The Snows of Yesteryear

by Gregor von Rezzori, John Banville (Introduction), H.F. Broch De Rothermann (Translator)

Gregor von Rezzori was born in Czernowitz, a onetime provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine—a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear.The book is a series of portraits—amused, fond, sometimes appalling—of Rezzori’s his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children’s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Romania, Biography, Ukraine, German Literature

225 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using an elegantly lyrical and allusive prose, Gregor von Rezzori has written a memorable autobiography, focusing on the five people that helped shape and mould his life growing up into the Austro-Hungarian aristocratic class, before seeing his family reduced to nomadic refugees by WW I. He and his family became Romanian and Soviet citizens, and, following a period of being stateless, Austrains. Despite his parents' marital break-up and the occupation of his native duchy, Bukovina, by Romania in 1919 and by Russia in 1940, his family lived under the illusion of pseudo feudal grandeur. In this intense group portrait, the author opens his heart on the good and the bad moments during a period of great change in Europe. His overprotective, proud mother, a woman of lifelong rancor, was a mismatch for his cheerful, voluble father, an architect and big hunting enthusiast set in his rigid ways and pathological prejudices. Cassandra, his nanny, a peasant woman who wore exotic garb, kept up his spirits with clownish pranks. We also meet Bunchy, his worldly German governess, and his sister with whom Rezzori had a deep sibling rivalry throughout childhood, but whose death at age just 22 clearly haunts him dearly.

Rezzori was born on his mother’s estate in Bukovina in 1914. Bukovina was Austrian in those days, Romanian after the First World War, and Russian after the second. The Rezzori family were minor Austrian gentry administering the outposts of the empire. There was Italian blood on the father’s side and Romanian-Greek and Irish on the mother’s. Rezzori is very much concerned with blood and racial inheritance in this book. The concern itself appears to be an inheritance: his father was steeped in late 19th-century Greater German ideology. He was also unquestioningly anti-semitic. Rezzori deplores such attitudes: but he can never leave them alone – they are an ingredient in the fuel he runs on.

Starting the memoir as a boyhood in Czernowitz, a city that in the course of the twentieth century was variously located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romania, the Soviet Union, and today’s Ukraine, you get a sense of stability. But there is a looming sensation of irretrievable loss and dislocation, with images of beauty and destruction becoming central themes in his intimate story of the disappearance and re-emergence of his country. The building blocks of Nazism start to slowly crawl out from the cracks, which at this time, no one could have foreseen just what was around the corner. Splitting those closest to him into different parts of Europe. But predominantly most of his story revolves around his younger days as a child, and this is where he really does shine as an autobiographer. Bringing back a lost time, like it was yesterday.

Although infused with a feeling of dislocation, von Rezzori’s recollections are at the same time intensely rooted in the city’s streets and squares, its sounds and smells, in the landscapes that surrounded it, and in its rich mixture of peoples and cultures. He doesn't write chronology, but instead skips back and forth in different decades, but it's the the gradual crumbling of the world of Austria-Hungary that manifested itself in the anxieties that filled his boyhood memories. His parents reduced from social, cultural, and political elites to relics of the old order. Gregor’s mother, for example, seeks to uphold her family’s elite stature even as its social foundations disappear. She does so by quarantining her son in the house and garden, thereby protecting him from the contamination that was sure to result from play with other children or from venturing out into the world beyond the yard fence. His father, whose pension vanishes with the Austrian state, retreats to live and hunt among Transylvanian Saxons, a German-speaking minority in Romania’s north.

I found this to be an intensely moving portrait, brushed with strokes of a profound transparency and tenderness, a vigilant eye for nuances of love and indifference, language, landscape, and class behavior. It's written without a single slack sentence in sight, textured like a fine silk all the way through. 'The Snows of Yesteryear' leads the reader into a world now irretrievably lost, where Rezzori colours in the blanks with a vivid personal history done with such brilliance and reassured heartening self-confidence.

[William2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have often read of populations of ethnic Germans who were moved about at will by Hitler and Stalin. But I have never read the story of an affected ethnic German family. That is one of the things this book does.

The writing holds the reader. That said, it must also be admitted that portions of “The Mother” chapter are abstract, almost verging on the clinical. It’s telling rather than showing.

