Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  I did not answer and they came nearer.

  “Well, what are you?” another of them asked. “A Rumanian? A Pole?”

  “Neither the one nor the other.”

  “Well, then, what? A German?”

  “No,” I said. I felt an Austrian; that is: I was no German.

  “But you speak German. So what the hell are you? A Jew, maybe?”

  Why I did not answer I did not know at that moment. It was not cowardice, for it was obvious they meant me no harm. I did not like them very much; they were not my kind, and they were Jews. But I did not dislike them, either, and that made it worse. They had asked me to join their team, and here I stood and lacked the courage to say simply, “I would have liked to play with you, but I can’t, because you are Jews and I am not, and I don’t need to say any more. However, I thank you for having asked me.” I did not fear hurting their feelings. What I feared was that open words of that kind could have meant the direct contact of which I was afraid. A direct human relationship could have resulted—esteem or hatred, either one, would have meant the same. I didn’t answer.

  “Well, speak, baby,” one of them said and came so near that our noses nearly touched. “Are you a Jew or aren’t you?”

  I still kept silent, and finally the first one said, “Oh, leave him alone. He’s only a stuck-up pissing goy.” He threw the puck into the field, and they leapt after it, he with them, and there I stood alone again in my corner, with my beautifully tidy eights, and the huge shawl around my neck.

  I believe that must have happened in the winter of 1927. I was thirteen or fourteen years old. In order to have the vagaries of my adolescence corrected, my benevolent and crazy parents, after a slight effort to have me tamed by a couple of relatives, put me in a Styrian boarding school renowned for its severe methods of education. To it I owe—along with the ever since vainly fought habit of smoking cigarettes and a profound knowledge of the pornographic folklore of the German and English languages—the insight that all public education’s task is to vulgarize the genius of young people in such a way that only natures of extraordinarily strong neurotic tendencies are enabled to escape banality. The holidays I spent, usually, in the Bukovina, grateful for the utter loneliness that received me there, luckily freed for a few short summer weeks from the company of schoolmates in whose minds and muscles manhood fermented and from teachers deformed by their profession into baroque monstrosities. I passed my time hunting with my father in the Carpathian forests and walking the streets of Czernowitz and Sadagura, just watching and listening to what was going on. I don’t know how I ever managed to pass my final examinations, for my midyear reports were catastrophic. My father, when he got the good news, sent me a cable with the single word “Ahi!”—an exclamation of Bukovinan Jews expressing unusual astonishment at the unexpected. Later, he explained that, in point of fact, the exclamation was a survival from the days of chivalry. Yiddish, he said, was mainly Middle High German, with Hebrew and Polish elements. For example, take the Yiddish expression “nebbish,” which was nothing but the “squire” (neb-ich: “near I”) who runs with the knight, carrying his shield. “Ahi!” was what the knights shouted when, at a tournament, they put their lances under their armpits and ran against one another.

  This explanation was given to me not without a trace of embarrassment, for it was rather uncomfortable to think that the language of our models for a noble attitude of life should be faithfully preserved only by the Jews. Therefore my father did not fail to add that a certain decline of forms, as well as of habits and even of costumes, of the upper classes to the lower ones is the rule. The caftan of the rabbis, for instance, and their fur-lined caps and boots were actually the costume of Polish noblemen in medieval times, and a Jewish wedding preserved many a custom that originated in the court ceremonies of the dukes of Burgundy. It is about the only cultural-historical lesson put into my mind between my fourteenth and my seventeenth year that remains there today.

