Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The gray-haired man with the large box of marrons glacés under his arm (a box whose contents would suffice to kill a horse, if the horse tried to consume them at one swoop, not to mention a ninety-four-year-old woman) pulls up his coat collar: it is drizzling, he has no hat, headgear never suits him, under hats, caps, hoods, his face looks oddly asexual, his masculinity must be located in his forehead and in the short-cropped iron-gray hair above it, his mouth is effeminately soft with his mustache removed, even though the not-all-too-full lips have narrowed over the years. He knows it: it’s the mouth of an old crone. Not a pleasant face, he has to tell himself, even though he has been told there is a great deal of charm, a great seductiveness in the way he speaks, in his liveliness, alertness, and even at times lascivious malice—“your goddamned charm,” as his second, Jewish wife used to say, “your abominable, disreputable charm” …

  yes, but behind this disreputable charm, which sometimes strikes even him as abominable, he sees an often astonishing naïveté—more distinct (because of the contrast) in the mustachioed lothario who sat here twenty years ago on the Via Veneto, elegant in the by no means unintended, not unflirtatiously selected, unconventional, vacationlike casualness of his clothing (as though the blue Mediterranean lay right behind the walls of papal Rome; as though the palms of Hammamet were growing right there), to all appearances blasé and urbane, a man who wasn’t born yesterday, who can do anything, and who throughout his checkered career has pretty much learned all the tricks of the trade—and yet a childlike, round-eyed believer in miracles like the one that you could change the world by filmmaking ….

  that’s how he sees himself here, among all sorts of whores and pimps: ready to transfigure the surrounding world for himself, redreaming it into the world that was promised him in earlier stages of his existence—although promised only in his dreams, promised only as an eternal wish. Nevertheless he never tires of reinventing it for himself; he sits here, knowing he is surrounded by nothing but different varieties of prostitution: the straightforward, unadulterated prostitution of female flesh, of boys’ flesh, intellectual prostitution, the prostitution of talent, of ambition, of faith, of enthusiasm—he sees all this accurately, he has no delusions about it. In this respect, he only knows he will draw his nourishment from the wealth of images which he takes in like a whale taking in plankton, the pigment with which he can transfigure Rome—

  for he is prepared to love this city, he has sought it out as a final refuge, as the last colorful nook in a leukemic Europe. All through his life he had felt alive only to the extent that the world around him seemed alive. And Rome in its ancient decay appears alive as a compost heap. This is the only legacy he has for his son, and he is determined to will it to him. The unhappy little bastard should at least become a European. In other respects, the boy resembles his father only in a shadowy, ghostly way. Then at least in this one respect there is to be semantic harmony. He is prepared to fight all the more energetically for this random son (still and all his only son!), now that the divorce has been granted and the child awarded to her. He wants to use any legal and, if necessary, illegal means to get him here, to Rome, into his custody. He even considers kidnapping him if all else fails—

  for he wants to defend the child against her, against her restlessness, her insecurity and stupid insistence on the absolute, her (as he puts it, “not always housebroken”) fanaticism. Once, when they were making a halfway peaceful attempt to agree on the boy’s upbringing, she screamed at him, “I’m the mother!” and he himself lost his composure and screamed back, “That’s precisely the kind of lie I want to protect him from!”—whereupon, disarmed by her incomprehension, thrown back on his irony, he shrugged and turned away while she hurled back at him with a sonorous theatrical laugh and thespian gestures, “You?! You?! …”

  “Well, I’m waiting,” he snapped maliciously over his shoulder. “You can’t just stop at two dramatically meaningful ‘You!’s. You ought to drop from your high-toned theater German to the yiddling level and blurt out, ‘You! Of all people! …’ Your sense of style should have obliged you to do so: Neo-Realism instead of Weimar.”

