Gregor von Rezzori: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Anti-Semitism, in various aspects — mild distaste or virulent loathing, unabashedly arbitrary or justified by religious dogma or some idea of “race”—is the element that shapes each story in the book. Or, to put it another way, deforms what each story would be if anti-Semitism were not an overwhelming element in the narrator’s consciousness and history.

In “ Skushno ” the young narrator’s uncle Hubi fondly recalls an encounter with a distinguished neighbor, Saul Goldmann, casting a sickening display of bigotry as a youthful, high-spirited witticism. Anti-Semitism recurs throughout the book as foible, ornament, quirk, heirloom, side effect, device — in short, always as something trivial.

The particularly dazzling story “Troth” is a vertiginous slalom down inter-looping trails of absurd logic, all constructed in the service of untenable ideas. Here is the narrator’s placidly anti-Semitic Viennese grandmother shortly after Germany has annexed Austria:

Coming back from Mass, she had been laughed at and shouted at in the open street, and nearly man-handled, by a handful of young rowdies who were forcing a group of Jews to wash slogans for the Schuschnigg regime off the wall of a house. Among those Jews, my grandmother recognized a physician who had once cured one of my aunts of a painful otitis media, and she interfered, attacking the young rowdies with her umbrella and shouting that this was going too far.

A marvelous phrase, “going too far.” How far is precisely far enough? What is a judicious, a decorous, an appropriate measure of contempt — the precise amount of contempt in which a Jew ought to be held? And how much is excessive, or, even worse, vulgar?

Rezzori is exquisitely sensitive to indices of status, and anti-Semitism frequently appears in the book as a function of prestige. Here, again from “Troth,” the narrator is describing a local charlatan, who calls himself Mr. Malik. Though Mr. Malik turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a passionate admirer of Hitler, the same grandmother of the narrator (whose vast string of ridiculously pompous names are summarily discarded by his Jewish friend, lover, and mentor, Minka, in favor of “Brommy”) takes it for granted that because Mr. Malik’s name is obviously assumed, he must be a Jew. And

Jews who changed their names, like Mr. Malik, were crooks and swindlers. Their camouflage was but a falsehood to which they were driven by their disgusting greed for profit and their repulsive social climbing. This was particularly the case with the so-called Polish Jews…. The elder ones and very old ones, particularly the very poor, were humbly what they were — submissive men in black caftans and large-brimmed hats, with curls at their temples, and in their eyes a sort of melting look which the sadness of many thousands of years seemed to have bestowed. Their eyes were like dark ponds. Some of them were even beautiful in their melancholy. They had spun-silver prophets’ heads, with which the butcher’s face of Mr. Malik would have compared very unfavorably, and when they looked at you, humbly stepping aside to let you pass, it was like a sigh for not only themselves but all the burden of human existence which they knew so well. But the young ones, and especially the ones who were better off, or even rich, showed an embarrassing self-confidence. They wore elegant clothes and drove dandified roadsters, and their girls smelled of scent and sparkled with jewelry. Some of them even had dogs and walked them on leashes, just as my aunts did.

What an affront! Note the word “even”; note the word “just.” After all, what is the point of having a dog, if it is not an indication that you are superior to someone who doesn’t? The very scaffolding of the world trembles if there is not, demonstrably, an “other.” And those who enact their otherness — particularly through powerlessness and suffering — are admirable exemplars of a sanctified social order; those who defy, or more insultingly, ignore, the status levied upon them are arrivistes — that is, not to put too fine a point on it, scum; because it is the job of the oppressed and despised to prop up the dignity of those who oppress and despise them. The world Rezzori presents to us is a cauldron of East and West, nationalities, languages, customs, and legacies, and he reminds us repeatedly throughout the book how efficient and universal an instrument racism — specifically racism as an adjunct of nationalism — is in establishing and maintaining self-respect.

One of the many paradoxes that Rezzori presents to us in “Troth” with a straight face is that although the narrator can manage, due to his childhood in the Bukovina, a better Yiddish accent and tell a better Jewish joke than the Jews he encounters, those Jews are far more refined — more European —than he or any of the other gentiles around. And although the punctilious anti-Semitism of his relatives might afford him no end of amusement, he accepts anti-Semitism as his lot, a sort of badge of his being, as something — however distasteful from some points of view, however infantile or retrograde — that is an ineradicable feature of his being. It might cause him to behave, from time to time, in inconvenient ways; it might cause him, from time to time, to feel things that are highly inconvenient or even slightly shaming, but it does, nonetheless, confirm his identity.

The narrator, once again of “Troth,” who has been trying out various nationalities in search of one to be gratifyingly loyal to, says:

Salzburg in the summer of 1937 was just awful. It was overrun with Jews. The worst of them had come from Germany as refugees and, in spite of their luggage-laden Mercedes cars, behaved as if they were the victims of a cruel persecution and therefore had the right to hang around in hundreds at the Café Mozart, criticize everything, and get whatever they wanted faster and cheaper — if not for nothing — than anybody else. They spoke with that particular Berlin snottiness that so got on the nerves of anyone brought up in Austria, and my sharp ears could all too easily detect the background of Jewish slang. My Turkish blood revolted. I could have slaughtered them all.

And a little bit later, he continues:

Poldi was the fat journalist from Prague, who as a theater critic, went regularly not only to Vienna but also to Berlin. He had lost a lot of weight and was not half so amusing as he used to be. What irritated me most of all was the self-complacent way he treated me — and I could not rise to the occasion, because he resolutely kept aiming at my cultural gaps.… In the landscape of my mind, politics had not figured prominently. As a subject of Rumania — that is, of His Majesty King Carol II–I knew … that in Bucharest there was a parliament where deputies represented the party of the peasants and the party of the liberals and whatnot, and that they were a bunch of crooks who did nothing but steal the money of the state. There were also some Jews, who were Communists, and therefore, rightly were treated as such.… But fortunately, there were also some young Rumanians who, under their leader, a certain Mr. Cuza — which was a good and noble name, though only adopted by that gentleman — beat up those Jews from time to time, thus keeping them in a hell of a fright, and preventing them from spreading more Communist propaganda and provocation. I knew, too, that in Austria there were many socialists, called Reds, who were beaten up by or beat up the Heimwehr, which was a national guard defending the ethical values — such as the cleanliness of mind guaranteed by the fresh mountain air, and the love for shooting goats and plucking edelweiss.

The reader’s first reactions might well be shock and rage, revulsion at the playfulness, the unruly, romping satire — or shock and rage, revulsion at having been made to laugh out loud. How dare anyone make light of such willful ignorance, such self-absorption in the face of genocidal evil?