Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (New York Review Books (Paperback))

Excellent prose, Von Rezzori was no doubt a great writer, better than more famous authors, Deborah Eisenberg on the firsts lines of her introduction mention it's a beautiful novel made of ugly things, like Turgenev's short First Love, well she is right, there is something terrible in the subject matter of the book, knowing now about the Holocaust and it's myriad of implications, in all honesty I know from Von Rezzori for quite a while, and was very impressed by some excerpts here, and there I read before from him, and just put him in my long reading list, but is not until now I read this book. The author it's quite shockingly unapologetic on it's views, and treat it as a matter of course, or you should say it, without the hypocrisy, and political correctness that pervade the issue in a post-Holocaust World, and this is of course very unusual, the result of all this made me have divided view about the author and his work; great prose, but now with a lot of misgivings about the author himself!Is he is what he claims to be, or there is some quite not true and made up in his story?You see the story it's narrated in the first person, using his supposed real name, and family members, if the story it's a novelistic construct, so also the claims about his personal life, may be false, or phoney, but if it's not, Von Rezzori, will not be the kind of person you could choose him as a friend, or someone you want to be associated, and even less, look up to, even if liking, and admiring his superb prose style.And yes I will read more of him just to find out what sort of person he may be, and what other yarns he may concoct, even if disagreeing with his personal moral character, of course you do not need to like someone, or be an apologist of their life, in order to like his writing style.

First this book is not really a novel, but a group of five stories, which are not in chronological sequence, so it didn't feel like a memoir either. The time flips around so frequently that I lost its sense of direction. The character's name eventually becomes Gregor (the author's real name) and he falls in love with Jewish women. The title, I think, is sarcastic. How could Gregor fall in love with Jewish women and call himself an anti-Semite? The writing is beautiful, which I think mitigates the confusion.

This book is poorly titled. He's not so much an anti-semite as he is an inward-focused, spoiled WWII civilian who must deal with inconvenient changes in geography and history. If you want to learn how the almost-elite avoided WWII and most of its exigencies, this is the book. If you're looking for answers to "why did it happen" or "what thought processes brought it about in this class" this is not the book. Not a complete waste as it displays an entire group of central European thinking—mostly the shattered Austro-Hungarian clique—to those of us who didn't know a thing about them.

This is the most engrossing book I've read in the last few years (and I tend towards trashy spy novels that were meant to be engrossing). It's also an amazingly deep portrait of the forces that led to the Nazi Holocaust and the civilizational meltdown that was WWII. To a 30-year old American, European anti-Semitism of the pre-war era seems sort of inscrutable -- how did some stereotypes about greed and big noses lead to epic genocide? Von Rezzori excels at making the abstract concrete through the book's five loosely connected stories. We see how Jews existed alongside, and sometimes intermingled, with the rest of the society inhabited by his narrator, but remained unmistakably different in the eyes of him and his contemporaries. As borders constantly shifted, people looked (or claimed to look, as the narrator's father ironically demonstrates) to their ancestral lineage, rather than their geographic location, to define themselves and claim membership in a particular tribe. These groups weren't just "Jews" and "Gentiles," but countless pseudo-ethnic or political groups flung almost randomly around the old territory of the Holy Roman Empire -- Romanians, Gypsies, old high Austrians, German reformers, Italians, and of course Jews. Without an overarching political entity to keep them together (as the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires had), these categories provided a set of convenient boxes in which oneself and others could be sorted and defined.Though we only see actual Nazis in the next-to-last story, their appeal to the narrator and his Gentile cohorts is made clear -- while crass and vulgar, they once again offer an organizing force to their world, adrift since 1918. The Jews, however, are the one group too different to fit in to this new order, and disdain for them is a terrific uniter of others across class and ethnic lines, much as anti-Black racism appealed to poor whites in the American South. The narrator has suffered just enough perceived "humiliations" at the hands of Jews, and absorbed just enough resentment and disdain for them throughout his upbringing, that their fate just doesn't bother him too much, until it's far too late (and even then, the reader is left unsure how much it really bothers him). An amazing portrait of how genocide and tyranny happen not because of a few fanatics -- they will always exist -- but because enough ordinary people become apathetic.

Here you have a a vanished world, vanished peoples, vanished borders and countries.This is told from the perspective of a privileged kid growing-up to manhood in that period over the post WW I period.The anti-semitism is very much tongue in cheek. There are no bullying brown or black shirted morons here.Not yet, at least.However, the author does show how anti-antisemitism was ingrained in the Christian mind set and considered to be an unthinking natural state among the populations of many countries in central Europe in that period.For me there was an awful feeling of doom as Jewish friends of the author discussed their future plans having no inkling that they were already doomed to live through and die in the horrors to come.The book is rich in character and colour.If you need answers as to what Middle Europe was really like then and how a passive antisemitism paved the way for full blooded genocide, read this. Hitler wasn't the only anti-semite in Europe. We all were, God help us!

