An Ermine in Czernopol

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Gregor von Rezzori was the first writer I got to know by sight, but that wasn’t due to his fame as an author so much as it was to an Austrian TV show called Jolly Joker that ran in the early 1980s. The program offered glimpses of the international jet-set and typically featured fast cars or aristocrats, or more often than not aristocrats with fast cars, along with movie stars who lived in Monaco or the south of France. It was an endearing show, without a hint of malice, in love with a vaguely antiquated idea of luxury and grand style — a series of charming, well-meaning, and inconsequential episodes that demonstrated how beautiful life could be for a few lucky souls. The single most impressive thing about it, however, was the moderator: an elegant, suntanned gentleman getting on in years who seemed to radiate health, sophistication, and wit, and who always appeared remarkably relaxed. He was often filmed standing on a beach or atop a hill, occasionally at the steering wheel of a fast car, and he always spoke with a soft accent that had just a hint of nasal elegance and was impossible to place. Later I learned that it was half that of an Austrian aristocrat and half the peculiar German of his native Bucovina.

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