Memoirs of an Anti-Semite Read online

  GREGOR VON REZZORI (1914–1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one “spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest.” After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for both radio and film and began publishing books at a rapid rate, including the four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society and An Ermine in Czernopol (published by NYRB Classics). From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence with his wife, gallery owner Beatrice Monti. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (available as an NYRB Classics).

  DEBORAH EISENBERG is the author of four collections of short stories and a play. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. She lives in New York City.

  MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-SEMITE

  A Novel in Five Stories

  GREGOR VON REZZORI

  Introduction by

  DEBORAH EISENBERG

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

  Skushno

  Youth

  Löwinger’s Rooming House

  Troth

  Pravda

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  The friend who introduced me to Ivan Turgenev’s short novel First Love, characterized it as a beautiful thing that’s made out of ugly things, and it has occurred to me since that a substantial quotient of ugliness may well be integral to all truly beautiful literary works. In any case, there can be few books rooted in a more profound ugliness than Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which so vividly, so feelingly, so elegantly, with such tender care, anarchic humor, and shocking honesty portrays the crucible of Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, with its catastrophically toxic compound of cultural elements and historical impulses.

  Rezzori was born in 1914 in the Bukovina, and he preserves in print, in this and other books, the immense vitality of the region at that time—the linguistic and ethnic ferment, the vast, brooding landscapes lit by the fading glow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the borderland combustibility. As a young man, Rezzori also spent time in Vienna, where he studied and had family, in Bucharest, and in Berlin, and he can cause those cities to spring to life on a page with such intense immediacy that you can practically drink the coffee and eat the pastry.

  Memoirs of an Anti-Semite was first published in its entirety in German, in 1979, but the story “Troth,” which the polyglot author wrote in English, appeared ten years earlier in The New Yorker under the title “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.” And although the book was written decades after World War II, most of it is set in the preceding years, along the road to that war.

  The cultural life of Germany and Central Europe in the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s burns so brightly against its dark background that for many of us who weren’t there it has the force of thwarted memory, of something that grieving is straining to reinstate. And the art of the period—music, film, painting, architecture, and literature—with its probing, uneasy, anticipatory qualities, seems to be straining forward for some sort of information or resolution from the far side of the immense blood-filled trench that violently severs one part of history from another.

  It is sickeningly clear to us, now, just what is about to happen back then, on the other side. And yet, though the abyss yawns conspicuously in their path, the people walking around in that particular past seem nearly oblivious. Why, why on earth don’t they watch where they’re going?

  The names of certain years are like tolling bells that announce not only the horrors each contains, but also the greater ones to come: 1919—the Treaty of Versailles; 1923—the apex of hyperinflation in Germany; 1933—the Reichstag fire, which enabled Hitler to seize power by declaring a “state of emergency”; 1935—the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of citizenship; 1938—Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into the German Reich; Kristallnacht, the state-sponsored pogrom against Jews throughout the Reich; 1939—the German invasion of Poland; 1942—the Wannsee Conference, at which the program was devised to eradicate all Jews by means of extermination camps.

  And of course between these years and within each of them, there are the myriad new rules, decrees and laws, economic and social events, and developments within the Church as well as within the medical and academic establishments, all of which were to signify in the ensuing immolation of a large part of the world.

  The incremental contributions to the intertwined catastrophes—the war and the attempted genocide of the Jews—continue to be sifted and scrutinized. And there are many contemporaneous reports available to us. We have a number of astonishing witnesses’ accounts from people who were soon to be murdered and from some who, against all likelihood, evaded murder. And we have the Nazi’s hair-raisingly meticulous records of their programs, policies, and deeds, their triumphal speeches and exhaustive propaganda. There are also some superb diaries and memoirs by people like Sebastian Haffner and Missy Vassiltchikov, who could perfectly well have led successful lives within the Third Reich but who instead dedicated themselves to opposing it.

  But with all this wealth of documentation, one thing that we have very little insight into is what it felt like to be someone who managed somehow to remain relatively unaffected by and relatively unconcerned with the government’s darkening shadow. What about the person who was managing just to go about his or her business? What might such a person have been experiencing at each turn, at each of the moments that, in retrospect at least, appear as so starkly significant?

  Once a great public cataclysm has occurred, it is nearly impossible for people to recall what it is they felt and how they behaved during it or just prior to it. Misery is a potent aid in obliterating memory, and shame in distorting it. The mind’s mandate is to interpret, and even in the most routine course of things the mind confects a stance—codifies, retroactively, reactions and attitudes; interpretation springs instantaneously from experience, but interpretation is inherently inaccurate.

  Perhaps Rezzori’s most astounding coup in this book is to keep his narrator’s consciousness severely restricted to the moment it is experiencing, his tone pristinely untouched by the reader’s (and author’s) indelible awareness of the conflagration about to engulf entire populations. The stories are told from some unspecified “present” about a younger self. Yet throughout those sections of the book set before the war, there is no stain of hindsight—sanctimony, apology, self-exoneration, regret, or even sobriety regarding the shattering events that are soon to follow. It is a fastidious exploration of a psyche in circumstances that became extraordinary, and it sheds more light on murderous and suicidal human irrationality than any other single work I’ve encountered. It is also—however troublingly—deliriously funny and a virtuoso literary performance.

  The complexities of the book’s title alone, the tangled and ambig
uous colorations—brutal, nostalgic, formal, comedic, goading, confessional—put one off-balance and on guard before one even reaches the subtitle: A Novel in Five Stories, itself arrestingly equivocal.

  I’d assume this choice of subtitle was at least in part a marketing decision: novels are more saleable than stories, never mind that the book is not really a novel at all. On the other hand, neither is the book exactly a collection of stories. The sections, each of which is complete in itself, are, in fact, related—though it’s hard to say exactly how; they’re certainly not related in any way that free-standing segments of a novel might be expected to be related.

  The first and last sections of the book have Russian titles—“Skushno” and “Pravda.” Skushno, we’re told immediately, “is difficult to translate. It means more than dreary boredom: a spiritual void that sucks you in like a vague but intensely urgent longing.” Pravda, on the other hand, we can all easily translate, and yet—as exemplified, for instance, by the famous Soviet newspaper from whose name most of us know the word—whether it actually means anything is debatable.

  What impels the book’s first section toward the dubious, fragmented goal of the last, expresses itself variously in the course of the intervening stories as a longing for one’s childhood landscape—source and symbol of one’s integration into the universe—the longing for something to believe in, the longing for something to be loyal to, the longing for something to be: childish and adolescent longings, the longings of the pure in heart—romantic, innocent, and noble. Or so they seem to those who hold or extol them. But under Rezzori’s unflinching gaze the sentimental haze evaporates from around them and we watch notions of “loyalty” and “identity” degrade into little more than fertile soil for the cultivation of hatred.

  Anti-Semitism, in various aspects—mild distaste or virulent loathing, unabashedly arbitrary or justified by religious dogma or some idea of “race”—is the element that shapes each story in the book. Or, to put it another way, deforms what each story would be if anti-Semitism were not an overwhelming element in the narrator’s consciousness and history.

  In “Skushno” the young narrator’s uncle Hubi fondly recalls an encounter with a distinguished neighbor, Saul Goldmann, casting a sickening display of bigotry as a youthful, high-spirited witticism. Anti-Semitism recurs throughout the book as foible, ornament, quirk, heirloom, side effect, device—in short, always as something trivial.

  The particularly dazzling story “Troth” is a vertiginous slalom down inter-looping trails of absurd logic, all constructed in the service of untenable ideas. Here is the narrator’s placidly anti-Semitic Viennese grandmother shortly after Germany has annexed Austria:

  Coming back from Mass, she had been laughed at and shouted at in the open street, and nearly man-handled, by a handful of young rowdies who were forcing a group of Jews to wash slogans for the Schuschnigg regime off the wall of a house. Among those Jews, my grandmother recognized a physician who had once cured one of my aunts of a painful otitis media, and she interfered, attacking the young rowdies with her umbrella and shouting that this was going too far.

  A marvelous phrase, “going too far.” How far is precisely far enough? What is a judicious, a decorous, an appropriate measure of contempt—the precise amount of contempt in which a Jew ought to be held? And how much is excessive, or, even worse, vulgar?

  Rezzori is exquisitely sensitive to indices of status, and anti-Semitism frequently appears in the book as a function of prestige. Here, again from “Troth,” the narrator is describing a local charlatan, who calls himself Mr. Malik. Though Mr. Malik turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a passionate admirer of Hitler, the same grandmother of the narrator (whose vast string of ridiculously pompous names are summarily discarded by his Jewish friend, lover, and mentor, Minka, in favor of “Brommy”) takes it for granted that because Mr. Malik’s name is obviously assumed, he must be a Jew. And

  Jews who changed their names, like Mr. Malik, were crooks and swindlers. Their camouflage was but a falsehood to which they were driven by their disgusting greed for profit and their repulsive social climbing. This was particularly the case with the so-called Polish Jews…. The elder ones and very old ones, particularly the very poor, were humbly what they were—submissive men in black caftans and large-brimmed hats, with curls at their temples, and in their eyes a sort of melting look which the sadness of many thousands of years seemed to have bestowed. Their eyes were like dark ponds. Some of them were even beautiful in their melancholy. They had spun-silver prophets’ heads, with which the butcher’s face of Mr. Malik would have compared very unfavorably, and when they looked at you, humbly stepping aside to let you pass, it was like a sigh for not only themselves but all the burden of human existence which they knew so well. But the young ones, and especially the ones who were better off, or even rich, showed an embarrassing self-confidence. They wore elegant clothes and drove dandified roadsters, and their girls smelled of scent and sparkled with jewelry. Some of them even had dogs and walked them on leashes, just as my aunts did.

