Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

What gave me the right to stand my ground among those people was a rather strange talent Minka had discovered in me. Not for nothing had I passed a great part of my childhood and adolescence amidst Polish Jews. While walking through the streets of Czernowitz and Sadagura and Lvov, I had kept my ears open, and I spoke better Yiddish and knew more of the customs and behavior of the so-called Polish Jews than most of the refined Jews of Vienna or even Prague. I was an expert in all shades of Jewish slang and the way Jews spoke when they wanted to speak select German. And when somebody told a Jewish story, which at that time, and especially among Jewish intellectuals, was cultivated as an art, and told it badly, Minka would impatiently interrupt him, saying, “Come on, don’t bore us. Tell your story in a low voice to Brommy, and he’ll tell it to us much better than you do.” If for some reason she chose not to interrupt the imperfect storyteller, she and I would exchange a short, vague, yet significant look, very much in the way that my eyes would meet those of my mother or father, my grandmother or my aunts, when somebody who was not of our kind committed some lapse of manners or language. If, on the other hand, some master told a Jewish story to perfection, then Minka would pull my sleeve and say, “Pay attention, Brommy!”

Brommy…. It was a name of quite another form of existence, which ran parallel to my existence as son, grandson, and nephew — very much as Guru Malik within the esoteric community of my aunts led a life parallel to that of brave engineer Weingruber, who lived his petit bourgeois life as an employee of the Styria Motor Company. Once, when someone called me on the telephone, one of my aunts answered, and afterward she asked me with an expression of amazement, “What do your … friends call you? ‘Brommy’? But you have such nice other Christian names. What a regrettable lack of taste.”

Furious, without knowing why, I said, “You mind your own business!”

“Now, really!” she exclaimed. “Have we come to the point where boys of your age speak to adults in such a way? Don’t forget, you’re only eighteen, after all.”

I certainly did not forget it. It weighed on me that I had lied to Minka about my age. One day I could bear it no longer. We had been talking about some of her troubles, and she said, “It’s astonishing how understanding you are for your age, my boy.”

“Minka,” I said, “there’s something I have to confess. I lied to you.”

“What about?” she said and smiled. “Oh, I see. You want to tell me that in fact there is a drop of Jewish blood in you.”

“No,” I said. “I am sorry there isn’t. But I’m not twenty-three. I am only eighteen.”

“What? But you’re not serious?”

From then on, she treated me as a sort of wonder child. “Would you believe it? He’s only eighteen!” They probably all thought I was Jewish, and were proud of my precocity.

Well, it did not go on forever, alas. Very soon I was nineteen, and at twenty I had to do my military service in Rumania, and my gay time in Vienna was over. But it was soon replaced by another fascinating experience. I now became aware that I knew almost nothing about the country I belonged to, the Rumanian people, or their language. In order to fill that gap, a young Rumanian student was hired to teach me Rumanian and something of Rumanian literature and history, and I not only formed friendships with my tutor and some other young Rumanians which have lasted till today but also learned the historical past of the three Rumanian principalities — Moldova (to which the Bukovina had once belonged), Muntenia, and Oltenia — and their struggle to unite against their Turkish oppressors and Phanariot rulers and become a nation and the kingdom of Rumania. By tracing some rather remote lineage of my pedigree until it found root in Rumania, I was able to justify my newly discovered love for that country and my claim to belong there not merely as part of a former Austrian minority but by inheritance. Then I exchanged my first name, Arnulf, for the third of my Christian names, Gregor, which also happened to be the Christian name of some half-Greek, half-Russian ancestor originating in Bessarabia and beautifully outfitted with a Turkish wife. My father watched with intense disapproval my Rumanian friendships and my attempts to tie myself genealogically to Rumania, but by that time I had — thanks to Minka Raubitschek — acquired a certain independence of mind, and when my father said that he loathed the Bukovina and if it hadn’t been for the Carpathians would long since have left it, I said boldly that, according to my taste, it was better to have a free outlook over a lovely rolling country with a vast horizon than to be always running your nose against some stone wall, as in Styria. Whereupon my father turned his back, and did not speak to me for a couple of weeks.

I came back to Vienna in the summer of 1937 as Gregor, sporting an enormous Phanariot mustache. I hurried upstairs to embrace Minka and break the news that I was in love. It was not a very happy love story, though, for the lady in question was married, and, to make matters worse, I liked her husband very much. Minka, as usual, was full of understanding, comfort, and good advice. We passed a few gay days together, but no night. I had outgrown my teddy-bear stage and, besides, would have considered it treason to my love to sleep soundly in another woman’s bed instead of lying alone, sighing for her. I was going to meet her shortly in Salzburg, where she wanted to attend the festival. Minka took me to the station. Looking up at me while I looked down at her from the open window of my compartment in the train, she saw my excited happiness. Her eyes shone tenderly, with a strange, more profound tenderness than ever. “If you were wise,” she said, “you would now get off this train and never see that girl again.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything you have had with her so far is beautiful — all promise and expectation. Now come the troubles.”

“Oh, don’t talk rot. We are going to be very happy.”

“I do hope so,” she said. “I am very, very fond of you, you know.”

The train started up, and I sat back in my seat in a state of bewilderment. It could not be that Minka was in love with me, could it? No, that was impossible. Yet the thought flattered my vanity, and, rather the prouder for it, I looked forward to meeting my adored one.

Minka was right. Things became frightfully complicated, and 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. I fled to Styria, for a visit to my old boarding school, and then followed my ladylove back to Rumania.

When I came back to Vienna again, it was February 1938, and what I found was chaos. Minka had come to fetch me at the station. She merely said, “Poor boy, I am afraid that your aunts’ guru is right and the Weingrubers and Schicklgrubers and Schweingrubers will soon potentialize the world.” Most of her friends — Bobby among them — had already gone to Switzerland, she said, or England, or France, or were preparing to leave Austria even at the price of their material existence.

“Oh, don’t exaggerate,” I said. “You Jews are always making a fuss about something. What in the world is going on, anyway?”