  Too bad. But stupidity is unforgivable. Besides, their being at daggers drawn, mangling one another furiously, had begun very early, right after the child was born. He remembered the pang in his heart when he learned it was a boy and not a girl. A girl would be she, would be her likeness increased by him, a creature to be worshiped. He had ardently wished it would be a girl. That it had to be a boy struck him as fateful: he could not say, then, why he regarded racial mixture as a boon in a girl and as a curse in a boy. Today he knew: a boy was he himself as a Jew; a monstrosity, a kind of curse—he had felt that, back then, but had not dared to admit it to himself. Nor had he understood back then that the quarrel erupting between them had concerned only one thing: the conception of “Truth”; they had never come to terms with what this actually meant.

  Not even when the argument had assumed outright criminal proportions. He recalled a certain day: the little boy, five years old, had contracted a childhood disease, measles or something of the sort—he tended to make light of such matters, he also wanted to spare the boy the torments caused by his own mother’s maniacal anxiety; the circumstances were very different, of course: while he himself had been a fairly robust child, his little son (he almost said resignedly, “Naturally!”) was frail, susceptible—in any case, the child was in bed and had been looking forward so much to the father’s visit that his temperature rose steeply; the father was no longer living with the wife but visited the boy as often as he could, though his work kept him so busy that he seldom managed to come; now he was sitting by the sick child’s little bed, telling him stories—talking into the disquieting, huge, belladonna-black eyes, telling him stories from the forests of the Carpathians, from his own childhood there: many wonderful and dreadful tales about deer, weasels, and falcons, about bears and lynxes, about flute-playing shepherds and poachers and brigands hiding out in the immense woodlands … and she, the mother, hatefully called to the child, “Don’t believe a word he says! He’s lying!”

  The crux of it was Pilate’s question, he thought ironically: “What is truth?” It wouldn’t really have been worth more than a shrug, if he hadn’t felt that it “represented itself,” that beyond the motives, the arguments, the logic and logic-chopping of their disagreement, there was a fundamental conflict that virtually lifted their fight about the theme of “Truth” into a different dimension and gave it metaphysical weight: as a question of spiritual, moral existence, the decision between damnation and salvation. Even today, when he knew and saw so much more than in the past (he was more judicious in his judgment both of her and of himself, purged of passions), even now he still could not quite discern the meaning of their struggle, only suspect it, sense the momentous “beyondness,” the way one senses the ocean beyond the dunes of a coastal landscape, the way he, as a child at home in the Bukovina, had sensed something vast and menacing beyond the woodland on the horizon: Russia and, beyond it, Asia.

  Nevertheless, it fills him with a ridiculously vain little satisfaction, which he registers ironically. He can say to himself, it was not just the banal story of a swiftly abortive marriage, it was a theme for classical tragedy. He tried to see it with the eyes of others. The fighting with her soon became unbearable for everyone and poisoned five years of his life, driving him into a different country, a different city. For oddly enough, the people around him seemed to have sensed the transcendent quality of the conflict: his friends, his acquaintances, her friends, her acquaintances, took passionate part in it, took sides, split into camps. Suddenly he found himself being snubbed by previous well-wishers because they had allegedly discovered that he was a confidence man, his name was not what he claimed it was, he was probably Jewish himself and, typically, anti-Semitic toward his charming wife; then again, others came to him privately to confide that everyone knew she could not be regarded as normal, she had been in psychotherapy for
years, had spent long periods in sanatoriums, and would probably soon wind up in an asylum. This horribly embarrassing, shameful quarreling that could not be hushed up and, naturally, called the stupidest people into action took place at the expense of their child and within its bewildered soul, and it probably killed the boy in the end. But at least it was not just about something personal and private. It was fought out for something general, crucial. One could define it by asking the same simple question twice with a different meaning each time: is it possible for two human beings to communicate? Fine: as far as the spiritual needs of Jane Smith and John Doe might be concerned, it’s merely a question of semantics, of the similarity of social background, of intellectual level, emotional harmony; but put in a general context, the question whether it is possible for two human beings to communicate strikes at the foundations of human existence.

