Exquisite Memoir

The Snows of Yesteryear 

by Gregor von Rezzori

“To recognize what is absurd and to accept it need not dim the eye for the tragic side of existence; quite on the contrary, in the end it may perhaps help in gaining a more tolerant view of the world.”― Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear

This is one of the most exquisite and profound memoirs I have ever read. Gregor Von Rezzori has a remarkable talent for crafting exquisite metaphors that evoke a feeling of location and history. This is what distinguishes his memoir from others. A subtitle for the memoir reads, "Portraits for an Autobiography." As a result, Von Rezzori organizes his memoir around his family, dedicating chapters to "The Mother," "The Father," and "The Sister." These are his portraits, and he only gave them the names "Cassandra" and "Bunchy," which were their childhood nicknames, when he wrote two chapters about people who were close to him but not related. This arrangement by family portrait creates a chronological mosaic composed of short stories that are connected by his recollections.

When the Second World War broke out, his cherished homeland vanished, marking the end of the memoir. Originating in the years following World War I, this gives his personal narrative a historical backdrop. As a result, the memoir's themes are based on the idea of a world that has been destroyed, collapsed, and faded into what is now his "yesteryear." In "The Mother"'s opening, von Rezzori uses a metaphor to explain them: "The mermaid is blind; her world has turned to rubbish." The tinsel from a long-forgotten carnival is inside the chest. Additionally, the mermaid is decaying.(p 55)

The "golden mists" of the past are the expectations that were so bold and vivid when he was younger. Nevertheless, there is a lot of humor and beautiful detail in this tale of decline because the author captured the Rabelaisian joy of spending time with his father, the pride he took in learning to hunt, and the rare but sweet times when his mother lavished him with all the love she had kept hidden from him due to her habitual neglect of her family. "I envied her for being our father's favorite; she despised the blind infatuation my mother showed me, suffered maternal injustices with mute pride, and devalued her mother's preference in my own eyes," he says, describing his sister and himself sharing intimate moments. When I was a little oaf, she was a graceful girl; when I was still a lout, she was an exceptionally good young woman." (p 204)

The memoir ends with a short epilogue where, among other things, the adult Gregor Von Rezzori (who became an accomplished journalist, media personality, and author) shares his personal return to his birthplace of Czernowitz and found that "it wasn't the Czernowitz whose vision I had carried in me for half a century." He found, like so many who grow up and leave their home of birth, that you literally cannot go home again, for the place you left is different than the myth your mind has created and hidden by the mists of time. The story told in this memoir is ultimately one of dissolution of both an idea and an ideal. It is memorable for the beauty and love that was experienced by this often lonely man. It is this that shines through and creates a glowing memoir of a yesterday that will remain forever impressed upon all who read it.

View all my reviews

Memoir as Novel

Memoirs of an 
Anti-Semite 

by Gregor von Rezzori

"The story I am telling seems as distant --  not only in space but also in time -- as if I'd merely dreamed it."

Rezzori's novel reads as if written with the authority of a memoir yet it is imbued with the "golden haze of myth" (p 243). The aroma of the dying embers of the fire that destroyed the empire into which the narrator was born fills each chapter of his life and rises to form a cloud that stands between him and his past and stands between the reader and the reality of his life, fiction though it may be. Moments of hilarity abound like the episode when the young boy of Czernowitz tries to improvise a uniform that will transform him into a young fraternity cadet. His humiliation is evident to all but himself yet this moment of humor is quickly transformed in the horrible reality of class and racial consciousness that bare the dark side of the world of our young memoirist.
The young boy grows into a gregarious dreamer whose artistic talent is wasted on crepe-paper window decorations and dreams that lay fallow in the byways of Bucharest. His thoughts ran to romantic melodrama: "At nineteen life is a drama threatening to become a tragedy every fifteen minutes." (p 72) His relations with women, torn between the unattainable ideal and his frequent lust for the gutter, lead him to philosophical meditations: "This brought up the question of free will, and that was his existential conflict." (p 119).
The final chapter, "Pravda" is the most shocking and revelatory section of the novel.  At age sixty we are in the consciousness of this observer of change:  "had he fallen into a deep slumber back then like Rip Van Winkle and awakened only in the world of today, he would go crazy with despair: what has happened to this world between then, 1919, and today 1979, is so incredible, has changed it so radically that one can scarcely believe the same person lived in both epochs.
Thus we are thrust with the narrator into the modern world, a new epoch, and one in which the question: What is truth? is both more difficult and more important than ever.  This is in his thoughts as we see the themes of the earlier sections reemerge in light of this radical age.
Rezzori uses colors and mood motifs with a veritable pastiche of breathtaking prose to hold the adventures and musings of the memoirist together and control the pace of the story. Hauntingly beautiful when it is not horrifying this is a monument to the writer's art and simply a great book.


Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori. New York Review Books. 2008 (1981)


View all my reviews

Sunday Commonplace Entry




This week's entry comes from The Death of My Brother Abel by Gregor Von Rezzori

And there I had a vision all at once. You, Mr. Brodny, the model American (hadn’t gone over on the Mayflower, to be sure, but all the more militant in New World spirit for that: a pogrom-tested Babbitt from Galicia), and as the personification of that spirit you were eating not patè de grives but a dish named Yurop. The thing you smeared so thickly on your little pieces of white bread and inserted between your perfectly serviced teeth, the thing on which you closed your lips, leaving them to their so original play of expressions, while you were totally interiorized to a chewer and swallower—that thing was not thrush patè, it was Europe. Her spirit, her soul, her dream of herself, her self-illusion. Her old skillfulness, her inexhaustible wealth of forms, all her many forms so thoroughly imbued with her spirit, in short, the essence of her being. Indeed, that was a feasting! I saw palaces and cathedrals vanishing into your mouth, which closed over them, contorting—either disdainful or offended, mocking or arrogant—while your teeth chewed. Entire cities, lovelier than Nuremberg, were gobbled up by you, for instance Bruges or Siena or Salzburg or Varasdin or Prague. With you, I tasted Paestum still in swampland and a tangle of wild roses, I saw a spring morning in Brabant melting on your tongue. You forked up the Lubeck Dance of Death and chewed it with delight; you then insert Michelangelo’s David with its oversize head and fists (but what a head, what fists!), promptly followed by a Klimt portrait of a lady. Shakespeare’s sonnets tickled your palate. You swallowed the facade of Chartres with all the mysterious queens and angels and granted yourself, last but not least, the concluding chapter of Proust’s Du cotè de chez Swann. And you washed all this down with a wine that got its color from Giordano Bruno’s blood and its charmingly virile spirit from Spinoza. And with the sounds of Palestrina, Mozart, Beethoven, and Strauss, your angelic voice now clambered over the threshold of my consciousness: Gaia’s first lover.

I had to hold my breath and writhe and squirm to keep from throwing up.

from The Death of My Brother Abel (c)Viking Press (1985)