Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  It was rigorously exclusive; already at that date, 1927, one of the conditions for admission into the aquatic society was watertight proof of Aryan birth. The comradeship of its members was generally regarded as exemplary. These venerable gentlemen—one and all of an optimistic disposition—would climb into the single sculls, double, foursome, and eights, and heave up the river moving like metronomes all morning, then turn and shoot back down on the crest of the current in little more than a quarter hour. Under the showers, where they then sluiced away the sweat of their labors, I was to hear the remark that became the basis for my lifelong animosity against rowing.

  I was scarcely thirteen and very shy. I hated the studied nonchalance with which these muscular men dropped their shirts and shorts and stepped naked into the showers. There they would stand, spitting and spluttering, their hair plastered over their faces, and, without the slightest abashment, mix yellow jets of urine into the clear white of the water, send farts reverberating around the tiled walls, and discuss “women.”

  A prominent subject was Josephine Baker, who was appearing at a Viennese theater at the time. Needless to say, I was head over heels in love with her, and I suffered torments as I listened to the detached professionalism with which her charms were discussed as though she were some favored racehorse. “Class,” my dashing relative said, turning his face in a screwed-up grimace to the nozzle, soap suds oozing from his armpits and pubic hair, “that’s what she’s got, class, even though she’s black. Better than a Jewess, though, all the same. I tell you, if I weren’t in training …” And like an echo coming from the tiled walls a voice answered him: “Well, let us know if you succeed—it’s only fair among friends and members of the same club.”

  Thirty years later, then, on the banks of the Spitzingsee, I felt not the slightest desire to hire a rowboat. Out of sheer boredom I exchanged a few words concerning the weather and the business prospects of the morrow, a Sunday, with the proprietress. The woman’s odd accent arrested my attention.

  “You’re not a Bavarian,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Yugoslav?” I ventured.

  “No,” she said, “you’ll never guess.”

  Nevertheless I tried; the gulash of nationalities and accents in Central Europe is indeed quite confusing, but an attentive ear can generally localize them, and to my trained one it was clear that she came from some neck of my own woods.

  “I’m from Bucharest,” she finally admitted, and I delightedly addressed her in Rumanian. “But I’m not Rumanian,” she added.

  “What, then?”

  She was Ukrainian.

  Her evasiveness aroused my curiosity. “What did you do in Bucharest?” I wanted to know.

  “I was an artiste,” she replied with a coy mixture of demureness and twinkling eyes that put me on the scent of some nocturnally practiced art.

  “A dancer?”

  No, a singer, not of the operatic or Lieder kind, simply a singer in a Russian chorus.

  I felt a thrill. “In a garden restaurant behind the Biserică Albă?”

  She gazed at me in astonishment. “How did you know?”

  Yes, that indeed was the question. By the grace of God alone, apparently, and it confused me even more than it did her, for I had never set foot in this restaurant, wasn’t even sure on which street or passage behind the Biserică Albă it was situated. But I had heard the chorus, every night, a whole summer long.

  It was a summer that according to my memory consisted solely of lavender-blue skies and unfulfilled longings; only a few isolated events and disjointed situations still hover in my mind; the one thing I remember distinctly is that it was insufferably hot; no dog showed its nose on the streets until sundown. I spent most of my days, certainly most of my evenings, under a canopy on the terrace of my tiny apartment, which was perched on the flat roof (today one might grandly refer to it as a penthouse) of one of the high-rise buildings that even at that early date and especially in the quarter around the Biserică Albă had shot up all over Bucharest. At that time my passion for horseracing had taken me by the scruff of the neck in the truest sense of the word: I’d been thrown, had dislocated three joints in my spine, and was obliged to wear a plaster cast around my neck and shoulders, like the unforgettable Erich von Stroheim in La Grande Illusion.

  With this mishap my own illusions, which had also been sweeping, evaporated into the lavender-blue heavens: my intention, for instance, to transport steeplechase horses to Abyssinia, making a fortune with them in the flourishing colony of the Italian Empire, and then returning home to convince a certain young lady that her refusal to unite her life with mine had been a mistake.