“My allergies to all kinds of tensions, exaltations and neurotic resistances have their throat-tightening origin in those days, when, presumably, the hardness displayed to my mother at the end of her life also originated. Her endearments were of a tempestuousness that frightened more than delighted me, and in addition prompted venomous remarks from my sister. Even though I surmised, with the uncanny ability of children to plumb the reality behind the surface, that the bluntness with which my mother interfered in our harmony stemmed from her need to find some firm ground in a life that was slipping away from her, I never forgave her for it. Nor did I forgive her her absentmindedness, which she tried to correct with unyielding opinions and rigid prejudices.” (p. 62)

Despite this, the chapter is probably one of the best mother-takedowns I’ve ever read. My God, did he hate her!

“The strictness of her own upbringing had established for her a world cast in primer-like simplicity, which contained no real human beings but merely standard roles whose comportment was assigned irrespective of individuality, character, temperament or nervous disposition. It was the world concept of a stable social order, a world of stereo-types: a peasant was unmistakably a peasant, a sailor a sailor, and a privy councillor was forever nothing but a privy councillor; any deviation into the specifically individual was a step toward chaos. . . Whoever deviated from this predetermined role, a role reduced to its most essential or trivial elements, or whoever went so far as to forget the assigned role altogether, was not merely reprehensible but downright evil.“ (p. 93)

The book is really a collection of resentments and grievances. Early on Rezzori mixes portraiture and historical context and landscape description and other things that make his indignation interesting. Toward the end, it’s simply unalloyed bitterness.

Friends, don’t waste your days in bitterness. Read Rezzori’s novels. Those I have read — both superb — are Oedipus at Stalingrad and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.

[Declan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beginning a book is like entering someone's house for the first time. You might feel a little uncomfortable and unsure about your host; your initial apprehension may develop into a sense of ease and reassurance or, barely across the threshold, you might feel that you are about to have a experience you will savour, with someone whose every word and action is beguiling.

I was half way through the prelude to the first chapter of'The Snows of Yesteryear' when I felt completely beguiled. That feeling of being in the company of someone who not only had an engaging story to tell, but who could tell it with vivid details and astounding insight, using fully ripened language was there from the beginning and never let up until, at the point of departure, it faltered just a little.

Through five main chapters we learn about the life of a boy whose family is materially privileged but emotionally fractured. Each of those chapters focuses on a person who was central to Gregor's life as he grew towards manhood, beginning with Cassandra, a maid as untamed as she is spirited. Right at the start we learn that They had peeled her out of her peasant garb and had instantly consigned the shirt, the wrap skirt, the sleeveless sheepskin jacket and the leather buskins to the flames. Devoid of all her colour, Cassandra says: They turned a goldfinch into a sparrow. For Gregor she represents a whole other way of being. Described as "simian", she nonetheless introduces Gregor, in a casual, though not entirely unintentional way, to sensual experiences which, even at a young age, he recognises as significant: behind the black silken curtain of Cassandra's hair, in the baking-oven warmth of her strong peasant corporeality, I found refuge at all times from whatever pained me. Their closeness is a cause of irritation to Gregor's neurotic mother, but eventually it is age that begins to break the bond as, at age 8, the intrusive nature of potty time can be tolerated no longer and a rift occurs. But nothing can take from the impact that this woman with strong roots in the north of Romania has on a boy whose early childhood is marked by a sense of belonging nowhere.

Not only did the family have to flee Czernowitz, in Bukovina because of World War 1, but on making their way as far as Trieste they were forced, after less than a year, to move again this time to a village in Lower Austria. That idyll had to be abandoned too for a house in Vienna before an eventual return to Czernowitz. But had they never left Bukovina, the turmoil and empire-building of the 20th century would have meant that they would have been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Romania, then split between Romania and the Soviet Union before becoming a part of the Ukrainian SSR, at which time Czernowitz became Chernovtsy!

Little wonder that Gregor's mother was a deeply unhappy woman, but it seems that far more than history impinged on her and formed her into a woman who was incapable of being happy and who seemed to have no idea of how contentment might be achieved and so remained always in the rusting shell of her unapproachability. Dissatisfaction with a life that was permanently out of focus meant that she was continuously finding fault with those around her, with vexation all too easily turning into sharp cruelty. Even so I was shocked when Gregor said that All too often her demonstrations of maternity had had the earmarks of rape. It is difficult to find any evidence in Gregor's detailing of their relationship that quite justifies that accusation, but he has nonetheless an astonishing ability to incisively analyse the precise nature of his mother's dilemma:

The strictness of her own upbringing had established for her a world cast in primer-like simplicity, which contained no real human beings but merely standard roles whose comportment was assigned irrespective of individuality, character, temperament or nervous disposition...any deviation into the specifically individual was a step towards chaos

Another element in the unsatisfactory life of Gregor's mother is her marriage to a man whose passion is hunting which results in his being absent much of the time. In attempting to explain his father's compulsion to kill wild animals Gregor says: that his all consuming passion for hunting was in reality an escape to and a shelter from the reminder of a truer and unrealised vocation...A gesture of defiance stood at the very origin of his fixation- indeed, obstinate defiance was the determining trait in his character. He does have a job too which involves visiting old monasteries to examine the artifacts they possess. Some of Gregor's happiest times were spent accompanying his father on expeditions which encompassed both facets of his life and allowed Gregor to experience moments of transcendent and revelatory beauty:

We are guests of the abbot; with paternal kindliness the prior shows me fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts in bindings of chased silver ; sunlight falls through the tall windows, in broad stripes alive with dancing motes of dust, into the semidarkness of the library, and outside, jays are heard quarreling in the pines; my longing thoughts wander to the glories of the autumnal forest beyond the church walls blazing in picture-book colours.


He portrays his father as a man who was far more even-tempered than his mother,but who had several dark and unpleasant aspects to his character too, most notably a vicious antisemitism which contrasts with Gregor's mother who was much liked by her Jewish neighbours.

Gregor's sister was four years older than him and he attached major significance to those years, believing that she had foundational experiences which steadied her life in a way which eluded him. But he would eventually become much older than her because her life was to end long before it should have when she succumbed to just the sort of disease her mother had spent her life worrying about and through this horrible affliction her mother finally found a purpose by attending constantly to the daughter who, when she was healthy had been much less favored by her mother. In contrast she had always been doted on, and indulged fully, by a father who, now that she was ill, withdrew completely and stayed where he could not witness the indignity of her final weeks.

Above, around and within this family the benign presence of the children's governess Bunchy prevailed. Warm and encouraging Bunchy whose laughter was reminiscent of pigeons cooing. Both children learned much from this deeply knowledgeable woman:

When a certain pettiness of outlook degenerated into stubborn narrow-mindedness , Bunchy's determined intervention drew our attention to basic discrepancies between the conception of life held by normal civilized people and that held by us. We then made haste to follow her implicit injunction

Although Gregor was not suited to the conventions of the school system he developed into a man with an outstanding ability to record the endlessly complicated ways in which people choose, or are forced, to live their lives. Bunchy, it would seem, more than any of the others opened up the world for him. Within that world Gregor had available to him four amazingly divergent examples of womanhood. Yet he is honest enough to tell us that he had, throughout his life and in his relationships with women, a cold heart.

I found some evidence of that cold heart in the epilogue to this book and I still can't decide whether or not it was wise to include it. By revisiting Czernowitz he was always going to be disappointed. What I feel he fails to appreciate is the extent to which a city of ones youth - a place in which one can , for a little while, believe in the limitless possibilities of oneself and of the city - can never be revisited because it was always more than just a physical reality. By recounting his understandable disappointments he risks being just another grumpy man, finding fault with the many ways in which the world has changed. Except that here, because of the subjugations of communism, almost nothing has changed: I couldn't get over it. There could be no doubt that this was indeed the Cernauti of my childhood, tangibly concrete and real- and yet it wasn't the Czernowitz whose vision I had carried in me for half a century. Famously, of course, you can't go home again and I'm inclined to wish he hadn't.

But this is a remarkable book, evocative, witty and beautifully written.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 2 years ago I read Gregor von Rezzori’s novel “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite”, and in my review wondered aloud about how much was fiction and how much was autobiography. It was partly to find out that I read this book. In answer to my question, it seems antisemitism was a characteristic of the author’s father rather than the author himself.

This is an unusual, and at times very moving, autobiography, structured around 5 people who played a formative part in the author’s childhood. Each gets their own chapter – the author’s mother, father, and sister; plus “Cassandra”, an illiterate Carpathian peasant who was the author’s childhood nanny, and “Bunchy”, a Pomeranian woman who was his governess during his adolescent years.