  What an affront! Note the word “even”; note the word “just.” After all, what is the point of having a dog, if it is not an indication that you are superior to someone who doesn’t? The very scaffolding of the world trembles if there is not, demonstrably, an “other.” And those who enact their otherness—particularly through powerlessness and suffering—are admirable exemplars of a sanctified social order; those who defy, or more insultingly, ignore, the status levied upon them are arrivistes—that is, not to put too fine a point on it, scum; because it is the job of the oppressed and despised to prop up the dignity of those who oppress and despise them. The world Rezzori presents to us is a cauldron of East and West, nationalities, languages, customs, and legacies, and he reminds us repeatedly throughout the book how efficient and universal an instrument racism—specifically racism as an adjunct of nationalism—is in establishing and maintaining self-respect.

  One of the many paradoxes that Rezzori presents to us in “Troth” with a straight face is that although the narrator can manage, due to his childhood in the Bukovina, a better Yiddish accent and tell a better Jewish joke than the Jews he encounters, those Jews are far more refined—more European—than he or any of the other gentiles around. And although the punctilious anti-Semitism of his relatives might afford him no end of amusement, he accepts anti-Semitism as his lot, a sort of badge of his being, as something—however distasteful from some points of view, however infantile or retrograde—that is an ineradicable feature of his being. It might cause him to behave, from time to time, in inconvenient ways; it might cause him, from time to time, to feel things that are highly inconvenient or even slightly shaming, but it does, nonetheless, confirm his identity.

  The narrator, once again of “Troth,” who has been trying out various nationalities in search of one to be gratifyingly loyal to, says:

  Salzburg in the summer of 1937 was just awful. It was overrun with Jews. The worst of them had come from Germany as refugees and, in spite of their luggage-laden Mercedes cars, behaved as if they were the victims of a cruel persecution and therefore had the right to hang around in hundreds at the Café Mozart, criticize everything, and get whatever they wanted faster and cheaper—if not for nothing—than anybody else. They spoke with that particular Berlin snottiness that so got on the nerves of anyone brought up in Austria, and my sharp ears could all too easily detect the background of Jewish slang. My Turkish blood revolted. I could have slaughtered them all.

  And a little bit later, he continues:

  Poldi was the fat journalist from Prague, who as a theater critic, went regularly not only to Vienna but also to Berlin. He had lost a lot of weight and was not half so amusing as he used to be. What irritated me most of all was the self-complacent way he treated me—and I could not rise to the occasion, because he resolutely kept aiming at my cultural gaps.… In the landscape of my mind, politics had not figured prominently. As a subject of Rumania—that is, of His Majesty King Ca
rol II—I knew … that in Bucharest there was a parliament where deputies represented the party of the peasants and the party of the liberals and whatnot, and that they were a bunch of crooks who did nothing but steal the money of the state. There were also some Jews, who were Communists, and therefore, rightly were treated as such.… But fortunately, there were also some young Rumanians who, under their leader, a certain Mr. Cuza—which was a good and noble name, though only adopted by that gentleman—beat up those Jews from time to time, thus keeping them in a hell of a fright, and preventing them from spreading more Communist propaganda and provocation. I knew, too, that in Austria there were many socialists, called Reds, who were beaten up by or beat up the Heimwehr, which was a national guard defending the ethical values—such as the cleanliness of mind guaranteed by the fresh mountain air, and the love for shooting goats and plucking edelweiss.

  The reader’s first reactions might well be shock and rage, revulsion at the playfulness, the unruly, romping satire—or shock and rage, revulsion at having been made to laugh out loud. How dare anyone make light of such willful ignorance, such self-absorption in the face of genocidal evil?

  In fact, it is precisely this tone of levity that is the very substance of the book’s gravity. If “1938” did not have its deadly ring in our ears—if we did not know perfectly well what was to take place in, for example, “1941,” we might find the tone painfully callous, or contemptible, but not exactly shocking. As it is, though, we are shaken out of our automatic and sanitized a postiori position on past crimes—that is, crimes in which we ourselves were not involved.

  It is partly the narrator’s engaging self-mockery that prevents us from being able to dismiss him outright as nothing more than an amazingly frivolous lout, and it is partly the transfixing spectacle of the various mental collisions he experiences in front of us. He takes the road of least resistance in almost every situation, but his weak character (which occasions much head-shaking on the part of his clownishly reactionary relatives) is no guarantee that he’ll always have a good time; the same acuity that enables him to distort or camouflage the evidence in front of his eyes functions also as almost an opponent, allowing highly unwelcome insights to dismantle his equanimity.