Customer Reviews

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (New York Review Books)

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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.

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.

"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.

This book was recently re-issued by NYRB as part of the series of revived (and ignored/forgotten) "classics". It was favorably (and eloquently) reviewed in the February, 2008 "Atlantic" by Christopher Hitchens and received laudatory reviews at the time of it's initial publication. Probably because of the author's eloquence, poetic imagery and lack of a "compelling" plot-line, it was out-of-print until this 2008 re-issue.

The author was born Gregor Arnulph Hilarius d'Arezzo in a fringe region of the former Austria-Hungarian Empire in Czernowitz, Bukovina, the hinterlands where much of the novel is set. While his family supposedly had "origins" in an "aristocratic" Sicilian background, his father was a civil servant. Possibly with intended (or with inadvertent) irony and aping the arriviste behavior ascribed to some of his Jewish characters, he "Germanified" his name and added the aristocratic "von". The author lived and wrote in the 20th century and only recently died (1998) though the novel's atmospherics are more evocative of the late 19th century. It should be noted that the author lived and worked in wartime Berlin as a radio announcer and in films: this put his thoughts and perspectives under the direct scrutiny of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry. The wartime German art world was not a haven for dissenters.

Rezzori's book, comprised of 5 "novellas", evokes the "lost" , decadent and slowly dying world of "fin de siecle" mittle Europa. The book is redolent with literary and theological allusions/pretensions, weltschmerz and young adult angst with overtones of sarcastic remove and irony. Laced throughout the book are lacerating and vitriolic anti-Semetic charicatures, uttered (with occasional flashes of self-insight) by the author/protagonist. Similar remarks made by his acquaintances and friends lack this element of sardonic introspection. Occasionally, and equaling in vehement crudeness the remarks of the "goyim", self-hating statements and sweeping condemnations are made by Jewish characters, themselves. All such comments presuppose the Nazi definition of Jews as a distinct "race", with ineradicable characteristics that can be confidently identified by acute observors. Ultimately, the narrator fails to enlighten himself, a particularly mordant observation given not only that the events related in the book transpired during the ascending limb of the European anti-Jewish trajectory immediately preceding WW-II, but were "recollections" penned during the post-war years.

One can only comment favorably on the elegance of the writing and ponder the catastrophic implications of the enduring prejudices which pervade the book's characters. As the book will likely be read by those with sophisticated understanding, the more deplorable prejudices will be placed in "appropriate" context, to wit, explained and justified as a time-capsule synopsis of prevailing social mores and behaviors of a particular time and place. Indeed, in the tendentious (and pretentious) introduction, just such a stance is adopted. Given Rezzori's wartime pursuits, however, I wonder how much of the attitudes and perspectives displayed by the narrator reflect his own world view at the time of writing.

In summary, a well-written, interesting novel with certain disquieting and annoying features. It is reminiscent of 19th century Russian literature and has been compared to Goethe's, "Sorrows of Young Werther". While a fine novel, it is not in the same class.

Despite the suggestive title, this is NOT about or written by an antisemite. It is a colorful view of life in eastern Europe between the two World Wars. Very readable. Superb.

In this naturally flowing, brilliantly written, but also raging reactionary, prose Gregor von Rezzori brushes an in depth picture of the fate and the mentality of the aristocratic class during the first half of the 20th century. It is the world of the Dual Empire, of troth, but ultimate defeat by `the ruse of history'. It is the world of S. Zweig's `The World of Yesterday' and Joseph Roth's `The Emperor's Tomb'.

The Dual Empire and Troth
The Dual Empire was an idea and an ideal. It was Holy, because God's State on earth.
It had a constitution that offered uniform protection, leadership and administration to a gigantic territory inhabited by many nations and threatened by many dangers.
It was held together by the ethical principle of troth, loyalty, the allegiance of vassals, the unconditioned obedience that the liegemen had sworn to their lord and his flag, the two-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire.

The aristocratic class
The aristocracy of the 20th century was a class where `people were beginning to accept the notion that work was not necessarily shameful, `something my family still found hard to fathom.' `But anything connected with selling in a store was below social acceptance.'

The ruse of history: defeat
The aristocrats fought among themselves for European supremacy. They not only destroyed their own empire, but also that of their enemies (?). They destroyed the very thing they pretended to fight for: `ideals, holy traditions, values handed down for generations'.
They offered political and social power to `power-drunk demagogues mounted on a pedestal made up of interwoven interests - financial, mercantile and political'.
The protagonist continues in raging reactionary prose: `Every bomb simply opened the cellars and let the rats free, the profiteers, the greedy, the uncivilized, the illiterates, the oppressed and offended who wanted their share of the cake no matter how.'

Vae Victis
The protagonist's class feels, justly, `a collective guilt, the oddly empty grief, the madness, the melancholy of golden memories (that sunken golden flag).'
He sees himself as `a moth-eaten survivor of a bygone splendid world', eluding `an out-an-out collision with reality, for he knew how dangerous reality was.'(!)
He `will not live long enough to see those liberated rats produce a civilization of what they think to be social justice.'

Gregor von Rezzori's book is a supreme expression of the mentality of the First Estate, who looked upon the Third Estate as (potential) thieves of `their share of the cake'. They protected themselves under the banner of their leader `the Emperor and his army' and the `Holy' Second Estate. But, unfortunately for them, they didn't understand the `ruse of history'.
I highly recommended this book as an evocation of an old, but not `splendid' and in no way democratic `civilization'.

The book is a fictionalised autobiography comprised of five chapter-like stories. The narrator (as very likely, the author) had a hedonistic, "carpe diem" personality type with a moderate level of maliciousness.

The first story, located in Bukovina (Romania), recounts a childhood incident. The second and third stories, located in Bucharest and the forth, in Vienna, recount the period of young adulthood. The last story is a meditative look back at senescence.

The author has an elegiac style that is very engrossing. The stories succeed in provoking the envy of the reader for the interesting life of the narrator.

The provocative and tongue in cheek title can be explained by the fact that all the stories centre on the narrator's acquaintance or friendship with a Jewish person (for the last four stories, with a Jewish woman in fact) that turned bad.

The book, alongside Olivia Manning's first two volumes of the "Balkan Trilogy", is one of the few available in English that evokes the interwar Bucharest. However, while Manning's account of Bucharest and Romania is negative, the author was enthusiastic of his life in Bucharest. I consider it one of the best and most sympathetic evocations of interwar Bucharest.

The book might also be appealing for people interested in the interwar Central Europe and anti-Semitism.

As for the suspicion of the author's alleged anti-Semitism and the larger "Jewish question", I prefer to quote Carl Jung:

"Why this ridiculous touchiness when anybody dares to say anything about the psychological difference between Jews and Christians? Every child knows that differences exist." (Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition)