Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

This judgmental hierarchy — which, incidentally, did not assist him in his own handling of money — produced some deplorable effects. Before I was old enough to serve as his hunting apprentice and companion, he took a liking to a young man who, although the son of a former captain in the imperial medical corps — that is, an academic renegade who had deserted into the military — at least answered to the Germanic name Ingolf and, more important still, distinguished himself by a feverish passion for hunting. For a time he was my father’s favorite and accompanied him on all his shoots; he was, to my intense resentment, presented with the gift of some rifles and was praised to the skies. However, the young man also had to think of his future and therefore entered the service of a bank. From then on, my father no longer knew him and barely reciprocated his greeting when they met.

While such attitudes were already close to mental derangement, my father’s anti-Semitism was outright pathological. This aberration even crept into the articles he wrote for hunting magazines. What the chosen people can possibly have to do with the observation that longbills tend to skim along forest lanes and drift toward smoke remains totally unfathomable, but he managed to find the association — as, for instance, that no lure is of any use if one happens to encounter a Jew in the morning before the hunt, or that Jews nowadays even have the impudence to participate in snipe shoots. Such idiotic derogations were eagerly printed in German periodicals of the 1930s, though this did not mean that my father was a friend of National Socialism. Much as the nationalist element in the Greater Germany concept appealed to him, he was repelled by its socialist component, on sociological rather than ideological grounds. Together with Lord Russell he shared the view that one had to be a very great gentleman to be a good socialist. Who was not a gentleman had better keep out of politics if he did not wish to be placed under police supervision as a club-swinging anarchist. He showed me some illustrated magazines on whose title pages could be seen pictures of the new Führer of what soon was to become the Greater German Reich. “It’s all very fine and well,” my father commented, “Germany rises once more. But have a look at this fellow: I wouldn’t hire him as a stable boy!’’

He would not even concede to the new regime its hatred of Jews, which in his eyes was a privilege reserved to him and his peers. “To be sure,” he would say, “Jews are blood-suckers, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to steal from them.” That much worse was done to them he preferred to deny. “Admittedly, in Russia pogroms were possible — and might even happen in our day. But the Germans are a cultured nation.” (After all, they produced Nietzsche and Wagner.) When the followers of the Romanian anti-Semitic leader A. C. Cuza started to beat up Jews, he closed his eyes: it happened, he said, because the Jews in the countryside exploited the peasants. His moral condemnation was directed at anything having to do with or motivated by money; and as everyone knew, money was the main concern of the Jews.

On one occasion his prejudice caused me such intense embarrassment that I began to doubt all his notions. It was prior to the great depression of 1929; I was barely fifteen years old but was considered an equal by my father, while my mother still treated me as a petted child. I saw myself somewhere in the middle of those two contrasting attitudes, each of which probably held some truth. As a boy, I played at cowboys and Indians; as a moony adolescent, I saw myself playing the role of future worldling and ladies’ man. The movies provided the models for those dreams in the persons of Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks or Lionel Barrymore, according to one’s mood. The female dream goddesses were Lia de Putti, Louise Brooks and, ultimately, Greta Garbo. Out of sight of my father, I brushed brilliantine in my hair and wore white-and-brown co-respondent shoes with baggy white Oxford trousers. Among the young ladies of whom I was enamored, one was the local tennis champion. In those days, one did not yet play in bathing suits. The headband and white skirts ending above the knee featured by Suzanne Lenglen lent even to young girls a feminine allure that compelled us, their young male partners, to observe a gentlemanly comportment all the more pronounced in its punctilious correctness for being precocious.

The president of the tennis club was a Jewish banker, the fashionable man in town. He had known my mother’s family for decades and treated me with the most engaging courtesy. That he was also a hunter goes without saying: there hardly was a sport in which he did not participate. That to my father hunting was not a sport but a sacral act was another matter. In any case, the two Nimrods had never met. It so happened that a big drive shoot was arranged on which I was allowed to accompany my father. When we arrived at the meet and got out of the car, my father froze in his tracks. Among the guests who had arrived before us was the Jewish banker. My father turned to me and said cuttingly, “I’m afraid we’re in the wrong place. We were supposed to come for a shoot, not to the stock exchange.” He turned on his heel and went back to the car. Before I could follow him, the banker came up to me, shook my hand most politely and said, “I trust we’ll see each other soon for tennis.” I bowed in agony and hurried after my father. He spoke not one word to me on the way home or for the next few days.

It need hardly be said that such eccentricities did not make him friends. But the prevailing tolerance in a region distinguished by so motley a mixture of ethnicities, where everyone accepted the others with all their peculiarities, with either a sardonic smile or an indifferent shrug, conferred a kind of fool’s license on mavericks like my father. Few had much esteem for him. He made no bones about the fact that he counted Romanians (after Czechs and Poles) among the body-strippers of the corpse of the defunct Dual Monarchy. Russians, Poles and Ruthenians were mere colonial populations. He saw himself as a leftover functionary of a liquidated empire. “We have been left here as a kind of cultural fertilizer,” was one of his favorite sayings. With violent abhorrence he rejected any identification with the local ethnic Germans of the Bukovina, whose black-red-and-gold Teutonic affectations, elastically adapted to Romanian conditions, seemed to him as presumptuous as the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich philistines. Aryan zealotry and hatred of Jews were not hallmarks of the aristocracy: quite the contrary; in those days they were the characteristics of the newly risen bourgeoisie. Withal, he had an inkling of the dangers inherent in such pettifogging fanaticism. “Such people always tend to exaggerate,” he would say.

At that time, however, he could still count on many people approving of his peculiar ideas — though not my mother. His thoughtless excesses and oddities she would counter with the terse comment: “One’s mind is well rested when one has so little in it’’—one of her few ironic remarks. On the whole, she thought of him as literally insane and of his insanity as directed maliciously against her. That there were other women who found his traits amusing enraged her. She hated him too much to be jealous, but she felt ridiculed by the pleased complicity with which these other women laughed and carried on in a lightheartedly cheerful manner with him. During their life together she suspected him, probably with good reason, of extending his frequent professional assignments not merely to hunt but also to spend part of his time at various estates where he was on equally — if not more — intimate terms with the lady of the house as with his host. That he never even suggested taking my mother along was a social affront that she held as much against the innocent hosts as against him.