Gregor von Rezzori, _Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories_, trans. Joachim Neugroschel

 FIVE RELATIVELY FREE-STANDING novellas (the stories tend to be sixty-some pages), all with the same narrator at different ages, and all of them seemingly drawn from Rezzori’s own experience, so these days “fictionalized memoir” or “autofiction” might be the handier descriptor, but the book was published in German almost fifty years ago, so, sure, “novel,” why not? It’s an interesting book, however we categorize it.

Rezzori’s family was part of the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with holdings in Romania, but Rezzori was born in 1914, just five years before the Treaty of Versailles did away with the Austro-Hungarian empire and (as a side effect) his family’s place in the world. His parents and grandparents never quite leave that vanished world, with its dueling scars and hunting in the Carpathians, but Rezzori has to figure out how to live in post-war world with not much beyond charm and upper-class manners. 

The first four stories track him from boyhood in the 1920s to young manhood in the late 1930s, with a final chapter on his life after World War II. The settings shift, as do his circumstances, but a unifying element is, as the subtitle indicates, the narrator’s anti-semitism. He is not an ideological anti-semite, not at all fanatical about it, but it’s how he was raised, and it seems perfectly natural and understandable to him, persisting even as he has friendships and even love affairs with Jews.

And then, after the Anschluss, with Austria now bound to Nazi Germany, anti-semitism is state policy. The narrator isn’t a Nazi, does not exactly approve of the Nazis, but he’s no dissident, and on some level the policy seems not exactly wrong to him if a little exaggerated. 

In this way the book is a subtle and perceptive study of how our own unexamined assumptions, given a little family and social encouragement, can lead us to acquiesce in evil. 

The prose has a somewhat over-stuffed, Victorian-Beidermeier style at times, but the whiff of the 19th century novel in the languor of the descriptions seems deliberate and ironic, given the 20th century horrors hovering unstated in the background.