Rezzori was born in 1914 and grew up in the city of Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi) where his father had been an official of the Austrian government. During the author’s lifetime the city was successively part of Austria, Romania, the USSR, and Ukraine, and his sense of dislocation forms an important part of the book. After the collapse of the Dual Monarchy the family still considered themselves socially and culturally superior to the other nationalities in Bukovina, but were also despised by the new Romanian authorities, as members of an ethnic minority of suspect loyalty. Nor were the family accepted as true Germans, as the author noticed when he was sent to school in Austria:

“…it pleased the rulers of that country [Romania] at the time to consider me an alien interloper, while for my Austrian school-mates I was but a Balkanic gypsy from the remotest southeastern backwoods. The untainted Germanness extolled by Hauff and Schnorr von Carolsfeld was denied me forever.”

All of us have our idiosyncrasies but the author’s family scored unusually high on eccentricity. This was particularly true of his parents. His mother was neurotic and controlling, embittered by the fact that in her time and place the role of wife and mother was tightly circumscribed. His father struck me as something of a contrarian, and as someone who would have fitted better into the world of about a century before his time. He considered himself an Austrian but become a loyal citizen of Romania, and despite being an anti-Semite and a German nationalist he opposed the Nazis (it’s all set out in the book). His escape from the world was to develop an obsession with hunting. In one passage Rezzori describes his parents:

“Our parents were odd and off center, each in his or her own peculiar way, each in his or her own wrongheadedness, the cause and origin of which could be found in their quixotic reaction to an out-of-joint world. Their obsessions—our mother’s anxiety-whipped, guilt-ridden sense of duty and our father’s blindly passionate escape into his mania for hunting—were specific responses to circumstances that in no way fitted their upbringing, their existential concepts and expectations, even less their dispositions.”

Rezzori was an acute observer of others, and the translation I read suggests the original book was beautifully written. Some of my favourite sections were those where the author accompanied his father on hunting expeditions, simply because of the marvellously evocative descriptions of the Carpathian countryside of a century ago. It’s gone now, along with the multi-ethnic nature of the region. Rezzori lived until 1998, and with the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 he was able to visit his hometown for the first time since 1936, which event he describes in an Epilogue. The visit was, of course, a bittersweet one.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essentially this book is a series of portraits of Rezzori's family and two most intimate nurses/governesses, and their lives during the two World Wars and the time in between, when their home city of Czernowitz was caught in the post-collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when it was handed over (and over again) between Romanian, German, and Russian rule. The people of the Bukovina were basically in the hands of whatever army happened to be roaming through the land at the time, and eventually the whole identity of the region seemingly vanished. There are many parallels throughout the story of the dissipation of the empire and the disintegration of the family, but what this book did so well, and so brilliantly, was elucidate that strange, mythological period of adolescence and early childhood, when we, at the time, are experiencing such vivid and lasting impressions but do not yet have the faculty to express what they mean, even to ourselves, while all the while our individuality and personality are being formed by these same occurences. One can't help but draw the comparison of lost empire/lost childhood, but there is more going on here than that. A melancholy nostalgia, a dry and absurd humor, intimate emotional observation, and a sense of something irrevocable that we all seem to experience when looking back at our own lives are what this book succeeds in communicating. Perhaps only Speak, Memory has come so close to illustrating those twilight years. But Rezzori's prose is more centered in the emotional, while Nabokov is solidly discoursing through the intellect. As far as memoirs of childhood go, I can't say yet which I prefer. But if you enjoyed Speak, Memory definitely give this a go.

Some favorite parts: Cassandra making the snow flowers (which inevitably dissolve in time); the image and detail of the sinking toy ship (which is referenced throughout); his father dragging a dead, bloody boar through his mother's snobby, aristocratic social gatherings; all the descriptions of the gardens, the roads into the wilderness, the ecstatic recollection of the weather and natural surroundings of the Bukovina and how that was reflected in the people. There is so much here to sift through, I will certainly reread this at some point.

