The American writer Jonathan Safran Foer must have experienced the same. In Ukraine he went looking for the world of his Jewish relatives murdered by the Nazis and found little or nothing. He did experience so many crazy adventures that he decided to fill in history, which in 2002 led to the equally witty and gruesome novel Everything is illuminated. Something similar applies to Menachem Kaiser (Toronto, 1985). In his non-fiction debut The legacy. A quest for forgotten family property, Nazi treasures and the meaning of memories he does not fill in anything, but what he writes is sometimes funny,...