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    Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

    Author Gregor Von Rezzori
    Introduction by Deborah Eisenberg
    Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
    Ebook
    New York Review Books | NYRB Classics
    On sale Dec 07, 2011 | 320 Pages | 9781590175507
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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 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.
    Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998) was a novelist, journalist, memoirist, screenwriter, and author of radio plays. His works Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear are published by NYRB Classics.

    Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short stories and a play. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. She lives in New York City.
    Gregor Von Rezzori View titles by Gregor Von Rezzori
    “Unsparing in its presentation of the convenient attitudes that sanction the vilest regimes, Memoirs turns self-implication into a subtle and ferocious ethic and teaches that none of us is free from casual, dangerous moral lapses.” —Greg Jackson, The Guardian 

    "[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

    "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, The Globe & Mail

    "Gregor von Rezzori, in his newly reissued novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, meshes the micro and macro versions of interwar anti-Semitism very skillfully indeed…[a] welcome new edition in the library of classics kept evergreen by The New York Review of Books…Writing as he did from the wreckage of postwar Europe, Gregor von Rezzori could claim the peculiar distinction of being one of the few survivors to treat this ultimate catastrophe in the mild language of understatement. This is what still gives his novel the power to shock." — Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic

    About

    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.

    Author

    Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998) was a novelist, journalist, memoirist, screenwriter, and author of radio plays. His works Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear are published by NYRB Classics.

    Deborah Eisenberg is the author of four collections of short stories and a play. She is the winner of the 2000 Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and five O. Henry Awards. She lives in New York City.
    Gregor Von Rezzori View titles by Gregor Von Rezzori

    Praise

    “Unsparing in its presentation of the convenient attitudes that sanction the vilest regimes, Memoirs turns self-implication into a subtle and ferocious ethic and teaches that none of us is free from casual, dangerous moral lapses.” —Greg Jackson, The Guardian 

    "[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

    "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, The Globe & Mail

    "Gregor von Rezzori, in his newly reissued novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, meshes the micro and macro versions of interwar anti-Semitism very skillfully indeed…[a] welcome new edition in the library of classics kept evergreen by The New York Review of Books…Writing as he did from the wreckage of postwar Europe, Gregor von Rezzori could claim the peculiar distinction of being one of the few survivors to treat this ultimate catastrophe in the mild language of understatement. This is what still gives his novel the power to shock." — Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic

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