[Chuck LoPresti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I try to never say "Proustian" in a review because it really means "hey, I've read Proust" which is a laudable achievement worthy of public proclamation but a generally vague and misleading element in a literary review. Rezzori's Snows... is a look back, look for and look out for what are memories are and what we let them do to us - that's Proust-like. His language/prose is remarkably erudite and complex but never desultory - that's Proust-like too. Rezzori draws with words, makes music with words and contemplates how words construct thoughts - again - much like the work of Proust. But where Rezzori is unique is that he never is reduced to neurotic coiled reflection that seems largely onanistic - that is very un-Proust like. Rezzori has an amazing insight to the formation of human characteristics and social interaction that rivals Stendhal but unlike Stendhal's romantic and purely literary leanings - it's art-history that informs Rezzori's insights. He paints with words - aware of style in every stroke and in great respect of his audience. If you are interested in reading about how a family lives and dies in post Trianon eastern-Europe - you won't do much better than this. Illuminated by the same crepuscular glow that brings Schulz's Drohobych out of the darkness and impermanence of temporary Poland, Rezzori's Czernowitz flickers on the edge of memorial non-beingness with arresting dalliance. There's no need to romanticize such memories when their foundation is more "irreal" than any rainbow-streak of grease that populated Proust's tea cups. If you subscribe to the notion that the greatest generations of humans probably came and went around the time of the Second World War - this little giant of a beautifully packaged NYRB short novel will leave you pleasantly unchanged and better informed. It is sort of Proustian.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir gives us Rezzori's childhood through his descriptions of 5 people. His mother, a crazy, neurotic woman who never really grew up; his father, a Trump-like, bigoted narcissist who thought of nothing but his own needs; his sister, 4 years older, a very self assured person who died at the age of 22, and his two most important influences; Cassandra, a peasant woman who cared for him as a very young child, and Bunchy, a teacher/governess who came into their lives at just the right time. His love for these two women shines on every page. His family, not so much. This all took place between the two World Wars in Austro-Hungary, when the family was essentially displaced. Beautifully written.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every time there was a mention of the relatively contemporary world, i.e. late 20th century, I was knocked out of my reading reverie and made to realize this was actually published in 1989. The writing, the sensibility, the everything about it is so cultured and refined and smart and of a piece with what I guess is late-modernism, that it seemed Rezzori must have been a contemporary of Musil. This is certainly not a complaint, as the writing is so graceful and elegant, but also honest and sensual and stunningly visual. I enjoyed it thoroughly. While it portrays in detail a large convulsive world, a vanished world that morphed into the world that morphed into our own morphing world, it is a very personal and intimate memoir as portrayed through five individuals – governess, mother, father, sister, tutor – and one bewildering region – Bukovina -- that shaped the author’s world.

[Nathanimal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the extravagant, dreamy cocktail of Mitteleuropa. This giant clash, recombination, alchemy of many peoples, cultures, classes all sloshed together in the first half of the 20th Century when so much was going on. (If this interests you try The Island of Second Sight, too.) It's culture like a Picasso painting, exactly what the Blood & Soil types were so afraid of, a culture with lots of stark contrasts and sharp edges, endless opportunities for danger and conflict, but also for discovery and novelty. It's why I've always wanted to live in a city, to be confronted with many things that aren't like me at all.

What I'd give to sit down with Rezzori over a nice, long, multi-course dinner. Did you see the film Grand Budapest Hotel, where the narrator spends the night in a storied, Old World hotel at the table of the man who has owned the hotel through numerous regime changes and listens to his charming stories of how he survived and the way things used to be? This is a lot like that, only it really happened!

[Stela · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Snows of Yesteryear is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. Not only the characters portrayed are fascinating (the telluric Cassandra, the neurotic Mother, the burlesque Father, the fairylike Sister and the down-to-earth Bunchy) but also, but especially the reconstruction of a lost era and of a lost land are truly magical: an era of bygone sunny even-when-cloudy days lived in a town that, belonging first to an Austrian defunct empire, then to a Romanian ephemeral kingdom and finally to a dystopic Soviet Ukraina, changed its name accordingly “from Czernowitz to Cernăuţi to the present Chernovtsy”. The narrative voice tries and brilliantly succeeds to recapture the spirit of that era in which

We did not live our own lives. Our lives were being lived by our period.

It is no wonder therefore that these two other characters be added to the gallery: the Past and the Town. The Past that sometimes melancholically sometimes ironically, carries the mixed feelings of minorities dreaming of the golden age of the Austrian Empire while inhabiting a region which should have remained their own too, but for the cruel, sarcastic turn of history:

Greater Romania, the product of the 1919 Treaty of Trianon, was at the peak of its vainglory and did not like to acknowledge that, together with its minorities, it had been bequeathed their cultural heritage. My father never let an opportunity pass to proclaim this loudly, and on one of these occasions he had precipitated a nasty dispute with Professor Jorga, pope of all Romanian historians, an effrontery equivalent to lèse majesté and defilement of the national flag.

