Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (New York

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (New York Review Books (Paperback))

The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth-centuryâ€™s ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narratorâ€™s Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just his relationship that has blinded him toâ€“and makes him complicit inâ€“the terrible realities his era.

Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzoriâ€™s most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.
Country USA
Brand New York Review Books
Manufacturer NYRB Classics
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9781590172469
ReleaseDate 2007-12-04
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781590172469

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (New York Review Books (Paperback))