Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

In the large stores with the big turnover around the Boulevards Elisabeta and Lipscani, the rejections were no fewer but more businesslike. Here, however, now and again, if the competition had not outraced me, a store manager was willing to grant one corner of window to Aphrodite products, and that meant I had to get down to work on the spot. I despised this work, which I did clumsily. Erecting pyramids of toothpaste tubes, setting out bars of soap, adding an artistic touch to a spread of shampoo containers — these struck me as the classic occupation of shop assistants, and I suffered torments because to a certain extent I was on display myself; anyone passing in the street could see me doing this silly and hardly presentable work. I was tortured by the fear that some acquaintance of mine or my parents might come along and halt, to stare incredulously through the panes, watching me crawl around tacking coils of crêpe paper around soap boxes or garlanding them over cartons of detergent. With a small cluster of other rubbernecks gathering about him, the acquaintance might tap on the glass, and then, shaking his head and expressing astonishment with gestures and grimaces, he would let me know he was wondering what on earth I was doing here. Even if I had been willing to explain this merely unusual, perhaps, but still courageous step toward world renown as a draftsman and painter, I could not have concealed my shame.

Naturally, I was also ashamed of these feelings of inferiority, and that made the whole matter even worse. I had to ask myself, what was my pride made of that it could be injured so easily? I soon acknowledged that the sensibilities of a mama’s boy with a highly dubious self-confidence caused me this anguish. After all, people were beginning to accept the notion that work was not necessarily shameful — something my family still found hard to fathom. Of course, it very much depended on what kind of work it was. Commerce per se was embarrassing, but if the trade was in weapons, hunting gear, or riding equipment, then it could pass. Likewise, commerce in luxury items like wine, caviar, and pâté de foie gras, taken up by many ex-officers, was excused when it occurred as a necessity brought on, alas, by the times; and it did not occasion any loss of fashionable friendships. But anything connected with selling in a store was below social acceptance. This was a privilege of the Jews, and no one cared to dispute their right — at least, no one with any self-respect. I had been brought up to behave as though I did not consider myself anyone special and yet secretly to have a very high opinion of what I was. Under no circumstances would it have occurred to me to put myself on the same level as Jews. Yet I was now being placed there by the kind of wares I helped to peddle. Soap, toothpaste, and shampoo — who else should hawk them if not a Jewish shop assistant? The awareness of my being a kind of hod carrier, an out-and-out menial, for mostly Jewish shopkeepers cut sharply into my richly prejudiced self-esteem.

And yet at the same time my prejudices angered me. I rebelled against the people who had ingrained them in me. The thought of what my father might say if he found out what I was doing here sent a hot feeling of shame through me which instantly turned to rage — but, alas, impotent rage. I knew I basically thought the way he did. I hung in the threads of my background and upbringing like a fly in a spiderweb.

How could I ever get rid of experiences like, for example, the following one: when I was fifteen, my father had taken me along on one of the big shoots that were the prestigious high spots of the hunters’ season; only the very best guns took part. For me this was the climax of an exceptionally successful year. For once, I had studied well and passed my exams without the usual difficulties. I had therefore been allowed, in the summer, to join the local tennis club. My father didn’t know that the club’s newly chosen president was a Jew, a wealthy banker, elegant, soft-mannered, ambitious. He had accepted me as a young member with extreme politeness, as if it were an honor for the club as well as for him personally that I join. All summer he had shown me his friendliness. Now, upon our arrival at the meeting point for the first of the great winter shoots, he was the first person my father saw as we approached the group of hunters who had already arrived. My father stopped abruptly. “We must be mistaken,” he said in a loud, purposeful voice. “I thought I had been invited to a shooting party, but obviously we have come to the stock exchange.” He turned on his heels and went back to the car.

Before I could follow him, the banker came forward and held his hand out to me. “Good morning,” he said with a kind smile. “What a pleasure to realize that we are hunting mates as well as tennis partners.”

I hesitated for just a split second. I knew my father was expecting me to turn my back on the pretentious Jew and follow him. But the drill I had been given to behave politely with everybody, no matter who, was too strong. I took the banker’s hand and shook it, mumbling a banal phrase of conventional politeness, then quickly followed my father. My father did not speak a word to me all the way home. The punishment he inflicted on me was the cruelest one: for the rest of the season I was not allowed to join him for a single shoot. My humiliation was the more effective as, at the same time, my studies deteriorated. I did not have the moral right to nourish rebellious feelings. I had shown that I lacked character in every way. I was a shame to my family, my class, and myself — not only because I had failed to behave as my father expected me to do; even more so because of my cowardice in not standing up for what I myself thought was right.

So here, years later in Bucharest, I waxed defiant. The sense of dishonor intensified; and with almost masochistic readiness, I exposed myself to the humiliations that my activity as a publicist for soap and toothpaste afforded to the squeamish.

To be sure, I didn’t have much choice if I cared about keeping my job. Aphrodite was a company managed by Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Saxons, and thus it cultivated a ponderous work discipline that resolutely opposed Balkan dawdling. I had a fixed daily itinerary of drugstores and cosmetics shops to drop in on at least, where I cordially offered a window decoration whether it was desired or not. I could not report too many failures. It was up to my persuasiveness, my cajolery, my charm — any method would do. And if I was rejected, the fault was mine. There were no excuses. Nor was there any chance of claiming I had decorated a window when that was not the case. The job was verified by the salesmen, who made the rounds with their offers.

Thus, I was, so to speak, among commercial travelers — if my father had only known! And yet my artistic abilities (on which, of course, insultingly minor demands were made) were not all that was called upon. I was expected to have diabolical diplomatic skills, an irresistible manner, a flattering yet compelling way of getting what I was after. In short, my bosses needed something kittenish that would inveigle every boutique proprietor or manager to place his window at my disposal without further delay, allowing me to remove the competing wares and replace them with the alluring commodities of the Aphrodite Company. Such conduct was the very opposite of what I was gifted in or had been made capable of by my upbringing. I had been taught restraint and discretion, not “dash.” I had so little dash that I was actually unable to find a simple way out of my dilemma by turning my back on the Aphrodite Company. I stayed with my job not out of ambition or defiance—“I’ll show them!”—but rather because of drilled-in cowardice, an unconditional obedience that was typical of my class and based on something that had been hammered into me since childhood: self-contempt. The girl in the wheelchair would be bound to understand this. In a certain sense we were both cripples: she physically, I spiritually. If I claimed I did not have what it took to be a successful shop assistant, I was merely evading the secret knowledge that I had even less of what it took for something better. I lacked clarity, solidity, and authority.