The Past that uncovers once again that almost unanimous attitude of hate or indifference for the fate of the Jews in the period between the two world wars, actually the same attitude the reader had found in The Memoirs of an Anti-Semite:

As to the anti-Semitism of the upward-striving Third Reich, it was the generally accepted wisdom among non-Jews in the Bukovina at that time that, irrespective of all tolerance and even close personal relations with Jews, it could be only salutary if a damper were placed on the “overbearing arrogance of Jewry.” (…)

In a nutshell: The ascent of Nazi Germany, with its thunderous marching columns and wheat-blond maidens, concerned us infinitely less than the abdication of the recently crowned King of England in order to marry Mrs. Simpson.

As for the Town, it was simply the sacred space, the axis mundi where the past and the present happily and picturesquely coexisted, where only faces and costumes changed:

In the days between 1919 and 1940, the Kingdom of Romania governed the Bukovina with a sovereign self-assurance based on the claim that it had been the Romanians’ archoriginal home soil, their Ur-land since the time of the Dacians — a claim that may be questioned. In Czernowitz-Cernăuţi, one did not go to the trouble to doubt it. In fact, that Romanian interlude was hardly more than a fresh costume change in a setting worthy of operetta. The uniforms of Austrian lancers were supplanted by those of Romanian Roşiori, infantry wasn’t worth noticing much anyway, and the whole transformation was given no greater weight than the one accorded the changing scenery at the municipal theater between Countess Maritza and The Gipsy Baron or The Beggar Student.

However, returning to it after 50 years or so, and looking in vain for the house of his childhood, to find only his mother’s house surrounded by ugly new buildings, the narrator had the epiphany of the “mythical topos” his Czernowitz had become: a place invented by his memories and populated by his ghosts, a land much more beautiful than the real one:

No longer could I ever think of that house of my mother’s without its being superseded by the present ugly reality. The real house of my childhood had been spared this fate but instead had turned into irreality, haunted by a mythic quality that made me fear that I could never again believe in my own reality. So be it! It was indeed in the realm of the unbelievable and fabulous that my own Czernopol, the imagined counterpart of the factual Czernowitz, was located. The reality I had found in Chernovtsy threatened to destroy even this. I had to leave as quickly as possible. You must never undertake the search for time lost in the spirit of nostalgic tourism.

[James Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the many memoirs I have read, this is one of the most beautiful and meaningful. Gregor Von Rezzori has an uncanny ability to create beautiful metaphors that convey a sense of both place and history. It is this that sets his memoir apart from the others. The memoir is subtitled "portraits for an autobiography." Thus, Von Rezzori structures the memoir around the members of his family, with chapters titled simply "The Mother," "The Father," and "The Sister." These are his portraits, and it is only when he wrote two chapters about people close to him as family, but not related, that he gave them names, "Cassandra" and "Bunchy," these being the childhood appellations by which they were known. The result of this organization by family portrait is a chronological mosaic made up of vignettes melded together by his memory.

The memoir ends with the disappearance of his beloved homeland with the onset of the Second World War. Stemming from the aftermath of the Great War, this provides a historical context for his personal story. Thus the themes of the memoir are undergirded with the sense of a world destroyed, collapsed, and faded into an age that becomes his "yesteryear." Von Rezzori describes them metaphorically in the introduction to "The Mother": "The mermaid is blind; her world has turned to rubbish. The chest contains the tinsel of a forgotten carnival of long ago. And the mermaid herself is rotting."(p 55)

The expectations that were so vivid and bold when he was young become the "golden mists" of the past. Yet amidst this story of decline there is much humor and lovely detail, for the author shared the Rabelaisian exuberance of moments with his father, the pride taken in learning how to hunt, and the sweet, if rare, moments when his mother showered him with all the love that she had hidden from him through her habitual neglect of her family. He also shares intimate moments with his sister, describing their similarities and differences: "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. She was a graceful girl when I was a small oaf; she was a precociously exemplary young lady while I was still a lout." (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.

[Lorenzo Berardi · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are plenty of good books which you gulp down and then forget. And there are those rare excellent books which are made and meant to stay so that you choose to take your time to read them. 'The Snows of Yesteryear' belongs to the latter.

I'm not an avid reader of self biographies, but I'm always glad to read one of them when the name of the writer justifies it which is to say when the author did something in literature. (ok, I reckon how 'Open' by Andre Agassi doesn't quite belong here).

