Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Yet her age—she was at least in her mid-thirties; I never found out exactly how old she was, nor did I ever ask her—her age bothered me much less than her being petit bourgeois. She was beautiful. Early on, I had learned the old cavalier saying that a woman’s body ages later than her face. She didn’t have to prove it. Despite its occasional harshness and sometimes cheapness, her face expressed duennalike dignity; it was smooth and taut and amazingly youthful, especially around the full, fleshy lips with the very lovely teeth, though not around the tragic, darkly embedded eyes. And her body was splendid. Naturally, she was a very ripe woman, but that was precisely what fired my passion; I did not have to consult Dr. Maurer for potency pills.

  I felt I could ask the girl in the wheelchair to forgive me for such details if I actually got to the point of offering her my confession. Would she be discriminating enough to know just what I was talking about? Not, of course, a cynically perceived erotic experience: at nineteen, after all, one wants to make sure that everyone understands the moral purity and logical consistency of one’s every action, feeling, or thought; whatever one does has to seem of the purest purpose and most honorable intention. No, this was no frivolous sexual encounter; it was sincere love—on my part, too, even though it lasted only a short time. And that precisely was the cause of the conflict: despite its genuine and spontaneous beginnings, this love was not intended for the woman it went to. It had, so to speak, dropped into her lap, a fruit that had long since ripened for someone else. It was originally meant for the personification of my anima, whom I finally met today: my siren in the wheelchair, of course.

  True, the girl in the wheelchair did not correspond to the criteria of my anima in all particulars. You could not say that she had blond Jean Harlow hair; her attractive mop of fuzzy hair was an intense chestnut brown; the little face framed by the hair was perhaps a bit too chubby-cheeked and doll-like; and despite the obvious merits of her torso, any mention of the long-legged horsewoman’s figure would have been downright tactless. But after all, the physical factor was not the decisive one. In regard to the physical, one becomes more experienced and more mature, and one adjusts one’s ideals more flexibly to the insufficient realities. Everything else was all right, and that was the important thing: her proper birth, her careful breeding, the aura of her good background.

  I would have been lying if I had not admitted that the aura of her lowly origins was what made my love for the Black Widow as rotten as if it were crawling with maggots—a gradual crumbling under minor irritations that gnawed in, bored in everywhere. It was not just the way she spoke—she could not, of course, deny she was Jewish. Her race was written in her features, in the very face that had overwhelmed me with its inundation of happiness; but not only that: she could also take on a different expression, which I loved, an owllike, archaically wise expression of primordial motherhood. At such times, she looked like an ancient goddess…. But her language, as I was saying: her singsong, the flattened vowels, the peculiar syntax of people who, although having known an idiom since childhood (in her case, Rumanian), remain alien to it, and then the Yiddish expressions interjected all over the place—these things betrayed her the instant she opened her mouth. And yet that was the least that irritated me. I had finally understood that it was quite possible for me to love a Jewess, not in spite of the eternal Jewish tragedy, the age-old Jewish sadness showing in her face, but because of it: to see that face suddenly transformed by happiness—in fact, actually inundated with happiness—affected me deeply. But then I was equally affected by the “earth mother” look on that face when she was in a serious mood. Thus, experiencing so many astonishing things in myself, I accepted her Jewish features as part of her, just as I would have endured tattoos or brass disks grown into the lips, had it been possible for me to love a Central African native.

  Besides, the specifically Jewish quality in Jews had never repelled me so much as the attempt—doomed from the start—to hush it up, cover it over, deny it. The yiddling of Jews, their jittery gesticulation, their disharmony, the incessant alternation of obsequiousness and presumptuousness, were inescapable and inalienable attributes of their Jewishness. If they acted as one expected them to act, so that one could recognize them at first glance, one was rather pleasantly touched. They were true to themselves—that was estimable. One related to Jews in the same way as an Englishman to foreigners: one assumed they would not act like us. If they did so nevertheless, it made them look suspicious. It seemed artificial. It was unsuitable. Like the Englishman confronted with a foreigner behaving in an assiduously British manner, we saw the so-called assimilated Jew as aping us.

