Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

This is a strong recommendation to read a very different kind of book. There are many books that speak to the experiences of holocaust victims; there are even a few devoted to the stories of the perpetrators. This book attempts to explore the public bystanders that allowed it to happen through indifference or a willingness to accept the government storyline about the problems caused by Jews.

The story is set in Eastern Europe where the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI has left many people feeling at risk - financially and culturally. It is before the Nazi's major push into Eastern Europe and before the Final Solution. They are on the cusp of the holocaust, but don't know it. They go on with their daily lives. The narrator (he's no hero!) is the child of minor nobility trying to get by in a no longer familiar world. He is no Nazi, but has inherited an attitude of anti-semitism that informs his actions - or lack thereof. He lives in a milieu with many Jews from rag-pickers to professionals and businessmen. Many are more educated and wealthier than he is. He has many close relationships with Jewish neighbors growing up; in fact, some of his closest friends growing up are Jews. He 'loves' them, but his anti-semitism, so deeply rooted in his perceptions of class and family, relegates them to less than fully human.

The over-riding focus of this book is how the holocaust could happen, and by inference, happen again? The "Holy War" between Muslims and Christians? No-one knew what was about to happen then; what it is that we don't know now?

Book Description
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 his relationship that has blinded him to–and makes him complicit in–the terrible realities 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.