Now, 'Speak Memory' by Vladimir Nabokov and Witold Gombrowicz's 'Polish Memories' are both superb books. On the same subject, I've reasons to believe that I will enjoy those three self-biographic volumes by Canetti as soon as I have enough time to dig into them.

The thing is, Gregor von Rezzori did a better job than Nabokov and Gombrowicz in writing about his childhood. Mark my words.

One of the chief reasons why I liked 'The Snows of Yesteryear' so much is that von Rezzori doesn't focus on himself as much as Nabokov (quite obviously) and Gombrowicz did. That and the fact that the author chose to select his memories very carefully thus giving the book a very distinctive frame were beautiful writing goes straight to the point and every unexpected detour does lead to a specific episode.

'The Snows of Yesteryear' is shaped by people, spiced up by places and smells of history.
Von Rezzori here baked a delicious madeleine which brings back to life the five most important characters of his childhood: his mother, father, sister, wet nurse and governess.

Whereas it's the opening poignant lines of the chapter dedicated to his sister which cannot left anyone untouched, I believe that von Rezzori is particularly masterful when writing about his 'savage' wet nurse, Cassandra, and on his teacher/governess, Mrs Strauss - also known as Bunchy.

There you have an oddity. The emotional detachment von Rezzori felt for his long bygone mother and father when he wrote this book as an elderly man is less noticeable when the author remembers about Cassandra and Bunchy. As a matter of fact these two women did have a deeper influence on the future novelist's early life than his parents who were either overworried about him or hopelessly distant.

At a first glance, Gregor von Rezzori certainly had a privileged childhood. Son of a rich man of distant Italian origins but who praised his Germanness and a proud servant of a collapsing Habsburg Empire, von Rezzori grew up in a world of country houses, city mansions and holidays in spa towns or by the Carinthian lakes. His mum was a fashionable woman ruling over a half dozen servants while his father was a dedicated hunter who enjoyed conversating in Latin (and, accidentally, despised the Jews).

And yet, the von Rezzoris didn't fit the usual Belle Epoque picture of an uptown bourgeois Austro-Hungarian family giving parties, going to the opera, blaming the Versailles Treaty and - alas - flirting with antisemitism.
Living in multicultural but troubled Bukovina, the family was forced to leave their home and belongings behind more than once during young Gregor's childhood. Suffice is to say that in the short span of thirty years, von Rezzori's hometown of Czernowitz passed from Austria to Romania to Soviet Union only to become an Ukrainian city back in 1991 under the current name of Chernivtsi.

'The Snows of Yesteryear' is much more than family history and an elderly novelist reminiscing on his childhood, it's a document of extraordinary importance to understand why a single town could bear six different names: Czernowitz, Chernivtsi, Chernovtsy, Cernauti, Czerniowce and Czernopol.

[Patrick Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read this in large part because I'd heard that it's a vivid portrait of life in Bukovina (a region now divided between northeastern Romania and southwestern Romania) in the years between the wars. This proved to be only very partially true. Almost all of the events do take place in or around the city that was Czernowitz in Austro-Hungary when Gregor was born in 1914, Cernăuți in the Kingdom of Romania for most of his boyhood, and Chernivtsi in the USSR when he wrote the book (it is still called Chernivtsi but is now in Ukraine). But it's neither a period piecee nor a book about a place. It is both more specific and more universal. This is because it is a portrait of a family, and specifically an unhappy family. As if to prove Tolstoy's dictum about unhappy families, it is impossible to imagine any family anywhere in the world that was unhappy in quite the same way as the von Rezzoris.

The title is not a direct translation from the original. Rezzori, who wrote all of his books (of which there were more than 20) in German, gave his work the unapologetically verbose title of Blumen im Schnee – Portraitstudien zu einer Autobiographie, die ich nie schreiben werde. Auch: Versuch der Erzählweise eines gleicherweise nie geschriebenen Bildungsromans (Flowers in the Snow — Portrait Studies for an Autobiography, which I will never write. Or, an attempt at a similarly-not-written coming of age story). In comparison, Snows of Yesteryear is remarkably compact. It is, however, fitting. Not only does it evoke a sense of a world irrevocably lost, but like Villon's Ballade des dames du temps jadis (whence the quotation comes), this is a remembrance of individual people. Von Rezzori took the unusual step of writing his memoir as a series of biographical sketches of people who important in his childhood. All but one of them are women.