In this naturally flowing, brilliantly written, but also raging reactionary, prose Gregor von Rezzori brushes an in depth picture of the fate and the mentality of the aristocratic class during the first half of the 20th century. It is the world of the Dual Empire, of troth, but ultimate defeat by `the ruse of history'. It is the world of S. Zweig's `The World of Yesterday' and Joseph Roth's `The Emperor's Tomb'.The Dual Empire and TrothThe Dual Empire was an idea and an ideal. It was Holy, because God's State on earth.It had a constitution that offered uniform protection, leadership and administration to a gigantic territory inhabited by many nations and threatened by many dangers.It was held together by the ethical principle of troth, loyalty, the allegiance of vassals, the unconditioned obedience that the liegemen had sworn to their lord and his flag, the two-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire.The aristocratic classThe aristocracy of the 20th century was a class where `people were beginning to accept the notion that work was not necessarily shameful, `something my family still found hard to fathom.' `But anything connected with selling in a store was below social acceptance.'The ruse of history: defeatThe aristocrats fought among themselves for European supremacy. They not only destroyed their own empire, but also that of their enemies (?). They destroyed the very thing they pretended to fight for: `ideals, holy traditions, values handed down for generations'.They offered political and social power to `power-drunk demagogues mounted on a pedestal made up of interwoven interests - financial, mercantile and political'.The protagonist continues in raging reactionary prose: `Every bomb simply opened the cellars and let the rats free, the profiteers, the greedy, the uncivilized, the illiterates, the oppressed and offended who wanted their share of the cake no matter how.'Vae VictisThe protagonist's class feels, justly, `a collective guilt, the oddly empty grief, the madness, the melancholy of golden memories (that sunken golden flag).'He sees himself as `a moth-eaten survivor of a bygone splendid world', eluding `an out-an-out collision with reality, for he knew how dangerous reality was.'(!)He `will not live long enough to see those liberated rats produce a civilization of what they think to be social justice.'Gregor von Rezzori's book is a supreme expression of the mentality of the First Estate, who looked upon the Third Estate as (potential) thieves of `their share of the cake'. They protected themselves under the banner of their leader `the Emperor and his army' and the `Holy' Second Estate. But, unfortunately for them, they didn't understand the `ruse of history'.I highly recommended this book as an evocation of an old, but not `splendid' and in no way democratic `civilization'.

Although aware of the 2007 edition from the  New York Review of Books , I bought second hand the 1983 Picador hardback. It seemed a good idea at the time to acquire a hardback rather than a paperback, especially as there was nothing to choose between the two in terms of author-generated content, which is the same translation of the same five stories. I got it wrong. In the hardback edition, Pravda, the last 'story' (more of an essay really, though admittedly with some fictional content) has been mangled by the typesetter, with a whole page of text repeated and at least the odd word left off, though I suspect a larger section is missing, over-written by the doubled-up text.I have checked the NYRB text as best as I can using Amazon's See Inside facility and it seems not to have replicated the problem. (If you want to check for yourself, take a look at pages 263-265.)The stories all centre on someone who shares some key autobiographical features with Rezzori himself, but is clearly fictionalised - in different ways for the purposes of different stories - quite likely through Rezzori both borrowing parts of other people's biographies and extending his own by asking himself how matters might have turned-out if he had followed paths not actually taken. In the final story, presenting himself, the narrator, as a writer, he speaks of his habit of adopting other people's experiences as his own. "I invent myself in my own novels."So we get to know rather well someone who was born in Bukovina around the end of the First World War, whose family - at least partly by choice - had been stranded there as German-speaking Austrians when the former Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up and Bukovina became a part of the Kingdom of Romania. The first story is set in Bukovina, the second and third in Bucharest, the fourth in Vienna (the eye-witness account of the Anschluss is particularly to be commended) and the last is a post Second World War retrospective. In each of the five stories the narrator becomes close for a while with a Jew (four of whom are women, the last - briefly - his wife).Although the narrator has sympathy for and understanding of the Jewish condition and - increasingly in those years in Central Europe - plight, and in a handful of cases has whole-hearted love for a Jew, none of those relationships work out for the long-term. Repeatedly, we are made aware of the gulf between former colonial petite bourgeoisie such as himself and his family and Jews rich and poor, educated and not. Some Jews were in a position to aspire to elevated social status, but that was itself a major source of the unease of the potentially eclipsed. Rezzori writes of a grandmother who, "because so many Jews were successful in musical endeavours ... no longer quite considered it one of the fine arts." Pure bigotry.From time to time, we also glimpse the Jewish perspective of the goyim (gentiles), which is, in part at least, recognition of a real cultural gap as well as a self-defensive reaction to the way they were treated - even before the Nazi rot (and worse) became all-pervasive.The individual stories seem to be structured very much as if targeted at the New Yorker of the 1970s or earlier, and indeed Troth was first published there - under the title Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, no less. If the earlier stories weren't accepted (I only surmise that they were offered - Löwinger's Rooming House and Troth were written in English by the author), it may be because the early, scene-setting sections are over-extended and the concluding scenes rushed.Nevertheless, the tales are worth reading for the actually very rare insights they convey of life and conditions in those times in those places. New York Review of Books

Obsessively trying to understand the origins of this time of hatred. I really wanted to get in to the mind of this persons head to get a better perspective of why it went the direction it did. He is brutally honest and his writing is very subtle, at times almost comical (and you sense a level of guilt) but a must read ...especially with our current issues with immigration. It is very worrying to see similar signs with respect to what is happening now, God forbid we should ever get to this point again but if more people read this, we would have a better perspective so as to change things in a timely manner....!

Hilarious. Very revealing.

Diese Roman ist übersezt obwohl es ist wunderbar. Es ist beschreibende Literatur und ist Lesenwert. Jede Geschichte ist ungewohnnt und ein Geschmuckstuck.