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

The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth-century’s ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator’s Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just his relationship that has blinded him to–and makes him complicit in–the terrible realities his era. Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori’s most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history. The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth century’s ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator’s Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just this relationship that has blinded him to—and makes him complicit in—the terrible realities of his era. Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori’s most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history. Five stories trace the sentimental education of a restless, complex, and contradictory man from youth to late middle age. In "Skushno," the adolescent Gregor is disgraced and exacts revenge on the Jewish boy who is a rival for his aunt's affection. "Youth" finds him on the run from his aristocratic family, supporting himself as a window dresser, and enmeshed in an unhappy affair with a Jewish woman he calls the "black widow." Vienna in the years leading up to the Anschluss is the setting for the tale of betrayal, "Troth." And in "Pravda," the final story, an older man wanders the streets of Rome and reckons with a life held in thrall by passion and prejudice Skushno Youth Löwinger's Rooming House Troth Pravda.