  The diploma of a Gymnasium is a poor substitute for the rites of initiation with which primitive societies make a young male understand that he has become a man; yet in my youth nobody hesitated to take it as such. When I went back to Vienna, in order to follow in the footsteps of my late grandpapa and study architecture, I was merely a boy of seventeen, but I enjoyed all the liberties of a grown man, with none of the responsibilities. I could go to bed when and with whom I pleased, drink liquor to my heart’s content and the revolt of my intestines, and spend my money and time as economically or wastefully as I felt like. My parents were not rich; my father’s passion for hunting was expensive and soon devoured what the war had left of a former certain opulence. Yet, in the Bukovina, my monthly allowance would have sufficed to keep a Jewish family of seven from urgent need. Anyhow, I was not forced to begin my studies under the mental pressure of lack of time. But all this did not alter my solitude, which by now had become not only a habit but a deliberate, proud attitude. I did not have a single friend, and I did not long for one. With girls I was extremely clumsy and shy. Besides, my mother, fearing that I would abuse my new status and fall into debauchery, had arranged that I again live with my grandmother. Though my mother knew very well that the old lady was too much of a recluse to keep an eye on a young man, she counted on my aunts, whose theosophical preoccupations and love for dogs were evidence of a high morality that would perhaps keep me from immediately getting lost in a swamp of vices.

  It was at this time I learned that we had done Mr. Malik an injustice by calling him a Jew. On the contrary, he was a man of high moral standards. A very important free and yet not reborn soul who had followed his invitation and slipped into the emptied vessel of the body of his sister, Miss Weingruber, a highly gifted medium, revealed to the esoteric community that great things were in preparation. The universe was a big system of perpetual perfection. Everything in it had but the sole wish to dematerialize more and more and finally become pure spirit and unite with God. Materia was the contrary of God. It was a burden given as a curse to the fallen angels, a curse put upon their souls, which were longing to be light and free again. Death did not mean you would be freed. When you died, your soul was suspended for a while outside the dimension perceivable to us and, in a sort of metaphysical extra course, was taught what was good and what was evil, and particularly to understand what it had done that was good or bad in the existence it had just left. If, in the former life, it had done much good, it was allowed to slip into a new existence less burdened with materia. If it had done a medium amount of good or evil, it had to come back to the same world in another existence and carry the same amount of materia and live again, trying to do better. If, on the other hand, it had done a great deal of wrong, it was condemned to a lower form of existence, even more burdened with materia, and slipped into a body that was not just flesh and bones, like ours, but—let us say—of stone or iron. Your soul, doing better and better each time, finally dematerialized into pure spirit and united with God.

  Not only human souls were under the curse of materia but also your pet dog’s, as a slightly lower form, and everything else—even the cobblestones on which Minka Raubitschek had broken her hip. And each creature or inanimate object was given the chance of doing good or evil and of dematerializing or materializing accordingly. And, of course, the stars and the planets on which you lived too had their chance, and when all the beings of a lower-grade star had done very well, the star itself potentialized and became a star of a higher category, with thinner materia and better souls on it. And this was going to happen to our globe.

  My aunts were full of joy and expectation telling me about all this. By the good behavior of those who lived for the spirit, they said, our world had slowly potentialized and dematerialized and was now on the verge of potentializing into a nearly butterfly-like world. For there were very high-class souls—people like Buddha, Plato, and Jesus Christ—who deliberately took on the burden of materia in order to teach the others what was good or evil. Each of them was announced
by some soul of a high category materialized for this very purpose. And as Jesus Christ had been announced by John the Baptist, Mr. Malik had come to announce the arrival of another dematerializer. His name was Adolf Hitler, and one could already see what enthusiasm he had created in Germany by spiritualizing the Germans and cleansing Germany of the low, materialistic Jews. Mr. Malik was no Jew, in spite of the fact that he had changed his name (as had Mr. Hitler, whose real name was Schicklgruber—and he certainly was no Jew, either); he had done this for a different reason, for Malik was the name given to him in the outer world—the name of his spirit. The name given to his material burden, which he had voluntarily undertaken to carry, was Weingruber. He and his sister were actually one high-category soul divided in two and inhabiting two bodies.

