Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

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The friend who introduced me to Ivan Turgenev’s short novel First Love, characterized it as a beautiful thing that’s made out of ugly things, and it has occurred to me since that a substantial quotient of ugliness may well be integral to all truly beautiful literary works. In any case, there can be few books rooted in a more profound ugliness than Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which so vividly, so feelingly, so elegantly, with such tender care, anarchic humor, and shocking honesty portrays the crucible of Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, with its catastrophically toxic compound of cultural elements and historical impulses.

Rezzori was born in 1914 in the Bukovina, and he preserves in print, in this and other books, the immense vitality of the region at that time — the linguistic and ethnic ferment, the vast, brooding landscapes lit by the fading glow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the borderland combustibility. As a young man, Rezzori also spent time in Vienna, where he studied and had family, in Bucharest, and in Berlin, and he can cause those cities to spring to life on a page with such intense immediacy that you can practically drink the coffee and eat the pastry.

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