'Plunder' Explores Ties To The Past As Author Searches For Property — And Treasure — Lost To...

What drives people to want to know more about relatives long gone — grandparents, great grandparents, aunts and uncles — who exist in nothing more than name, and sometimes not even that? And what does it mean to try to reclaim something that was theirs, even if that elusive thing meant little to its original owner, who might not even have approved of your quest?

Author Menachem Kaiser has thought about all of it because in 2010, he started on a long, circuitous, Kafkaesque, sometimes absurd, usually frustrating, and occasionally poignant quest to reclaim a building in Poland owned by his grandfather — among the only members of an extended family killed in the Holocaust.

Kaiser joins host Robin Young to talk about the twists and turns in his story, which he writes about in his new memoir, "Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure."