GREGOR VON REZZORI (1914–1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one “spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest.’’ After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for both radio and film and began publishing books at a rapid rate, including the four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society. From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence with his wife, gallery owner Beatrice Monte della Corte. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (both published by NYRB Classics).
PHILIP BOEHM has translated numerous works from German and Polish by writers including Ingeborg Bachmann, Franz Kafka, and Stefan Chwin. For the theater he has written plays such as Mixtitlan, The Death of Atahualpa, and Return of the Bedbug. He has received awards from the American Translators Association, the U.K. Society of Authors, the NEA, PEN America, the Austrian Ministry of Culture, the Mexican-American Fund for Culture, and the Texas Institute of Letters. Currently he is translating Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel. He lives in St. Louis, where he is the artistic director of Upstream Theater.
DANIEL KEHLMANN is a widely translated German-Austrian novelist. He has won the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Heimito von Doderer Literature Award, the Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. He is a prolific author of fiction and criticism, and three of his novels—Me and Kaminski, Measuring the World, and Fame—have been translated into English.
AN ERMINE IN CZERNOPOL
GREGOR VON REZZORI
Translated from the German by
PHILIP BOEHM
Introduction by
DANIEL KEHLMANN
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
Translator’s Note
An Ermine in Czernopol
Epigraph
1. Concerning the Phenomenology of the City of Czernopol
2. The Landscape of Tescovina; Herr Tarangolian the Prefect
3. Description of the City of Czernopol
4. First Encounter with the Hussar; Tamara Tildy and Widow Morar
5. Departure of Miss Rappaport; Fräulein Iliuţ, Herr Alexianu, and Nâstase
6. Report on Colonel Turturiuk’s Ball
7. Change in Perception of War as “Beautiful”
8. The Volksdeutschen: Professor Feuer, Herr Adamowski, and the Smirking Kunzelmann
9. Herr Tarangolian Reports on the Challenge to a Duel
10. Birds That Dwell Above Cities: The Story of Old Paşcanu
11. On the Myth of Childhood: Madame Aritonovich’s Institut d’Éducation; Blanche Schlesinger and Solly Brill
12. Aunt Paulette Calls on Madame Tildy, While Papa Brill Visits Old Paşcanu
13. Ephraim Perko; Old Brill Visits the Baronet von Merores
14. Blanche Reports on the Insane Poet; Herr Adamowski Comes to Tea
15. Journalistic Activities of Herr Alexianu and Professor Feuer; Death of Old Paşcanu
16. Tanya’s Generosity; Herr Adamowski Contemplates the Times
17. Many Eyes: A Sports Fest in Czernopol
18. Farewell to Childhood and to Herr Tarangolian
19. Frau Lyubanarov Goes to the Asylum; Tildy shoots at Nâstase
20. Love and Death of the Ermine
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
1.
Gregor von Rezzori was the first writer I got to know by sight, but that wasn’t due to his fame as an author so much as it was to an Austrian TV show called Jolly Joker that ran in the early 1980s. The program offered glimpses of the international jet-set and typically featured fast cars or aristocrats, or more often than not aristocrats with fast cars, along with movie stars who lived in Monaco or the south of France. It was an endearing show, without a hint of malice, in love with a vaguely antiquated idea of luxury and grand style—a series of charming, well-meaning, and inconsequential episodes that demonstrated how beautiful life could be for a few lucky souls. The single most impressive thing about it, however, was the moderator: an elegant, suntanned gentleman getting on in years who seemed to radiate health, sophistication, and wit, and who always appeared remarkably relaxed. He was often filmed standing on a beach or atop a hill, occasionally at the steering wheel of a fast car, and he always spoke with a soft accent that had just a hint of nasal elegance and was impossible to place. Later I learned that it was half that of an Austrian aristocrat and half the peculiar German of his native Bucovina.
This was the famous author Gregor von Rezzori. I could hardly believe it. Novelists didn’t do that kind of thing, I thought: they didn’t host TV programs about aristocrats and movie stars, and in the rare event they did pick up a microphone it was to warn against some nefarious political development or to help launch their latest book. But then as well as now, Rezzori’s public persona hardly fit the accepted image of the distinguished writer. He had something of the grand seigneur and something of the rake; he was half aristocratic chronicler in the mold of Chateaubriand and half the enchanting trickster. As he himself put it (because even when it came to skeptical comments about himself he could put it better than anyone), he belonged to a dying breed spawned by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, “a typical, albeit anachronistic mix of high aristocrat and casino croupier.”
He began early on as a writer of popular literature and serial novels for newspapers, and even after he was established he continued to write entertainingly playful books for the mass market on the side, as well as miscellaneous travel guides for German tourists and even an Idiot’s Guide to German Society. He did this openly and mockingly and without being ashamed of the breadth of his writing; he was also fully aware of his own skill, and rightly so, for no reader of any judgment could doubt that the author of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite or An Ermine in Czernopol was one of the great writers of his time.
2.
Czernopol is of course Czernowitz, the capital of Bucovina and under the Hapsburgs a multiethnic center, a meeting place of Eastern and Western Europe, where Jews, Romanians, Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, and others lived together surprisingly peacefully. After the First World War the city was absorbed into the Kingdom of Romania; later, during the German occupation, the Jewish population was largely destroyed, and what was left of the old Austrian culture lived on only in literature—the poems of Paul Celan and the novels of Joseph Roth or Rezzori.
An Ermine in Czernopol takes place between the two world wars; it begins after the downfall of the monarchy and concludes shortly before the final catastrophe, the Nazi occupation, which forever ended the culture and way of life Rezzori describes. We are spared a depiction of the violence that followed, but we cannot read this book without feeling the history that haunts it: even in the wittiest moments of this truly witty novel we cannot forget the tragedy. Nor should we.
So why the camouflage, why change Czernowitz to Czernopol? Perhaps precisely to underscore the fact that the setting of the novel has nothing to do with the real
Czernowitz, since the city Rezzori depicts has disappeared entirely into the realm of memory and fantasy. This is all the more important because Czernowitz is hardly an indifferent or coincidental location for this book. This story could happen nowhere else but in that place of diverse ethnicities, amid the constantly shifting loyalties that marked the ongoing political upheaval of the 1920s and ’30s.
The concept of loyalty is crucial to An Ermine in Czernopol, a novel in the manner of Don Quixote, about a knight clinging to the outmoded code of honor of the former Austrian Empire. Major Tildy—the “ermine”—refuses to accept the new reality; he is unable to comprehend that everything in the world has become relative, and it is this staunch adherence to absolutes that leads to his ruin, when he steadfastly defends the honor of his sister-in-law, challenging everyone who insults her to a duel. His actions are all the more grotesque because this sister-in-law no longer has any honor to defend, though that hardly matters to Tildy, whose rigid code takes no account of reality—or of life and death.
Little of this, though, was clear to the narrator, who was still a child as Tildy’s story unfolded, sheltered in his parents’ home, where only a distant echo of events reached him. Who in fact is the narrator? Throughout the first half of the book he appears in the guise of an amorphous “we”—an atypical formal device Rezzori’s novel shares with Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides. Only later does a young man emerge from this childhood collective, and as this happens, we realize that the book is in significant part autobiographical. Yet from the start, the language of the book is not the language of the child but rather that of the mature narrator he will become, and who will look back on his childhood. From the start it is the language of the brilliant ironic stylist Gregor von Rezzori at the pinnacle of his form.
More than anything, however, the story of Major Tildy’s fight for the honor of his dishonorable sister-in-law is the occasion for countless digressions, the stage for a constant stream of marginal figures and minor characters whose appearances, however brief, invariably leave a lasting impression. These include the fruit delivery man Kunzelmann, whose constant mangling of children’s verses doesn’t disturb him in the least but torments his listeners; or Widow Morar, who never tires of telling the story of her husband’s suicide, which she watched through a keyhole; or—at the other end of the social spectrum—the worldly prefect Tarangolian, whose intelligence is only matched by his cynicism. In this way the novel captures voices from every stratum of a now vanished society, and the effect is both vital and eerie. It also preserves a no-less-vanished variety of Central European wit. In fact, Major Tildy is the only character who completely lacks a sense of humor, the only one who refuses to acknowledge and laugh at the dark side of existence. He is the only tragic figure, which is exactly why, for all his dignity, he is so ridiculous—because nothing is funnier than humorlessness.
At one point Major Tildy challenges the writer Nâstase to a duel, and the latter comes up with several comical arguments for why a smart man would refuse to submit to such a contest. At the end of this speech, Nâstase compliments the resolute Don Quixote for his Teutonic seriousness:
“And last but not least, gentlemen, please convey my compliments to Major Tildy for his understanding and steadfastness of character. It’s well known that his compatriots, the Germans, have to call an assembly in order to understand a joke. He, however, abandoned the attempt from the start. That compels a certain respect from me.”
That itself was a joke for which the sober Germans of the 1950s had little appreciation. Nevertheless, the German critics had high praise for Rezzori’s novel: in 1959, Der Spiegel ran a portrait of the author on its cover, and the book was awarded the coveted Fontane Prize. Equally important was the subsequent translation into numerous languages, as that ensured that the novel would not be restricted to German readers alone. Because despite his success, in the isolated and often very provincial milieu of the Bundesrepublik, Rezzori always remained a bit foreign, a bit suspect. The German literary establishment, it could be said, had abandoned Rezzori from the start. And that compels a certain respect.
3.
Speaking of Major Tildy, Prefect Tarangolian relates: “He himself supposedly said he knows only two types of response: the witty one and the just one.” The prefect’s clever turn of phrase may also be applied to Rezzori’s writing. He didn’t intend his work to be “just,” in other words clear and well-balanced, with no fluctuation in quality; he wanted his writing to be “witty”—erratic, unpredictable, enjoyable, and shimmering. He wanted to live well and make money, act in films, travel the world, be a friend of the rich and famous and a great writer on top of that. In all of this he succeeded, and because he cared so little for the just response and so much for the witty solution to things, he personified the trickster, the capricious conjurer, able to mix low vernacular and high tone like few others. Like all good novels, An Ermine in Czernopol is also a portrait of its maker: mischievous and fun, wise and unjust, impossible to reduce to a single formula, extraordinarily intelligent, and marked with a humor that reaches deeply into the darkness of things.