  Perhaps it would have been good if I had spoken about this frankly with my Black Widow. She surprised me sometimes with an intelligence and often with a knowledge I would not have attributed to her milieu. She most likely would have if not approved of it then at least understood that for us Gentiles (“goyim,” as she would put it), the point at which our hair stood on end was when Jews revealed in their social pretentions their desire to belong to us. Not because we might have feared compromising ourselves by accepting them as our own but, rather, because the attempt was so feebly presumptuous. In so-called polite society, they were insufferable; they gave it an “as if” quality, thereby making it base. It was even worse when they tried to break into a class whose characteristics antagonized us anyway.

  That was exactly what my Black Widow was doing. Even if I could have discussed it with her, I could not have made her see that my resistance was grounded not in arbitrary fictions but rather in a real difference in mentality, in psychic constitution, a difference that could not be bridged by the best will in the world.

  As for the girl in the wheelchair, I expected her to be so genuinely of my breed that if I described these tortures, she would, like me, burst into laughter, the helpless, enervated laughter of surrender. Notwithstanding the tragic element (mainly for the poor Black Widow), it was grotesquely comical to see how my amorous paroxysms would be chilled by the cold spurts of some aesthetic affront—I say “aesthetic” because it really was a question of class aesthetics, the tremendous effect of which is often overlooked.

  Once, for instance, the passion of our frantic discharges of love wrenched a noise of enthusiasm out of her that did not come from her throat. And my fiery Andalusian was almost driven to suicide by mortal fear, deep shame, a contrite sense of guilt—all of which shocked me much more than her innocent and spontaneous utterance of enthusiasm, which had the advantage that it could not be mendacious and which I instantly rewarded with a surge of tenderness. But no: she was so embarrassed that she raced out of the room, and for days thereafter met me with a bewildered hostility and injured mien, as though I were the one who had farted and not she.

  It was certainly absurd, nay, downright scandalous, to think that this rare gift of destiny, this fortunate event—the love of a beautiful, vivacious, experienced, and emotionally mature woman for a young man still wet behind the ears, a love that could cast a blissful glow over the rest of his life—would have to be destroyed by such fiddle-faddle as her leaving the spoon standing in the coffee cup like a pitchfork in a heap of manure, whereas “one” was accustomed to one’s taking the spoon out and putting it on the saucer, or “one” did not vanish under the table with muffled apologies when one had to blow one’s nose during a meal. But that was the way it was; I had to admit it. The toothpick that Mr. Garabetian, even while speaking, seldom removed from his mouth (and then mostly just to clean his ear) did not detract in the slightest from my affection and friendship for him. Yet my love for the beautiful Jewess, in whose face I saw all the sun-drenched passion of Andalusia (where, in gratitude for everything that the Jewish spirit had contributed to Western civilization by so grandiosely fusing Occident and Orient, the stakes had blazed), my love for the golden, happiness-flooded face of the beautiful sufferer, dissolving in a smile satiated with the mystery of mortal bliss, like the smile of La Belle inconnue de la Seine—my love was
wiped out, chewed up, ground down by the way she dressed, the way she stuck out her little finger when she ate ice cream, the pretentiously pompous respectability with which she behaved toward her customers, with which she laced the splendor of her breasts and hips as firm as cannonballs in rubber armor, in order to be “ladylike,” the way she did up her beautiful black hair like a pastry cook’s masterpiece when she wanted to go to a restaurant with me, the way she would act “refined” when dealing with people to whom she felt superior, raising her eyebrows, shoulders, and voice, speaking through her nose, and taking on the bitter, hostilely cautious expression of people who have social pretentions beyond themselves, just barely far enough beyond themselves so that they never get further than that.

