Memoirs of an Anti-Semite - Softcover

Rezzori, Gregor Von

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9780140062243: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140062246 ISBN 13: 9780140062243

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1982

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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-century's ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator'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 to-and makes him complicit in-the terrible realities his era. Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori's most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.

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From the Inside Flap:

Set in Central Europe between World Wars I and II, this work comprises five interrelated stories that depict one man's ambivalent, at times obsessive, relations with Jewish friends and lovers--including his Jewish wife.

About the Author:

Gregor von Rezzori was born in 1914 in the Bukovina. He studied at the University of Vienna, and became active as a writer, radio broadcaster and film-maker in West Germany after World War II. He is a prize-winning author who has slowly emerged as a classic writer of the twentieth century.

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