  One thing was certain: between him and his quondam second, Jewish wife communication had unfortunately become impossible; and the more he pondered how it had come to this after their initial, frequently stupendous rapport on every directly human issue, the more incomprehensible it seemed to him that the cause of their estrangement and ultimately their hate-filled opposition should have been theological—yes, indeed, to put it bluntly, a theological argument. They had never lacked rapport about plainly human issues; at times, this rapport had reached a state of ecstatic connivance. He remembered holding her in his arms and cradling her like a child when, trembling, she told him how her father had been arrested: friends had hidden the father in a country house, strictly impressing upon him that he was never, never to leave a certain room, because they wanted to show that he was not in the house; but he had panicked and crept into a different room that struck him as a more effective hiding-place, and indeed it probably was; when his friends, in order to show that even a room so obviously suitable as a hiding-place was empty, brought his pursuers, whom they wanted to lead astray, to the door and opened it—he was crouching inside ….

  trembling, she had told him this, and he had caressed her, waiting for her to calm down and to say what he must not say, and she had said it finally: she had looked up at him and asked, “Do you think my father was very stupid? Even my mother, who almost went crazy because of that, even she said he died because he was always such a stupid second-guesser. And of course, the friends who wanted to save him, they perished too ….”

  Thus had the rapport between them reached a dangerous level, and he wanted to understand how it could have been destroyed by an abstract disagreement that was in no way supported by anything concrete, a disagreement about two different conceptions of “Truth,” moral alternatives that neither of them had thought of as relevant—and naturally he had been unable to push away the thought of race, as a normal person feels morally obliged to do nowadays, after Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Why deny it? After all, he believed in the possibility of a mental legacy in the blood: a psychological heritage specific to the race and passed on from generation to generation—why, if crooked or pug noses are inheritable, if dark or light eyes or dark or light hair keep recurring, stubbornly following Mendel’s laws in bigger and bigger chess-knight leaps—his little boy, for instance, had much lighter hair than he himself as a child, and yet also those amazingly shiny, pitch-black eyes, melancholic in their childlike expectancy, even though, as far back as he could remember, his own family had always had dark hair and bright-blue eyes; and she too, the little boy’s mother, as Jewish as she may have been to all intents and purposes, had two radiant, clear eyes—what utterly mournful Talmudic student in her gallery of ancestors had shone through? … why—in the face of such disagreeable facts, one could, after all, ask with impunity—why should not spiritual and psychological structures, or at least a disposition to them, also be inheritable? Environment and education are not everything that forms a human being; it was nonsense to deny this, even if, thanks to the Nazis, it was now taboo to say so: in fact, because of those asses, one could no longer think about the Jewish problem in any halfway reasonable manner, one had to act as if there were no such thing; yet he was convinced that it would have to be possible to make characteristic distinctions quite unpolemically, altogether scientifically, between Jewish and non-Jewish mentalities, as detached as possible from the sociological conditions that normally shape them, determine them psychologically … especially here in Rome, where one has all the test material at hand, from the finest biblical scholar to the most knowledgeable Talmudist, it would have to be possible to draw the information from the purest source—but who would go to the trouble of being so thorough: the closer one lives to the sources, the more indifferently one lets them bubble—an old experience, alas—how often had he gone to La Scala when living in Milan? How often to the Louvre in his Paris days? …