  It did not help telling myself that she loved me with a terrifying passion and that this ought to be more valuable to me than good taste or the notion that she belonged to the finest society. For her, I must have been the fulfillment of a dream she had never dared to dream; with her passionate yet sober and distrustful nature, she would never have managed to believe that it could come true. It was obvious what was going on. If one viewed it in terms of Freudian depth psychology, which terms were specifically Jewish, after all, then one could reel the whole thing off like a grade-school homily: I was the son who had been denied to her, and simultaneously a most fiery lover, whose caresses were no doubt enhanced by the notion of sinful incest.

  I mocked Freudianism. Was there anything like a Jocasta complex, I was tempted to ask, which, lying dormant within her, had disturbed her relationship to others? If so, she could now abreact it to her heart’s content. Here I was, her pet, her doll, her baby—so why did she care about the rest? There was no one who mattered to her in the slightest. Her immediate family had died out, she said; the others were scattered somewhere in Bessarabia, she did not know exactly where, nor did she care. Thus it was all the more incomprehensible to see how she worried about what her neighbors thought of her. She was a shrewd, prudent, hardheaded businesswoman, but her accumulation of money was leading to nothing, as she desperately admitted; it had long since become an end in itself, a compulsion, egged on by a cold unfulfillment and presumably also by that anxiety never totally overcome, rooted deep in her race and permeating her entire being. The tenderness she showered me with was all the more poignant since it erupted out of her contrary to her nature and to all her habits; sometimes I had the impression that when she resisted it, she did so as a mere reflex. But when passion did burst through her inhibitions, then she was plunged into a kind of golden intoxication, a happy delirium which radiated from her like a monstrance. She became beautiful merely by looking at me.

  To be sure, this was not the case from the outset. After that initial daze, when we had plunged into each other’s arms on the sofa in the back room of the Parfumeria Flora, we went through alternations of being overwhelmed and dismayed, feeling shame and guilt, reservation and temptation, attempts to break away, irresolution, affected yielding and renewed scruples—all the emotive ups and downs that decent burghers use in their love affairs to make their own lives interesting and other people’s lives difficult. During this phase, the noble sentiments with which I tried to quell my anti-Semitic feelings were put to the acid test. Weren’t these exaggerated dramatics typically Jewish? I would have liked to discuss it with Mr. Garabetian, whose judicious and unsentimental views had a calming effect on my own exaltations. How could a woman with the sensual riches of my Andalusian act in a way you would expect of a Sacré-Coeur schoolgirl losing her innocence? Unless, together with all the burdens encumbering her much-afflicted race, she was also cursed with irredeemable philistinism. And that this was true, alas, was borne out—certainly not alone, but at least most eloquently—by the apartment in which I underwent the toil and trouble of putting down her resistance, which kept flaring up.

  The apartment consisted of three rooms behind the sofa room, which lay next to the sales space of the shop. The three rooms were appointed with assembly-line furnishings in exaggeratedly fashionable Art Deco style, or rather a Balkanese version thereof, in which the futurist element joined forces with the ornamentation of carved shepherds’ crooks: dining table and chairs, complete bedroom set, parlor furniture with a mirrored cabinet—everything displayed as smartly and sprucely as at the department store where all this splendor had been purchased. With the help of crocheted doilies, tiny little vases with artificial-flower arrangements, and Pierrot and Bonzo dolls, the hand of the lady of the house had provided the warmth of a personal touch. All this was billeted in an almost rustically simple one-story house; and the back wing, facing the yard, had a wooden goat shed attached to it.

  In such an ambience, I regarded it as a proud achievement to muster up sincere romantic feelings. That I ignored it, in the end, was probably due to another achievement: my courageously seeing the Black Widow as a Jew and wanting to love her even though she was Jewish—no, precisely because she was Jewish. This Jewishness, I thought, obviously involved that bad—or shall we say utterly different—taste which with its Oriental elements was something of its own, a bastardized European taste all right, but a taste that was as much a part of the Jews as their yiddling and their agitated hands. I had to accept it; I felt the same way about her initial philistine resistance to my courtship and her recurrent scruples. Could I tell whether or not some religious bias within her involuntarily rebelled against miscegenation with me, the goy? After all, everyone knew how extremely rigorous the Jewish hygienic regulations were.

