Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

A Novel in Five Stories

By Gregor von Rezzori
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Introduction by Deborah Eisenberg

The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth century's ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator's Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just this relationship that has blinded him to—and makes him complicit in—the terrible realities of his era. Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori's most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

A superb and unsettling satirical novel from 1979, in which the cosmopolitan and apolitical narrator exposes the ugliness of 20th-century Europe through his attraction-repulsion obsession with Jews.
— Martin Levin, Globe & Mail

[A] devastatingly beautiful chronicle of personal metamorphosis...daring and revelatory.
— Chicago Sun Times

These haunting stories portray history unwinding within a single skull, a cultivated, often charming mind being betrayed by a catastrophic flaw. They also show how such treason, magnified many millions of times, led civilization itself to the brink.
— Paul Gray, Times Literary Supplement

The author’s voice [is] an extraordinary blend of bitter self-denigration and sweet recollection. We relish his haunting evocations of twilight…and of course we an never avert our eyes from the dissection of anti-Semitism that keeps going on in the background–a dissection that amounts to an anatomy of Central Europe in the 20th century.
— The New York Times

A rich, disquietingly good book...these stories…are wonderfully intricate in character and texture, studded with observation.
— The New York Times

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