Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (3 page)

What indeed? Everything, of course. While the narrator has been pursuing his amusements and various personal concerns, taking in no more information about the world he lives in than what impinges directly upon him, the irrelevant “old hags” have been starving, have been assiduously cultivated into perhaps Hitler's most powerful constituency. And it almost must occur to the reader that although self-involvement might seem to be a minor and relatively innocent (to say nothing of prevalent) character flaw, perhaps there's nothing
inherently
minor or innocent about it; perhaps it's the context that determines just what it is and what its potentialities are.

If we take Rezzori's anti-Semite seriously—and how can we not?—we are compelled also to recognize the portrait, or reflection, of a comfortable person in a period of social deterioration or economic crisis, a period of political fragility. Now and again it occurs to most of us to wonder, I suppose, what the consequences of our own unexamined attitudes or biases might be; it occurs to us to wonder how something to which we're not particularly forced to pay much attention is going to develop, or whom it affects.

How many actually evil people does it take to accomplish a genocide and reduce much of a continent to ash? Only a handful, it seems, but that handful requires the passive assistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky. It's easy enough for most of us to distance ourselves from attitudes of virulent racism, but what about from carelessness, poor logic, casual snobbery—either social or intellectual—inattentiveness? Rezzori reminds us painfully that the great and malignant hazard of privilege is obtuseness.

“Blood still flows today as it did then,” the narrator of “
Pravda
” observes. “That it was not his own blood was due to random circumstances that one cannot even call fortuitous: the only dignity to be maintained in our time is the dignity of being among the victims.”

Yes, we wonder, what does it take to be a “decent person”? Maybe the most significant component is luck—the good luck to be born into a place and moment that inflicts minimal cruelty and thus does not require from us the courage to discern and to resist its tides.

Rezzori keeps his nerve; he ensures that his “I” has no idea what the year “1933” is, or the year “1938”—what those numbers will mean to the reader, or, indeed, will mean to his future self. And in doing so, the author also ensures that just before—or just after—we dismiss the feckless young narrator as an idiot, a question inserts itself: What year is, for example, “2007”?

—D
EBORAH
E
ISENBERG

Skushno
is a Russian word that is difficult to translate. It means more than dreary boredom: a spiritual void that sucks you in like a vague but intensely urgent longing. When I was thirteen, at a phase that educators used to call the awkward age, my parents were at their wits' end. We lived in the Bukovina, today an almost astronomically remote province in southeastern Europe. The story I am telling seems as distant—not only in space but also in time—as if I'd merely dreamed it. Yet it begins as a very ordinary story.

I had been expelled by a
consilium abeundi
—an advisory board with authority to expel unworthy students—from the schools of the then Kingdom of Rumania, whose subjects we had become upon the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the first great war. An attempt to harmonize the imbalances in my character by means of strict discipline at a boarding school in Styria (my people still regarded Austria as our cultural homeland) nearly led to the same ignominious end, and only my pseudo-voluntary departure from the institution in the nick of time prevented my final ostracism from the privileged ranks of those for whom the path to higher education was open. Again in the jargon of those assigned the responsible task of raising children to become “useful members of society,” I was a “virtually hopeless case.” My parents, blind to how the contradictions within me had grown out of the highly charged difference between their own natures, agreed with the schoolmasters: the mix of neurotic sensitivity and a tendency to violence, alert perception and inability to learn, tender need for support and lack of adjustability, would only develop into something criminal.

One of the trivial aphorisms my generation owes to Wilhelm Busch's
Pious Helene
is the homily “Once your reputation's done/You can live a life of fun.” But this optimistic notion results more from wishful thinking than from practical experience. In my case, had anyone asked me about my state of mind, I would have sighed and answered, “
Skushno!
” Even though rebellious thoughts occasionally surged within me, I dragged myself, or rather I let myself be dragged, listlessly through my bleak existence in the snail's pace of days. Nor was I ever free of a sense of guilt, for my feeling guilty was not entirely foisted upon me by others; there were deep reasons I could not explain to myself; had I been able to do so, my life would have been much easier.

I see myself in that difficult period as in a snapshot taken by one of those precision-engineered cameras blessed with a wealth of tiny screws and levers, gaping lenses, and pleated black-leather bellows which one pulled like an accordion from gleaming nickel scissor supports, cameras that were produced by the same
Zeitgeist
—still close to the horse-and-buggy world—as the clear-angled, high-wheeled automobiles that so aroused my boyhood fantasy. I envied my classmates—the well-behaved ones whom I left behind when I was sent from school—when they received such photographic apparatuses as birthday or Christmas rewards for success in their schoolwork, though I did not much value the photographs they gave me now and then.

I can see one snapshot now: it is of a boy with the rounded, defiant face of violated and soon assassinated childhood; his glum resolve, focusing exclusively on himself, is a bit ridiculous, and it deceives us about the earnest ordeal of adolescence, which—awkward in this respect too—can find no better expression of its genuine agonies. The day is overcast. I am sitting on a log, wearing a windbreaker of stiff, waterproof linen with a military belt and large pockets, the kind of jacket sported in the late 1920s by members of ideological associations, whether of the far left or the extreme right. In my case, of course, I was remote from anything philosophical, and I simply used the jacket on long rambles I took whenever I could, wandering lonesome and aimless into the countryside around Czernowitz. In the sunshine-basking seasons, the landscape with its vast horizon was as beautiful as a park; under a wintry sky, aswarm with crows, it offered only melancholy leagues of farmland, plowed up into black clods; far away, beyond the snowy strips that marked the hollows in the rolling terrain, the black lines of woodlands stretched all the way to the mountains, twilight blue and barely visible at the milk-glass edge of the sky dome. It was just such a day, in late winter, that corresponded best to my mood of
skushno
.

I have no hat; my hair is tousled by the wind. Smooth as a seal, my dachshund Max sits at my feet, worshipfully gazing up at me. He is my sole playmate and buddy, my friend, my comforter, in whom I find if not instant understanding then certainly unconditional love and unreserved approval of anything I do.

This photo does not exist—I must quickly point out—for I kept to myself so completely that no one could have snapped it; the schoolmates I have spoken of were now far away. Max and I bummed around the countryside near Czernowitz like a pair of tramps. Morally, too, we were rather footloose. We had a tacit agreement that any guinea hen venturing too far from its home coop was fair game; likewise any cat caught mousing in the furrows. Felines were my special prey, for, much to my sorrow, Max, despite all his other praiseworthy qualities, was not fierce. He would quite eagerly, indeed hysterically, rush at his game, but if it stood up to him, at the slightest nick on his nose he would turn tail, retreat yowling behind my heels, and yelp ignobly from his refuge. I comforted myself with the thought that he was still young and I was probably asking too much of him. Anyway, I carried a good slingshot and a handful of lead pellets in the pocket of my nonpolitical windbreaker, and my aim was almost as good as that of a circus marksman. Even the most tenacious tom reeled off in a daze when the bean-sized bullet struck his skull. Max then had a much easier time of it.

Today, dogs and cats share my home peaceably. But in those days I regarded the enmity between them as a law of nature; and, being a dog-lover, I was of course a cat-hater. I was the son of a man to whom hunting meant everything; the necessity of annihilating prey was as established a fact for me as the categorical imperative was for my teachers; and everyone knows that in shooting grounds, cats are pests. As for attacking the guinea fowl, that was a deliberate iniquity, an act of defiance. Raised according to the strictest rules of sportsmanship, I found a painful satisfaction in being a chicken thief. I was flouting the etiquette of venery, thus to a certain extent sullying my father's name. For the sheaf of thoughtfully severe punishments that were to make me conscious of my waywardness included, alas, the penalty of not being allowed to go hunting with my father. Every spring and summer since early boyhood, I had been permitted to accompany my father in the seasonal cycle of sporting joys: tracking woodcock and snipe at Eastertide, and, in my summer vacations, stalking bucks. Then, later, growing more robust, I had occasionally been taken along on the principal part of the annual hunt, during the rutting season of the deer in autumn and the wild-boar hunt in winter. But now I ran, straight out of Czernowitz and then on aimlessly cross-country, to escape the afflicting temptations that would have been unendurable at home: the nostalgic images of the mountain forests where my father hunted, resounding with the mating cries of blackcocks and woodcocks along the margins of the forests and, when everything was green again, the billy goats' gamboling in the first summer heat, the air alive with dancing gnats. This year, I was forbidden these pleasures.