  Naturally, this resistance also excited me; her yielding excited me. I think I must have acted like a child begging its mother for repetitions of a favor, for instance a fairy tale retold over and over. For it was like a fairy tale, the changing of her face when she overcame her scruples and gave in to her passion. Everything I could insinuate onto the dark severity of the primordial owl-face or onto the golden brilliance that flooded it when she perished in desire—everything passed into mythology. I called her “Astarte” and “Gaia,” even “Gaia Kurotrophos,” the Child-Nourisher, and when she remarked, “The things that come from your meshuggeneh head, baby!” her smile seemed as sweet as the smile on the effigy of an archaic goddess.

  These ecstasies were so intense that the plunges into sobriety were painful; and as our relationship got under way, I began to anticipate the descents with anxiety. Indeed, they multiplied as we got to know one another better. I would then hate the petit bourgeois Rumanian Jewess whose triviality ruined my raptures. Once, in the midst of the most passionate embrace, she rolled away from under me so violently that I was almost hurled out of bed. With a grimace, she grabbed a framed photograph from the Balkan-futuristic night table and concealed it in the drawer. “What the hell’s got into you?” I asked furiously.

  She was so upset that at first she could not even answer. Then, with tears starting out of her eyes, she managed to say through her teeth, “He was watching!”

  “Who?!”

  Again it took a while for me to get it out of her: “My husband.”

  “I thought he was dead!” I said heatedly. “I thought you Jews didn’t believe in life after death. When it’s over, it’s over, right? That’s why you people are so scared of death you start to shake the moment someone mentions it. And now, all of a sudden, some fellow is supposed to be watching from the beyond when his broad climbs into bed with another man, the sacred marriage bed! What was it like, anyway? Were you allowed to sleep in it with him? Or did you have to tease him and throw your marriage wig at him, and get permission to come to him only if he graciously held on to it instead of tossing it back?”

  “Don’t talk like that, baby,” she pleaded. “You’re all worked up; you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  I was beside myself. “If you feel you’re cheating on him even though he’s been dead for ten years, then maybe it would be better if I left. After all, it might occur to me that when I’m with you I’m cheating on someone who doesn’t even exist.”

&n
bsp; “You don’t understand, baby,” she said, her face bathed in tears. “I love you. I love you more than myself. More than anything in the whole world.”

  “More than the dead?”

  “The dead!” she said with an ineffably scornful shrug. “Who cares about the dead! You just don’t understand, baby. Come, I’ll show you how much I care about the dead! I’ll burn the photo up. Look, I’ll dump it in the garbage!” She took the photo from the night-table drawer.

  “Let me look at it, at least,” I said.

  “What for? The dead are dead. Why awaken him?”

  “Don’t talk such rubbish! I want to know what the man you married looked like.”

  I took the photo from her hand. Her husband was in his fifties, dark-haired, graying, massive, with an intense look in his eyes that reminded me of someone I may have met earlier, but couldn’t tell when or where; so I kept studying that face, until she took the photo away from me. “That’s enough!” she said. “And now look what I’m gonna do with it. I want to keep the frame; it’s still good. But the picture—just look how much I care about it!” She took the picture out of the frame and ripped it up into little pieces. Her expression was so wild that it frightened me. The scene was stamped vividly in my mind, almost as an archetype, and I haven’t been able to think of it since without horror: the naked woman with the bushy pubic hair at her groin, standing in front of her equally naked boyish lover and tearing her dead husband’s picture to shreds.

  Gradually, I learned the story of her marriage—that is to say, I got it out of her bit by bit. There had been no great intimacy between them—hatred, if anything, rather than love. He was a very strange man, with no head for business, which he pursued merely to earn money. In the end, he had left the shop entirely in her hands, while devoting every available moment to his two passions—or, if you will, his two vices: Jewish philosophy and women. Of course, my Andalusian added, they both amounted to the same thing for him, the ultimate philosophical problem.