  I felt no need of company. I stayed at home, cooked my own meals; a half-crazed jockey who had lost his license ran my errands. I lay on a deck chair in the shade of my canopy and read, and when it got too dark, I laid my book aside and drifted back into the dreams which the paling void above my head had absorbed so effortlessly. And night after night, on the stroke of nine, the strains of abrasive-sweet young girls’ voices singing “Hayda troika,” the prelude to an ensuing nonstop revue of banal Russian folk music, rose from one of the alleys below me.

  More than once I crossed to the balustrade and looked over in the hope that in the deepening dusk the glow of light that certainly marked the spot would rise to me, too, for it was audibly clear that the singing was being done in the open air, and my knowledge of the gardens and bars amidst the towering walls of the stark modernaki buildings told me there would be garlands of colored light bulbs dangling over the tables between potted lemon trees; the orchestra dais too would be framed in a blaze of light, and a multicolored neon sign with the name of the place in Russian letters and a double-headed Imperial Eagle would decorate the entrance. In my mind I saw the chorus girls clearly before me: the stiff, puffed bells of their skirts, the sturdiness of their legs in red saffian boots sticking out beneath, their embroidered blouses and blank doll-like faces with lurid circles of carmine dabbed on their cheeks, their streaky hair beneath the gold-edged triangular bonnets that always reminded me of the all-seeing eye of God as depicted on icons—all these details remained imprinted in my memory because they had been merely imagined, images evoked by the melancholy of the songs. This dragging melancholy came not so much from the shirokaya natura, the weighty Russian soul, as from the robotlike monotony of the girls’ singing; wafting aimlessly through the lofty echo chamber of those nights, the melodies became tokens of the emptiness of my days. Although I often thought of going down to find out whether everything was as I pictured it, this intention was also to remain unfulfilled. I was irresolute that summer, apathetic, not, I reassured myself, in the Oblomov sense, more in the nature of Dürer’s Melancholia or the medieval drawing of Walther von der Vogelweide, sitting on a stone mulling over a finished chapter of life while vainly seeking the key to the next. Apart from which I knew I’d have to change lodgings in a few weeks’ time.

  This tiresome necessity was due to my own neglect; I knew from experience and acquaintances’ repeated warnings that for some reason the Bucharesters were given to changing their dwelling places with astonishing regularity and that the dates of transmigration were fixed as irrevocably as the advent of spring or fall: in May, on St. George’s Day, and in October, on St. Demetrius’s. On those two days not a single van was to be had in the whole city; the streets were choked with carts and wagons precariously loaded with everything including the kitchen sink. I’d heard it said that neighbors on the same floor would rather swap flats than face another half year in the old one; those who did not have the foresight to get extension clauses in their leases past these dates were liable to be evicted without ceremony. It happened to me. With the dawn of St. Demetrius’s Day, the new tenants stood puffing at my door, and I had no choice but to gather my few belongings and descend to the street. By luck I soon found lodgings at a place called Löwinger’s Rooming House.

  This establishment was run by a family consi
sting of Mr. and Mrs. Löwinger, his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law. Mr. Löwinger, who looked like a prematurely aged rabbinic student, was a peace-loving gentleman pampered in every conceivable way by his womenfolk. By way of profession he sold lacquered pens—cheap, brightly colored wooden pens used mostly by schoolchildren; the colored lacquers on the shafts had a pleasant marbleized look but the disadvantage—or advantage, for Mr. Löwinger—of chipping and flaking easily, so that the pens frequently had to be renewed. Nevertheless, Mr. Löwinger’s profit was slim enough. He also ran a line in carved imitation-ivory pens in whose holders lenses showed the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome or the Eiffel Tower in Paris, tiny, but in minute detail, as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. But these more expensive items had nothing like the turnover of the wooden ones.

  Mr. Löwinger augmented his income by gambling, playing games that demand intelligence rather than those that depend on Fortuna’s smile. At chess, dominoes, and all advanced card games he was more than a match for most of the players who sat waiting to try their luck in the cafés, although, by his own admission, he was a dilettante compared to his father, who had lived on his source of income alone, never done a stroke of work in his life. One advantage he had had, Mr. Löwinger said ruefully, was that the cafés were full of suckers in those days.

