Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
  • Published: 15 February 2008
  • ISBN: 9781590172469
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $35.00

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

A Novel in Five Stories

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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.
  • Published: 15 February 2008
  • ISBN: 9781590172469
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $35.00
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Praise for Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

  • "The last great remembrancer of a region that has vanished from the map and mind of Europe." -The New York Review of Books
  • A "rich, disquietingly good book...these stories...are wonderfully intricate in character and texture, studded with observation" -The New York Times
  • "A literature in which the author envisions himself as a character in a design arranged from the data of his life as another author might arrange items from fictitious notes...He is an artist, devilishly honest, stubborn, the creator and the created of an artwork about a survivor...It is through Mr. von Rezzori's art, rather than through any vanity or apology, that we are enlightened."-The New York Times Book Review
  • "Yet it is not alone for the vividness of its settings and characters that we attend to Memoirs. We also savor the sound of the author's voice, an extraordinary blend of bitter self-denigration and sweet recollection. We relish his haunting evocations of twilight...and of course we can 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."-New York Times
  • "The 'I' in these pages-ambitious dreamer, insatiable lover, solitary night-wanderer-achieves more than catharsis: he comes to vivid, full life in the mind of the reader. The gloriously rendered settings...are an opulent banquet table spread for every taste."-Die Welt

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