  besides, that would have been irrelevant in the case of his (former, second, Jewish) wife, for she was not typically Jewish in any respect, quite the contrary: truly the most goyish shikseh he had ever encountered: no Jewish upbringing whatsoever, of course, being the child of emancipated parents; as her father was an art historian, she had been surrounded from the start by reproductions of religious works of art, imbued with Catholic culture; she, in contrast to him, her husband, the alleged anti-Semite, had never seen the inside of a synagogue, had not the foggiest notion of Hebrew ritual; the mother was once a member of the Laban dance group and needless to say a devotee of some freethinking nature cult, sandals her religious belief, so to speak; she knew about Moses and David only because of Michelangelo; long before being made conscious of belonging to the Chosen People, she could reckon herself among the chosen few for whom the mosaics of Ravenna and the Baroque jubilation of Ottobeuren were as natural as shoe polish and toothpaste for other people; then, of course, she was made conscious of the other chosenness so emphatically that unconsciously she scorned it. In her schooldays, a teacher had summoned her to the front of the class and exclaimed, “Just have a good look at little Ruth, she belongs to the nation that crucified our Savior!”—of course without mentioning how much Christian art owed to that event. Unfortunately the Aryan self-awareness of the Third Reich was not exactly conducive to the creation of Jewish national pride; even with the hatred for her Aryan classmates which she inevitably developed, she could not help resenting being different from the others, to wish she too would be one of those blond grain-harvesters in trim white blouses, laborers participating in Germany’s renewal, marching along with them when they sang their dear songs; she herself, after all, as the Allgäu incident proved just a few years later, had perfect physical requirements, not to mention the willingness of conviction; and it was no coincidence that in her rebellion against his own lax relationship to truth, she fully concorded with his first, East Prussian wife, who could have been accused of anything but not being Aryan, having the purest Pruzzian blood ….

  But then the ghastly thing had happened, which he called “invention of reality” and because of which he never for an instant doubted the correctness, the “Truth” of his own conception of truth (it was a frequent event in his dynamic life, an event he observed with the thrill of the uncanny, which refortified his bent for mystical notions): because they had started hating one another, they strove to know one another more clearly—after all, they had to give their hatred nourishment, reasons, arguments; and by seeing each other more and more sharply, more and more relentlessly, they invented each other in a new and more merciless shape—and that shape became reality. He had tried fully to comprehend the trauma of her childhood, adolescence, and youth as a pariah, a Jew in the Third Reich; he had tried at first out of love, in order to understand her all the more intimately, to identify with her all the more deeply; now he did it in order to find weapons against her, weapons she herself forged for him. He invented her as a Jew with the inevitable mental damage, and that is what she turned into, visibly turned into, more and more each day, each hour … it happened more and more often that one of his or her friends said to him, “You have to understand her:
she’s got awful complexes —she has to have them, poor thing. If someone’s as Jewish as she is, it’s a miracle she survived!” And the voices accumulated, admitting to him, “Yes, you’re right, unfortunately. She’s awfully stupid. It’s too bad—she’s so beautiful. But when stupidity is added to the Jewish complex, then it’s really unbearable.” It was eerie: one could invent reality so that it became real; for example, one could invent Jews for oneself, in order to hate them ….

  As for him, certain frosty responses of certain people, occasional irony, open baiting, and insolence made him notice more and more plainly that she had succeeded in depicting him as a disreputable personality with a shady background and an unreliable character; at times, he recognized with pale terror that her invention was visibly gaining reality: he caught himself telling fibs that were meant to give his background a brilliance that could scarcely lay claim to credibility; to correct this mistake, he took refuge in a flimsy self-irony that made him all the more suspect; incidentally, with his irregular income, he lived far beyond his means, often finding himself, shamefully, dunned by creditors, reacting in a cowardly way at times and a foolishly arrogant way at others—in short: he became the person he was taken for. One day, they ran into the prince—the prince in whose father’s castle they had met and fallen in love, under absurd circumstances, incidentally ….

  He had encountered the prince’s father in a Munich hotel, it was long past midnight, he was sitting in his room, at the typewriter, almost naked because of the dreadful heat, expecting someone to knock on the wall because of the clatter—then someone really did knock, but on the door; when he said “Come in!” an incredibly tall, haggard figure appeared, exuding antiquated nobility like a half-ruined tower overgrown with ivy and fanned by jackdaw wings. The figure named an historic name going back to the age of the Stauffers. He covered himself as best he could, named his own name, asked in what way he could be of service, apologized that his typewriter clatter had disturbed His Highness’s rest—No, no, the old prince protested, sheer curiosity had prompted him to knock: “You see, I was walking along the corridor and I saw your shoes outside the door, they are the shoes of our kind. Then I heard the typewriter; now that is something which our kind cannot do, I mean type—so I had to see who it was staying here ….”