  Mr. Löwinger Junior was a mite of a man, a fact he himself never ceased to marvel at, since his father had stood at six feet four and weighed nigh on three hundred pounds. Minute again in comparison to her husband was Mrs. Löwinger, whereas her mother and sister were positively Amazonian; the old lady with iron-gray hair reminded one of a fairground crystal-ball gazer; the sister, Iolanthe, was similar in type, with Oriental features and pronounced physical charms. When I moved in, Mrs. Löwinger was four months pregnant. The long-term lodgers informed me that this was regularly the case with Mrs. Löwinger at intervals of five to six months, and that the next miscarriage was surely imminent. Only once had one of her pregnancies gone the distance, but the resulting infant had been so small and feeble that the lodgers had laid bets on its chances to survive. One coarse gentleman remarked that the only one to make a killing had been the infant itself; it had died within the hour.

  This initial conversation characterized the general tone of Löwinger’s Rooming House. With one exception, a lady of whom I shall relate in due course, the boarders were exclusively male: traveling salesmen, students living in Bucharest for the term, a starving Russian sculptor, a man with radical political views who’d started professional life as the rear end of a horse in a circus, a journalist down on his luck. Regularly and for months on end the house was peopled by the members of a wrestling troupe, the glorious gladiators of what they themselves called “Luptele Greco-Romane.”

  Largely on their account the meals served at Löwinger’s were gargantuan. The Löwingers were Hungarian Jews who came from the region of Temeshvar, where Hungarian, Rumanian, Austrian, and Jewish culinary arts mingled in happy harmony. Both the mother-in-law and Iolanthe cooked exquisitely. The whole community ate at a single table d’hôte, all except the Russian sculptor, that is; he was too poor to participate and preferred to starve in his garret alone. When the wrestlers were present, extra portions of noodles and other pasta were added to the already sumptuous dishes, since with men like Haarmin Vichtonen, the Finnish world champion, and Costa Popowitsch, his Bulgarian counterpart, or the Nameless One with the Black Mask, who always mysteriously and decisively made his appearance toward the end of the tournaments, it was not merely a matter of keeping up the muscle tone but of keeping up their weight as well; the very walls quaked when they entered the room. Outside the ring they were mild as lambs, at times quite timorous. Duday Ferencz—whose task it was as Hungarian world champion to play the savage Philistine in Rumania with no regard for fair play and so incense the Rumanian spectators to outbursts of scorn and hatred (in Hungary this lot fell to Radu Protopopescu, a Rumanian)—Duday Ferencz once complained that the public had stormed the box office and made off with the night’s take. In answer to our question as to why they, the mightiest men in the world, hadn’t intervened, they looked at one another wide-eyed and said simply, “But that might have led to violence.”

  The wrestlers traveled a lot between their sojourns at Löwinger’s Rooming House and had a tale or two to tell; the mealtimes grew longer by the day. The students, whose families apparently feared their offspring would come to grief on their meager allowances in the big city, were bombarded with packages from home, from the contents of which the boys readily distributed what they were incapable of eating themselves. Rumania was a rich land in those days; sausage and ham, pastries and pies, flowed into the house in vast quantities. When the point came where the mere mention of food turned our stomachs, someone would invariably have the brainstorm: “Cherkunof’s starving!” meaning the poverty-stricken Russian sculptor upstairs.

