Looking at Ourselves in Gregor von Rezzori’s “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite”

When I initially picked up Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, I wanted to incorporate it into a course alongside Anna Seghers’ Transit, Magda Szabó’s Katalin Street, and other novels focusing on texts by European writers written during or following the Holocaust. However, as I read the five stories collected in Rezzori’s text, I discovered that it may be a difficult text, for various reasons, to teach in a course. I do think, however, that it needs to be taught, specifically for the ways that it details the narrator’s acquiescence, and really his obliviousness, to the impending atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. It is this aspect that I want to touch on today, continuing the discussion I began last post in my examination of Mr. Ekeles in Szabó’s Katalin Street.

In her introduction to Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Deborah Eisenberg highlights that while the narrator does not know the cataclysmic events that occur in the dates the narrator drops in the stories — 1919, 1923, 1933, 1935, 1938, 1941, 1943 — we, as readers looking backwards, understand the enormity of these moments on the path to genocide and war. Apart from these signifies, the levity in the stories become “painfully callous, or contemptible, but not exactly shocking,” as Eisenberg argues. The years inform us of the political machinations…