipe away this history. And they’d succeeded, no? Despite being the son of two Poles, my father would consider the idea that he is Polish ludicrous. No longing had been passed down. No seeds of nostalgia had been planted.

An old man exited the building and I ran toward him, gesturing for him to hold the door. A gracious and uninquisitive neighbor, he smiled and held the door. Inside was dreary, underlit, but not dirty or unlooked-after. It felt institutional and fireproofed. I walked up and down the stairs. There were four or five apartments on each floor and I looked at each door as if it might reveal itself as my grandfather’s. But of course no apartment announced itself as the apartment my grandfather had grown up in eighty years prior. I could have knocked on a door, could have done my best to explain who I am, what I’m doing in this building, what I’m doing at your door. But I felt sheepish. I already felt like I was trespassing. I’d gone inside, I’d gotten as close as I was going to get.

I went to City Hall, where a patient clerk looked up my grandfather’s name. It took a while to get it straight—​I had assumed that my grandfather’s legal name was spelled like mine; I simply handed her my driver’s license—​but eventually the clerk brought out a large leather-bound book and showed me a handwritten inscription, in gorgeous cursive, covering the bottom half of the page, announcing the birth of my grandfather, Maier-Mendel Kajzer (“Mendel” is the Yiddish diminutive of Menachem), to his parents, Moshe and Sura-Hena.

Then I walked to the station and got