—DANIEL KEHLMANN
Translated by Philip Boehm
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
WITH An Ermine in Czernopol, Gregor von Rezzori conjures a world we cannot inhabit except in fiction. The once-upon-a-time city of Czernowitz becomes the invented city of Czernopol. The voices in the book are real, though the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Nowhere but Czernopol could such a story take place. And no one but Rezzori could call this city to life, with its variety and mix of languages, its range of characters, its register of voices … And he does this with words. Words that tug and stretch at the German language, playfully, mockingly. Words that must find a new home in English.
Nor is that the only challenge facing the translator. Rezzori’s prowess as a raconteur hardly eclipses the depth of his philosophical inquiry or the breadth of his erudition, and the text contains layers of style and levels of thought that go beyond the recounting of personal experience, ranging from journalistic reporting on social movements to Proustian ruminations on memory—all tinged with melancholy—not only for the passing of childhood but for the loss of all that ended with the Second World War.
In the translation I have made certain stylistic choices to help bring readers into the world of the novel without burdening them with too much “foreignness.” Spellings of names and places that were “Germanized” in the original appear here in their proper Romanian (or other) form. Passages cited in another language are translated in the text or, in very few instances, with a footnote.
Many people have helped see this project through. I am particularly grateful to Beatrice Monte della Corte for her generosity at Santa Maddalena, where I had access to the author’s handwritten corrections to the novel (Rezzori frequently edited and emended texts long after their publication). For their careful editing I would like to thank Edward Cohen, Edwin Frank, Sara Kramer, and Helen Graves. Special thanks to Joana Ocros-Ritter for her keen ear and careful reading across so many languages. As always, I am especially grateful to my family for their encouragement and ongoing forbearance. For any and all lapses I can only hope that they, as well as the readers, show the same leniency as the citizens of Czernopol, where “lowliness was never a fault.”
—PHILIP BOEHM
AN ERMINE IN CZERNOPOL
The ermine will die should her coat become soiled.
—from the Physiologus
THERE are other realities besides and beyond our own, which is the only one we know, and therefore the only one we think exists.
A man staggers out of the howling recesses of some seedy dive into the uncertain gray of dawn.
His movements reveal the combination of bold daring and practiced confidence that mark a habitual drinker—the deadly serious parody of a clown.
His face is the crater field of some lost satellite.
His senses are seething with impulses: the din of the tavern, philological disputes, pride, humiliation, love, quotations, dirty jokes, hate, loneliness, faith, purity, despair—
He doesn’t know his way home.
So he sleepwalks to the next intersection, where the tram tracks cross the street—two dully glistening snakes.
Keeping his head aloft as though he were blind, he taps and tests the ground with his cane, then he pokes it into one of the rail grooves, and lets himself be led as if tethered to a pole.
The tip of his cane sails through the groove, raising a bow wave of moldy leaves and trash, gravel, dirt and muck; his shoes splash through puddles, wrench his ankle on the uneven cobblestones, trip over track ties, churn through gravel, dig through dust. The fog slaps his face like wet cotton wool. Wind tears at the strands of hair that dangle onto his forehead from below the edge of his hat; dew settles on his lips, giving them a salty taste, and collects in tickling drops inside the two creases on either side of his mouth: his pulpy, oily cheeks do not absorb the moisture. He mumbles to himself, occasionally blurts something out loud, launches into a song, interrupts himself, laughs, goes
silent, resumes his mumbling. His eyes are wide open and fixed unblinkingly ahead, like those of a blind man, like those of the gods.
In this manner he travels from one end of the city to the other.
The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is called Czernopol.
He knows nothing of its reality:
He doesn’t perceive its awakening, doesn’t notice the hanging pearls of the arc lamps, garish against the pallid sky, as they expire with a crackling hiss, or the spaces that come looming up around the buildings on both sides of the street, hoisting the city out of the darkness and into the morning; he doesn’t see the waxy bright rectangles of lighted windows as they emerge randomly amid the interlocking jumble of boxes—one here, one there, one over yonder. He doesn’t see the Jewish bakers rolling their wagons out of the dark side streets, doesn’t smell the heavy, hot aroma of freshly baked bread, doesn’t hear the rattle of the farmers’ carts wending toward the market, one by one, or the clatter of their small, emaciated horses, poked and prodded down the long melancholy roads from the flatland far away. He is as oblivious to the laughter of the passing late-night revelers as he is to the brutish barking of the policeman who fails to recognize him—a new, and obviously uninitiated, recruit. He knows nothing of the shadowy figures breaking out of the black caves of the building entranceways, wandering the streets toward unknown destinations, nothing of the sulfurous sky rising over the treetops in the Volksgarten, like Heaven on the Day of Judgment, and nothing, too, of the discordant screech of the first streetcar as it leaves the loop to join “the line,” and which is heading straight in his direction—
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