Divided Soul

By Paul Gray

MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-SEMITE by Gregor von Rezzori Viking; 287 pages; $13.95

These five long stories are connected by a single protagonist and a ruling obsession. They begin with a young boy growing up in the 1920s in northern Rumania. The time is already out of joint for his upper-class parents, who still mourn the death of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the succeeding decades are to prove even harder on the son. Near the end, he is a bitter old man in Rome, looking back on "half a century--and what a century!" of chaos and dissolution. Memories alone sustain him, and nearly all of them have to do with Jews.

The title of this intricate narrative is technically accurate but also misleading. The self-described "moth-eaten survivor of a bygone splendid world," who prefers Gregor above his half-dozen other Christian names, carries bigotry as both his birthright and curse. His father "hated Jews," and the son follows somewhat haltingly down the same path: "We just didn't like them, or at least liked them less than other fellow human beings. This was as natural as liking cats less than dogs or bedbugs less than bees; and we amused ourselves by offering the most absurd justifications." As he idles in Vienna during the late 1930s and watches the gathering power of the Nazis, Gregor is capable of the most appalling judgments: "And if the Jews were frightened, it served them right. It would keep them from becoming Russian spies and propagandists of Communism and also make them behave a little more decently at the Salzburg Festival."

Yet Gregor's repellent opinions are consistently at odds with his behavior. From childhood on he is drawn to Jews, as both as friends and lovers. In Vienna, he offers to marry one so that she can claim Rumanian citizenship and escape the encircling Nazis. This offer is kindly refused, and she gets out another way. When the war is over, Gregor does marry a Jew, his second wife, and fathers a son, who dies at the age of five after years of stormy divorce and custody battles. Years later, the old man tries to convince himself that this death was merciful, that the sad-eyed child would have grown up to be both "himself as a Jew" and a bomb-throwing Maoist. Yet a tactile memory triumphs: "Never will he forget how they walked through a park one winter, and the little boy held out his hand to have the father lead him along; he gave him his forefinger, and even today, he can still feel the little fist closing around it and clutching it."

The sadness of this moment does not absolve Gregor of his sins, nor does the fact that he knows when he has been beastly. He accurately labels his behavior as such, but his honesty seems disdainful rather than repentant. His soul remains disastrously divided against itself. He cannot reconcile what he thinks by rote with what he knows through experience.

Yet Author Gregor von Rezzori, 67, has made it possible to understand this antihero, who shares his name, place and date of birth and various cities of residence. It matters little how much of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite may be autobiographical; the book's achievement overshadows its origins. These haunting stories portray history unwinding within a single skull, a cultivated, often charming mind being betrayed by a catastrophic flaw.

They also show how such treason, magnified many millions of times, led civilization itself to the brink.

-- By Paul Gray

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