Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

on the third day, she sent her son to take him to the airport. He was frightened at how Jewish the boy looked. He had the hooked nose from their common blood. As well as the dark hair and piercing blue eyes. The young man was cordial and utterly indifferent. The old man from the West concerned him not at all. No use pointing out to the boy that he might have been his son. When parting, they barely shook hands. Then the airplane spiraled up over the bleak landscape, in which countless ponds were glittering.

“Thank the good Lord, ma chère , that you will never see Tsarskoye Selo again …” he would say to the old Russian woman.

When he arrived at the old lady’s building, the concierge was standing there as if awaiting him. “I just telephoned your wife,” she said, peering at him as though expecting consternation before she even told him the bad news. “The old contessa vanished,” is what he heard, for the woman said, “ La vecchia contessa è mancata .” Only a fraction of a second later he realized that this was a euphemistic expression to avoid the rude word “died.” Aha. Well, they had been expecting it for weeks.

The concierge had been taking care of her during the last weeks. Things had gone downhill rapidly. “I wanted to get in touch with you a couple of days ago, but you were out of town, your wife told me.” This morning, the contessa had sat up once again and gazed straight ahead and loudly exclaimed, “ Pravda! ” And then she had crumpled up, dead.

“It’s a Russian word,” he said, removing the wrappings from the box of marrons glacés .

“I know,” said the concierge. “My husband’s been in the Communist Party for thirty years. It’s a Moscow newspaper.”

“Yes. Truth. Here — would you like a chestnut? Take the whole box, I’ll just eat one, I really mustn’t, you know — at my age, one has to be careful.”

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 and An Ermine in Czernopol (published by NYRB Classics). 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 Monti. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (available as an NYRB Classics).

DEBORAH EISENBERG is the author of four collections of short stories and a play. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. She lives in New York City.