and looked down at the Opernring, now empty, where all the night through there had been ecstasy — a sudden ecstasy that had its source in the silent marching blocks, and that drew people out of their houses and made them run toward the marchers, shouting, roaring, embracing one another, swinging flags with swastikas, throwing their arms to heaven, jumping and dancing in delirium. It was an icy cold yet gloriously sunny day, quite unusual for the middle of March. It was so cold that you would not allow your dog to stay outdoors for longer than five minutes. There was nobody as far as you could see except two or three of the old hags, wrapped, onionlike, in layers of frocks and coats, who sold flowers in the New Market. They were running across the Ring and throwing their roses and carnations in the air, yelling, “Heil!” What did they have to do with it, anyway?
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”?
— DEBORAH EISENBERG
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
Skushno
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.