The stubblefields underfoot were still wet from snow that had only recently melted away. Buds were gleaming on the brookside willows, and you could count on your fingers the days remaining until spring: the buds would soon be breaking open into furry catkins, the sky would be blue again and striped with wet white clouds, the cuckoo would be calling everywhere. But I was chained to my guilt. My moral delinquencies were not the only sins I had to make amends for. I dragged around the syllabus I had missed and now had to make up as a convict the iron ball on his ankle. I knew—after all, it was droned into me every day—that if I passed the makeup exam in the fall, I would be reprieved: that is I would have one last chance for scholastic rehabilitation. Even though I knew this would mean nothing but one more year of boarding-school exile, far from home, far from my beloved country, from hunting, and from my dachshund Max, I was nevertheless resolved to do everything in my power to pass this examination.

My power was woefully dissipated, however. Outside, a thawing wind blew through tree branches which, still bare and transparent, were spun into the silky gray of the sky. I could hear the blackbirds panicking at twilight, drops falling, mice rustling in the dry leaves around the underbrush—all the small noises that almost startle a hunter when he listens for a sign of his prey.… I sat in my room, in front of my schoolbooks, absorbing not a word of what I read, not the simplest question. Seeking a surrogate for the missing hunting ventures with my father, I had plunged into hunting literature with all the passion of a starved imagination; soon, without quite realizing it myself, I was able to read in the original the classic French book on hunting by Gaston de Foix. But this achievement had garnered me no praise or even recognition. On the contrary: it was now considered proven that sheer wickedness rather than genuine slow-wittedness made me unwilling to fulfill my duties. This, in turn, embittered me so deeply that I gave up deciphering old French texts and did nothing but run around in the open air, with
skushno
in my heart.

The dynamics of such pedagogical quarrels are well known. The case histories are all too similar, and I need not bother to narrate mine in greater detail. Soon salvation came from relatives—an elderly, childless couple who put an end to the lamentations about me for the time being. They offered to take in the problem child for the summer.

Uncle Hubert and Aunt Sophie had been told about me early on, and about the progress, or rather problems, I was making. My parents were not without an ulterior motive: legacy-angling, I suppose, for these kin had no closer family ties than us and they were well to do. They lived in the country—more precisely, they lived as feudal lord and lady in one of those out-of-the-way hamlets with tongue-twisting names which, on maps of the European southeast, make the riverine regions along the Prut or Dniester seem like civilized territories. One should not forget, of course, the immensity of that territory, as well as the quite discordant and not always deeply rooted
kind
of civilization one finds there. East and West meet there unchanged in architecture, language, and customs, even in the smallest village. But I was born and bred in that part of the world, so I did not expect a walled town rich in gables and oriels, with arched sandstone arcades around the Roland's fountain in the town-hall square. And I knew that my uncle and aunt were not to be pictured as the baron and baroness of an ivy-covered stronghold towering over such a scene.

The townlet in which my relatives lived and where they were the most important employers was a settlement in the marches of colonial territory on the European continent—it had sprung up out of windblown cultural sand, as it were, and would melt away again. Especially at night, when you approached it from a distance, its forlornness under the starry sky touched you to the quick: a handful of lights scattered over a flat-topped hill at the bend of a river, tied to the world solely by the railroad tracks, which glistened in the goat's milk of the moonlight. The firmament was as enormous as the huge mass of the earth, against whose heavy darkness these signals of human presence asserted themselves with a bravery that could scarcely be called reasonable. The sight was poignant in a sentimental way, like certain paintings of Chagall's. With
skushno
in the heart, one could experience it as devastatingly beautiful.