Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories [Paperback]

Gregor Von Rezzori (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 30, 1991

Set in Central Europe between World Wars I and II, this work comprises five interrelated stories that depict one man's ambivalent, at times obsessive, relations with Jewish friends and lovers--including his Jewish wife.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Rezzori has a remarkable lyric gift that he uses to describe the wide expanses of Bukovina. In a series of beautiful set pieces, he evokes the vanishing world of Germanic chivalry, already in its last stages of degeneration into the debased kitsch that the Nazis would exploit, the emerging commercial melee of post-war Bucharest with its Armenian and Jewish shopkeepers and its red light district; and shabby-genteel Vienna, where he socializes almost exclusively with Jewish artists and musicians." --NextBook

"In his remarkable Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories...von Rezzori brought his lost homeland back to life so sharply and in such pungent detail that we feel from the first sentences as though we have lived there ourselves...For all its poignancy, Memoirs is no foray into nostalgia but a deliberately fragmented, and often quite funny, version of the classic German bildungsroman' — what might be termed the novel of formative influences." -The New York Sun

" A superb and unsettling satirical novel from 1979, in which the cosmopolitan and apolitical narrator exposes the ugliness of 20th-century Europe through his attraction-repulsion obsession with Jews." -Martin Levin, The Globe & Mail

“Gregor von Rezzori, in his newly reissued novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, meshes the micro and macro versions of interwar anti-Semitism very skillfully indeed... [a] welcome new edition in the library of classics kept evergreen by The New York Review of Books... Writing as he did from the wreckage of postwar Europe, Gregor von Rezzori could claim the peculiar distinction of being one of the few survivors to treat this ultimate catastrophe in the mild language of understatement. This is what still gives his novel the power to shock.” –Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic

Gregor von Rezzori’s “novels and memoirs revealed the tragic sweep of European history through two world wars and beyond.” –The New York Times (Michael Kaufmann, Obituary)

“The last great remembrancer of a region that has vanished from the map and mind of Europe.” –The New York Review of Books (Michael Ignatieff)

A “rich, disquietingly good book…these stories…are wonderfully intricate in character and texture, studded with observation” –The New York Times (Stanley Kauffmann)

“A literature in which the author envisions himself as a character in a design arranged from the data of his life as another author might arrange items from fictitious notes…He is an artist, devilishly honest, stubborn, the creator and the created of an artwork about a survivor…It is through Mr. von Rezzori’s art, rather than through any vanity or apology, that we are enlightened.” –The New York Times Book Review (Stanley Kauffmann)

“Here is a work that tackles–without reproof, without illusions, and without shallow moral judgments; by turns, engaged and detached, funny and sad, tender and heartless–the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, and its correlative anti-Goyism, the double tragedy of banal misunderstandings that changed the face of Europe and the world.” –Bruce Chatwin

“What we recall…is the breathtaking richness of the history it recounts and the extraordinary way it makes time pass by…Yet it is not alone for the vividness of its settings and characters that we attend to Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. We also savor the sound of the author’s voice, an extraordinary blend of bitter self-denigration and sweet recollection. We relish his haunting evocations of twilight…and of course we an never avert our eyes from the dissection of anti-Semitism that keeps going on in the background–a dissection that amounts to an anatomy of Central Europe in the 20th century.” –The New York Times (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt)

“The ‘I’ in these pages–ambitious dreamer, insatiable lover, solitary night-wanderer–achieves more than catharsis: he comes to vivid, full life in the mind of the reader. The gloriously rendered settings…are an opulent banquet table spread for every taste.” –Die Welt --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Language Notes

Text: English
Original Language: German

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 30, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679731822
• ISBN-13: 978-0679731825
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,382,396 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sensitive, startling portraits of an Eastern European mind., November 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (Paperback)

Gregor von Rezzori has taken some of the hardest things in the world to talk about and with them rendered stories that are decent, beautiful, and immensely entertaining. These are five stories that make up a novel, and it is not always apparent that the narrator is the same exact character from story to story, but the truth and the powerful feelings of each story present a great unity. In each chapter, the narrator grows close to a Jewish person who he loves and admires (though he has been taught to despise them as a class) and ends up hurting or failing them. Sounds monstrous, but it is a wonderful book.

I confidently recommend this book to anyone interested in modern literature and European history.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best Books I Have Ever Read, June 21, 2003

By 

neverwithoutespresso - See all my reviews

This review is from: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (Paperback)

This is one of the best books I have ever read. The writing style is brilliant. You feel like you are living side by side with the author, almost inside his skin, experiencing what he is experiencing, or perhaps at least you are an intimate friend, someone with whom he shares the details of his inner life as well as his worldly adventures.

While I read the book, I felt I was engaged in a relationship with a real person, sharing the sights and sounds of rural Rumania, the excitement of Bucharest, the conflicts and confusion he experiences as he faces life on his own and tries to sort out his feelings and experiences about the people he meets in light of the teachings of his family and society.

As someone mentioned in another review, Mr. Von Rezzori has the literary voice of a cultured, sensitive, articulate, sophisticated, intelligent, perceptive European. Many times, he charms you quite legitimately with the wit of the raconteur and the insight and agility of the boulevardier.

Although the beginning of the book is exciting and full of energy, the end is sad--in fact, deeply mournful--as the author recalls some deep regrets of his life.

This book is an interesting journey with an interesting, complex, and articulate man with a gift for literary intimacy.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant novel about coming of age in pre-War Europe., June 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (Paperback)

"Memoirs of an Anti-Semite" is a series of short stories, loosely connected and remotely chronological, which capture the inner turmoil and outer turbulence the narrator experiences while growing up in Eastern Europe between the Wars. Romantic Cafe's, spicy brothels, Viennese sophistication and Carpathian bleakness are but a few of the contrasting realities which continue to mold and shape the mind and soul of this young Rumanian. The pathological anti-Semitism he acquires while growing up in a petty bourgeois family in the Bukovina becomes an increasing source of irony in this novel, as the narrator finds himself surrounded more and more by Jewish friends and lovers.