Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor Von Rezzori (1981) second reading

I first read Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor Von Rezzori in November of 2013.  I just finished rereading it yesterday.  I will reread it at least once more.  I do not have a great urge to add what I said in my first post on it.

I would add now that we can see the narrator age, see his culture increase, his worldly knowledge.  

There is a great depth in this work.  Far to much to talk about in a blog post. 

Mel u

The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor Von Rezzori (2008, New York Review of Books Edition, introduced by John Banville)

Gregor Von Rezzori (1914 to 1998, born Czarnowitz, Bukouina- you can find background information on him in my prior posts on his novels) is the author of two great novels, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and An Ermine in Crernopol.  Memoirs of an Anti-Semite is one of the crowning achievements of the European literary tradition.   Donald Keene, the pioneering translator of the Japanese novel into English has said the novel is essentially a European art form.  Von Rezzori, like numerous other writers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, transcended national alliances.  

The Snows of Yesteryear, translated into elegant English by H. F. Broch de Rotherman with an illuminating  introduction by John Banville, is Von Rezzori's memoirs.  It is not wrong to see it as another elegy to the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Lately I have been getting into writers from the Empire and it must have been a magic place to inspire such love.

The memoir is organized around portraits of five people very important to Von Rezzori.  He begins with an account of a long time family servant, Cassandra.  The Von Rezzori family were aristocrats, with a bit of tarnish, Cassandra was an "earth mother" sort.  Illiterate, she inspired Von Rezzori with her many folk tales.  There are also chapters on his mother and father.  Both are seriously flawed individuals.  His father's only real passion seems to have been hunting.  He was a virulent Anti-Semite, an unfaithful husband, and an emotionionally remote father.  He and his wife lived apart much of the time.  His mother was what would have once been called "very high strung".  His sister, she died at thirty, plays a large part in the memoirs.  Her character is harder to discern, maybe because Von Rezzori was perhaps closer to her so his portrayal of her is more open ended.  The final chapter is devoted to Bunchy, a long time family governess.

The Snows of Yesteryear is also a portrait of life in the empire.  There is an almost Proustian quality to Von Rezzori's reflections.

First read Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, I hope to reread it soon, then An Ermine in Czernopol then read the memoirs.  You need to experience the greatest of his fiction to truly appreciate The Snows of Yesterday.

I commend The New York Review of Books for publishing three of his books and hope more will be coming. 

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori 1958

This wonderful book—literally, a book full of wonders—which lived for too long in shadow, has been brought fully to light by Philip Boehm’s lustrous new translation. An Ermine in Czernopol may at last take its place on the shelf alongside The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
—John Banville

If my shelves were short, I would remove both of the books Banville mentions and replace them with An Ermine in Czernopol and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.  

Memoirs of An Anti-Semite is one of the towering master works of 20th century European literature.  I am so grateful to Caroline and Lizzy for hosting  the German Literature III event so I did not die never having read the works of Gregor Von Rezzori.  He was a very productive writer in a wide variety of genres including travel books,  movie scripts, children's books, popular literature and towering works of art.   

An Ermine in Czernopol is set in Czernowitz, once in The Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of the Ukraine.  It was once a place great cultural diversity, with a dozen languages, several major religions co-existing.  I cannot describe it as well as the NYRB:

"Czernopol is a border city, a cultural and linguistic melting pot “where you can find a dozen of the most disparate nationalities and at least half a dozen bitterly feuding faiths—all living in the cynical harmony that is built on mutual aversion and common business dealings.” It’s suspended in history between a feudal past, whose peasants still bring their pungent presence and goods to the city’s market square, and a globalizing modernity whose vanguard has arrived in Czernopol in the form of American jazz, which jostles with the old Viennese waltzes and gypsy music. The city is further divided between the imperial Habsburg past and the chauvinistic nationalism of the new Romanian regime: “Even in its deteriorated state this former grandeur was easy to see and hard to forget, not yet fully surrendered to the garish colors of the new rulers.” In the lull between the world wars there are signs of the catastrophe to come: Nazi demonstrations, swastikas painted on Jewish shops, and, in the climactic set-piece scene, a pogrom sparked off by ethnic tensions over soccer team allegiances."

I know I have not told the plot and I don't plan to.  All I will say is read his books.  The NYRB has three i titles available.  I have not yet read his memoirs The Snows of Yesterday but I will correct that error soon.  

I am really glad I decided to once again participate in 

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - an elegy to a lost culture. 1942

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. 2001. 

The Emperor's Tomb By Joseph Roth 1938 

"Flower Days" by Robert Walser 1907 (no post) 

"Trousers" by Robert Walser -1909 (no post)

Medea By Crista Wolf

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori 

"Forgotten Dreams" by StefanZweig (no post)  

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. 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 Monte della Corte. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (both published by NYRB Classics).  From New York Review of Books.

From one of the movies he acted in.

Mel u

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori 1981

I am very happy to be once again participating in German Literature month.  The only real requirement is that the work was originally written in German. There are lots of reading ideas on the webpage for the event and a sign up link.

German Literature Month November 2013

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth great work on the decline of the Empire

I am discovering one after another great new to me writers in my readings for German Literature III. I will be hopefully reading all of the translated and available as a kindle fiction of Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, and Robert Walser.  I now adding Gregor Von Rezzori to this list.  

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite is a brilliant masterful work of art.  It is structured through five short stories

all told by the same narrator.   In fact taken seperatly they are great stories.   What these storied

show us about the depth of hatred of Jews that permeates Austrian society would fill a dozen

history books.    You can see all sorts of subtly in the forms of prejudice.  The narrator distinqishes

what he sees as high refined and cultured "European" Jewish from "Yids".  Von Rezzori portrays

through the narrator the deep corruption of Austrian society and lets us see why Austriians accepted 

Hitler as their leader.  

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite can stand with the greatest novels of the 20th century.  It is just a flat out 

brilliant book. 

Gregor von Rezzori was born in 1914 in Chernivtsi in the Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Ukraine. In an extraordinarily peripatetic life von Rezzori was succesively an Austro-Hungarian, Romanian and Soviet citizen and then, following a period of being stateless, an Austrian citizen. The great theme of his work was the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual world in which he grew up and which the wars and ideologies of the twentieth century destroyed. His major works include The Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his autobiographical masterpiece The Snows of Yesteryear. He died in his home in Italy in 1998. - 

From New York Review of Bbis Web page.