  The potentialization of the world could already be felt in my grandmother’s home by the fact that it, too, had to a certain extent been cleansed of Jews. No longer were the séances of the esoteric community accompanied by the chamber music of the Raubitscheks, for on the same day both Professor Raubitschek and his wife died of Spanish flu—a typical Jewish extravagance, as my grandmother said, because there was no epidemic, as in 1918, when many people died of it; therefore there was no cause to do it out of season, so to speak. Anyhow, they both died and left their daughter alone, and—alas!—what had been gained by their disappearance was largely spoiled by the scandalous behavior of Minka Raubitschek. Not only did she have an official lover, whose roadster often stood parked in front of the house all night, but other gentlemen were seen going into the Raubitschek apartment and coming out the morning after. Instead of chamber music on Wednesday evenings, one could hear the noises of carousing nearly every night.

  I rather liked Minka. She was friendly when we met on the staircase. Her voice was full and warm, and her smile beautiful. She looked Spanish, with her shining black hair and large black eyes. Her skin was lovely, and she used a lipstick of a most provokingly vivid red. She dressed well, and even her slight limping had a certain charm; she did not try to hide it but limped ahead courageously and decidedly. On Sunday mornings, I was invited by my grandmother to breakfast in her room. From the window I could follow the spectacle of Minka’s being called for by her official lover, a tall, fair, athletic chap, for their weekend outing. He was obviously an ice-hockey player. Sometimes he got into his roadster wearing his hockey uniform, vividly striped in red and white and yellow. Minka carried his sticks, knee pads, and shoulder pads. It all looked very smart and gay, and made me feel my isolation.

  The courses in architecture at the Technische Hochschule bored me to tears. Instead of giving me a taste for harmony, the instructors tortured me with the theory of statics of rigid bodies, equations, the use of vectors, and so on, and I have always been a hopeless mathematician. Very soon I began to cut classes, and finally I did not go there for months at a time. I was too ignorant to enjoy either a concert or the theater. With the exception, perhaps, of a few operettas starring Fritzi Massary, I saw nothing of the good theater in Vienna of that time. My grandmother still kept a seat at the opera and never went there herself, so I drowsed through Rheingold and La Traviata, wondering why people sometimes sighed with delight and sometimes expressed their disapproval. But I walked a lot. I crisscrossed Vienna from one end to the other, sometimes walking as far as from Döbling to Hietzing, and then taking the tramway back. I walked, preferably at night, through the inner city, watching the swarms of whores on the Kärntnerstrasse. During the day, it was the most elegant of all Viennese streets, and at night it turned into something like the Canebière in Marseille. Or I would stand and marvel at the beauty of the empty Josefsplatz and Fischer von Erlach’s National-Bibliothek, wondering why my grandfather had never achieved this perfection. Nobody cared that I came home at four o’clock in the morning, and old Marie had long since given up trying to wake me, knowing that I usually slept till noon.

  But of course I was too proud to admit my solitude to anybody. I spent most of my money on clothes, and when I set out for a stroll in the afternoon I would be most elegantly dressed, like some young dandy who is just about to get into his car and drive out to the golf course at Lainz or to the five-o’clock tea dance at Hübner’s Park Hotel in Hietzing. In the evening, I never left the house except in a very smart dinner jacket or sometimes even, when I felt like it, in tails, with a silk hat on my well-brushed head. After a couple of hours of lonesome walking through empty streets and somber parks, along the tracks of railways or the banks of the Danube Canal, I would sit down for a coffee and a brandy in the lounge of the Hotel Imperial, slipping off my patent-leather pumps under the table to ease my sore feet. One would have thought I was a young man with an exquisite social life.

  Once, well after midnight, I came home to my grandmother’s house in tails and silk hat and found Minka at the door, fumbling in her handbag for the key she had either forgotten or lost. She was amused at the misfortune of having no key, and at my arriving just in time to open the door. She was a little drunk. Her eyes sparkled, and her teeth shone moist between those provoking red lips. But, of course, I behaved like a well-bred young man. I unlocked the door and held it open for her with the particular politeness of a certain reserve, and she smiled at me and said I looked splendid. Where had I been, so elegantly clad? At a dance, I said. Where and with whom? With people she would certainly not know. What was their name? she asked. Oh, Rumanians, I said stiffly. It was typically Jewish, I thought, to be so insistent and to ask such personal questions, and I did not like it. The Rumanians were passing through Vienna, I said, on their way to Paris.