  Cherkunof was a rather unpleasant man who hardly ever deigned to show himself: some maintained this was because he had no shirt to his name, and indeed, if one did happen to run into him on the landing, he would clutch his threadbare jacket over his naked breast and mutter something that might as well have been an apology as a request to go to hell; even the Löwingers, who hadn’t received a penny in rent from him for years and allowed him to stay on out of sheer brotherly love, did everything they could to avoid him. Iolanthe had made attempts to draw him into the family circle but had been sent packing, although one vitriolic tongue at the dining-room table implied that Cherkunof’s reaction had been prompted not so much by the victuals she’d offered him as by the libidinous favors she’d expected in return: poor Iolanthe was no spring chicken, and she badly wanted a man. Be that as it may; after weeks of solitary confinement, during which he might well have died and been well into the process of decomposition for all the other Löwinger inhabitants could have cared, Cherkunof would suddenly find himself confronted with a string of well-wishers bearing whole salamis, liverwursts, apple strudel, and chocolate cake. Again, and perhaps understandably, his response was anything but thankful. With livid, hate-filled eyes he would stare first at the untimely offerings, then at their bearers, among whom, to top it all off, the rear end of the horse was prancing—a man whom Cherkunof as a White Russian loathed with all his being because of the man’s Bolshevik convictions.

  “You vont to poison me?” he shouted. “Vell? You vont to poison me! See vat I think of your offers! So to your offers!” He spat, and went on spitting on the slabs of bacon and poppy-seed buns until the foiled benefactors beat a hasty retreat, laughing their heads off.

  It was my first experience of such a milieu, which only served to heighten my enjoyment of it. After the splendid isolation of my “penthouse” near the Biserică Albă and the Russian restaurant I never saw, I delighted in adapting myself to a community, however motley. Not that I felt so out of place; with my plaster-of-Paris collar, my bizarre professional ambitions and brief past among jockeys, trainers, stableboys, and frisky fillies, I fitted in quite naturally to this freak sideshow and did my best to blend in.

  As is often the case when men of none too delicate upbringing congregate, the level of conversation at Löwinger’s Rooming House was earthy to say the least. No respect whatever was shown for the Löwinger ladies, very likely for the simple reason that Jewesses were not considered ladies. They themselves had long since become accustomed to the fact that everything pertaining to the human body, particularly its sexual aspects, was openly discussed in basic terms at Löwinger’s. The wrestlers were an exception, it’s true, and not out of celibate necessity as sportsmen but out of genuine purity of spirit. Only Costa Popowitsch, who couldn’t deny a hearty female following, would reply vaguely and in a general way when approached on the subject, but he never quoted personal experience. The Greco-Romans’ reticence was more than made up for by the salesmen, however, who delighted in giving detailed descriptions of their latest conquests. The rear end of the horse—his name was Dreher, I reme
mber—gave lectures on sexual repression and emancipation; the students were content to listen, risking only occasional contributions; whereas the uncrowned king in this respect was undoubtedly Pepi Olschansky, the luckless journalist. It was his boast that he’d never left a well-filled petticoat unexplored.

  Sometimes things got out of hand and Mr. Löwinger gently reminded his guests of his mother-in-law’s advanced years—a dangerous admonition that usually evoked only catcalls and the Ruthenian adage “Never try and shock Grandma with a flash of your cock; she’s had bigger in her day,” and the rejoinder that people living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, as Mrs. Löwinger’s constant state of pregnancy was tangible proof of her husband’s voracious appetite and he shouldn’t make life more difficult than it was already.

  This last was a reference to a very real problem with regard to receiving visitors at the establishment. The Löwingers had a small dog, a brown pinscher with cropped ears and tail and the habit of kicking up a tremendous racket whenever strangers appeared at the house, making it hard for the inmates to receive even the most innocent visitor unnoticed. Pepi Olschansky insisted on the right to cohabit regularly, once a day minimum, and his lady friends were understandably daunted by the glaring attention the dog’s hullabaloo drew to their furtive flights over the back stairs. Pepi threatened to slit the pooch’s throat one day if he didn’t shut up, which the dog somehow seemed to understand, for he henceforth bared his fangs and howled at the very sight of Pepi. If Olschansky made even the slightest motion to shoo him away, the yowling beast made straight for his beloved protector, the starveling Cherkunof.

  The odd thing was that sexual assuagement was to be had right there on the premises, but no one availed himself of it. It was an open secret that Iolanthe would be only too eager to oblige a friend in need; she was in her mid-thirties and eminently ready for plucking. Nevertheless, for some enigmatic reason, she found no takers, again perhaps simply because she was Jewish; one couldn’t “stoop that low” was the prevailing attitude; even Cherkunof had declined.