{"product_id":"memoirs-of-an-antisemite-isbn-9781590172469","title":"Memoirs of an Anti-Semite","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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori’s most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.\u003cp\u003e“Unsparing in its presentation of the convenient attitudes that sanction the vilest regimes, \u003ci\u003eMemoirs\u003c\/i\u003e turns self-implication into a subtle and ferocious ethic and teaches that none of us is free from casual, dangerous moral lapses.” —Greg Jackson, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Rezzori has a remarkable lyric gift that he uses to describe the wide expanses of  Bukovina. In a series of beautiful set pieces, he evokes the vanishing world of Germanic  chivalry, already in its last stages of degeneration into the debased kitsch that  the Nazis would exploit, the emerging commercial melee of post-war Bucharest with  its Armenian and Jewish shopkeepers and its red light district; and shabby-genteel  Vienna, where he socializes almost exclusively with Jewish artists and musicians.\"  --NextBook\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"In his remarkable \u003ci\u003eMemoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories\u003c\/i\u003e...von  Rezzori brought his lost homeland back to life so sharply and in such pungent detail  that we feel from the first sentences as though we have lived there ourselves...For  all its poignancy, \u003ci\u003eMemoirs\u003c\/i\u003e is no foray into nostalgia but a deliberately fragmented,  and often quite funny, version of the classic German bildungsroman' — what might  be termed the novel of formative influences.\" -\u003ci\u003eThe New York Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\" 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Globe \u0026amp; Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Gregor von Rezzori, in his newly reissued  novel \u003ci\u003eMemoirs of an Anti-Semite\u003c\/i\u003e, 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGregor von Rezzori’s “novels and memoirs revealed  the tragic sweep of European history through two world wars and beyond.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New  York Times\u003c\/i\u003e (Michael Kaufmann, Obituary)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The last great remembrancer of a region  that has vanished from the map and mind of Europe.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books \u003c\/i\u003e(Michael Ignatieff)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA “rich, disquietingly good book…these stories…are wonderfully  intricate in character and texture, studded with observation” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e (Stanley Kauffmann)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times  Book Review \u003c\/i\u003e(Stanley Kauffmann)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Here is a work that tackles–without reproof, without  illusions, and without shallow moral judgments; by turns, engaged and detached, funny  and sad, tender and heartless–the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, and its correlative  anti-Goyism, the double tragedy of banal misunderstandings that changed the face  of Europe and the world.” –Bruce Chatwin\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“What we recall…is the breathtaking richness  of the history it recounts and the extraordinary way it makes time pass by…Yet it  is not alone for the vividness of its settings and characters that we attend to \u003ci\u003eMemoirs  of an Anti-Semite\u003c\/i\u003e. 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 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.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.”  –\u003ci\u003eDie Welt\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eGregor von Rezzori \u003c\/b\u003e(1914—1998) studied at the University of Vienna and for a time lived in Bucharest. In Germany, after World War II, he became active as a writer and in radio broadcasting and filmmaking activities. American readers first discovered is writing in English with the appearance of his story, \"Troth,\" in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e. Mr. Rezzori's books include \u003ci\u003eTales from Maghrebinia, Oedipus Triumphs at Stalingrad, The Hussar, The Snows of Yesteryear, The Death of My Brother Abel\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eAnecdotage\u003c\/i\u003e. He lived with his wife in a village near Florence, Italy until his death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDeborah Eisenberg \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of three collections of short stories and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Rea Award, and three O. Henry Awards. She lives in New York City.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTranslated by \u003cb\u003eJoachim Neugroschel\u003c\/b\u003e and the author","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44862324277477,"sku":"NP9781590172469","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590172469.jpg?v=1767732537","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/memoirs-of-an-antisemite-isbn-9781590172469","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}