  She knew frightfully amusing Rumanians in Paris, she said. Had I been there lately? Not lately, I said, following her up the stairs. The steps were flat and easy to mount, but she had a little difficulty with her lame hip and the one drink too many she might have had, so I offered her my arm, and she leaned against it freely. My elbow registered that she was not so bony as the fashion of the early 1930s demanded. It was delightful, and a little embarrassing, so when we reached my grandmother’s floor, I stood still, and she let go of my arm and smiled again. “Thank you,” she said. “You are charming.”

  “Would you like me to accompany you to your floor?” I asked, and then bit my lip at my own clumsiness.

  She laughed. “Does it show that I’m drunk? I never realize it myself unless I have to get up these stairs on all fours. Come on, then, my young dandy, give me your arm again…. I once broke that silly left hip of mine,” she said, leaning trustfully against the length of my body. “Because I was in love—imagine! If I had gone on that way, I wouldn’t have a sound bone in my body. How are you making out with the girls?”

  “Well …” I said, and smiled shyly, as if I were too modest to tell her the full truth.

  She laughed. I said nothing more. I wasn’t quite sure she hadn’t seen through me and just been teasing me. “Would you like to come inside for a nightcap?” she asked when we arrived at her door.

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Thank you, yes, or thank you, no?” She looked straight into my eyes.

  “Yes,” I said, and felt that I was blushing.

  She handed me a key and said, “Fortunately, I haven’t lost this one.”

  Again I unlocked the door and held it open, and she went in, dropping her fur coat on the floor. I picked it up and put it on a chair. “What nice manners you have,” she said. “It must be lovely to have you around. How old are you?”

  It seemed too silly to say “I’m going to be eighteen next May,” so I lied. “Twenty-three.”

  “Just my cup of tea. There is a phonograph in the corner. Put on a record if you want some music. What will you drink? Whiskey, or a brandy?”

  “A whiskey with soda, please.” The flat did not look at all as I had imagined it would. She must have redecorated it since the death of the old Raubitscheks. With the exception of a huge library with black carved-wood bookcases that could have belonged to the chamber-music-loving Professor
Raubitschek, there was no trace of the particular Jewish-middle-class stuffiness I had had glimpses of through open windows at home in the Bukovina. There were flowers all over the place—her lovers seemed to be quite generous, I thought. Through an open door I could see into her bedroom, gay and feminine, the huge bed covered with a soft, flowery comforter. While she fixed the drinks, I had a look at the records. There were masses of them, piled up carelessly around the phonograph. I put one on with the label “Star Dust,” hoping it was Mozart and not as violent as Beethoven’s “Allergique.” With the first sweet sounds, she came toward me with the drinks. “Here’s yours,” she said, putting a glass in my hand. “Let’s see how you dance.” I did not know what to do with my glass, but finally took it in my left hand and put my other arm around her, and we danced a few steps. I could not feel that she limped. “All right,” she said, and moved away from me. “A little stiff, but there is hope. I can’t dance long, because of my hip, but I love it.”

  I took a gulp of my whiskey. She dropped down on the couch, leaned back, and shut her eyes. Suddenly she yawned, her beautiful mouth wide open. She yawned with a melodious cry that sounded like a happy weeping and that faded away in a sigh of utter relaxation, at the end of which she opened her eyes and said, “You are sweet. Now go downstairs to your grandma and sleep well.” She got up with an unexpected swiftness and went to her bedroom, already unbuttoning her dress in the back.

  I stood still in bewilderment, not knowing what to think of all this, not even knowing whether I had imagined something else would happen or what—just simply not knowing how to put my glass down and say “Good night” and “See you soon.” She turned and looked at me, still fumbling with buttons at her back. “If you don’t want to go,” she said, “you can listen to a few more records, if you like. But don’t mind if I fall asleep. I’m dog-tired.”

  I felt humiliated to the core. The situation was totally out of my control, and I wished I’d never accepted her invitation to come in for a nightcap. But, on the other hand, she was so kind, and sweet, and pretty. Her mouth had excited me.