The first of these was his nanny, who adds the greatest amount of local colour. Feeling close to one's nanny than to one's mother may have been an expected part of upper-class childhood in this period, but no other region could a nanny quite like Gregor's, who was a local peasant whose sanity was frequently questioned by those around her. He claims (with what must surely be some hyperbole) that she spoke no language fluently. Instead, she communicated entirely an idiolect of her own, which was roughly one-third Romanian and one-third Ukranian, with the final third being a hodgepodge of other languages, including Armenian, Yiddish, and Turkish. Given that Frau von Rezzori spoke only German, 'finishing school French, and nursery English', communication must have been challenging, to say the least. Nevertheless, she taught Gregor a vast array of fairy tales.

The second of these influential people was Frau von Rezzori herself, referred to as 'The Mother' (definite article definitely deliberate), a glamorous but totally unstable figure. Before the First World War, she had decided that her health required her to spend summers in the Alps, which was not so unusual, and winters in Egypt, which certainly was. Her approach to parenting seems to have been fairly disastrous, and although von Rezzori is just about able to forgive, he clearly never forgot (even in a book written 70 years later). Some of her obsessions were, in fairness, fairly typical of her time, although does detract from the rather alarming title of the anti-masturbation pamphlets she secretly distributed in her son's room: 'Young men, rejoice in your full testicles!'. But she combined this with an intense hypochondria by proxy, that led her to regard her children's good health with a mixture of surprise and disappointment. She spoiled her son with extravagant toys, but she took a cruel and idiosyncratic approach to discipline. For minor offenses, she would explain to her children that what they had done meant that she could no longer love them. More major disappointments, however, required a more theatrical technique: she would either pretend to abandon her son, vanishing and not answering his cries, or else would tell him that his behaviour had so upset her that she was now going to kill herself.

Gregor's father, the only man in the book, is portrayed as both a martinet and a buffoon. He worked first as a civil servant for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then improbably enough, as a senior clerical official in the employ of the Romanian Orthodox Church, a position for which he was markedly unsuited. According to his son, he was a man of diverse interests, but all of them related to shooting. The only time when the two of them bonded was when out stalking deer, hares, or fowl. His father was also a vicious anti-Semite and pan-German nationalist, whose only objection to National Socialism was that its leaders were all frightfully common.

The final two figures are rather less memorable. Gregor's elder sister was a model child and then pupil, very much unlike her brother. He felt overshadowed by her all of his boyhood, but then regarded her illness and early death as the most traumatic. The final figure is a woman who was clearly very interesting in her own right, having entered the employ of Frau von Rezzori's family after a stint as Mark Twain's secretary. However, Gregor's portrait of her is far less vivid than those of his parents and nanny

[Daniel Polansky]

So I read Ermine in Czernopol a few months back, and it was one of those books that I didn't exactly enjoy but which made me want to read something else by the author. Rezzori, a German-speaking mutt hailing from what is now a rather barren and homogenous portion of Ukraine but what was, before the fall of the Dual Monarchy, a vibrant ethnic stew of Eastern Europeans, essentially does a Proust here, recalling, in vivid and glorious detail, the events of his childhood. Framed as recollections of five people who played critical roles in his childhood, his wet nurse, his mother, his father, his sister, and a governess, Rezzori takes us to a world in its death throes, dismantled by World War I and about to be wiped away completely by World War II. It is an audacious task, to mimic one of history's supreme literary luminaries, but Rezzori does not shame himself. The writing is brilliant, a bit flowery perhaps but that's part of the fun of the thing, its loving descriptions of a vanished world. He manages to walk the most glorious tightrope here between romanticism and cold-eyed cynicism, and his descriptions of his loved ones, all long dead by the time he was writing this book, are loving but entirely unsentimental. These were deeply flawed people, as was Rezzori (as are all of us (let's not get off topic)), and though he looks back upon them with a love only deepened by time he in unsparing in his criticism of their follies, and his follies, and the follies of the age. Haunting and beautiful, one of my favorites of 2016.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friend Louisa recommended The Snows of Yesteryear over a bowl of steaming pork belly ramen in the East Village. Von Rezzori's memoir is Japanese comfort food for the winter-bound soul. He writes about a town in the Bukovina area of what was once the Austrian Empire, briefly under Romanian control, then Russian occupation, and now part of the Ukraine.

Rezzori was an expat in his own home. a man without the possibility of national identity.

In part the book is a social comedy. Portraying the futility and hilarity of the main figures of Rezzori's life defining their identities around past and or present political alliances and bourgeoisie existence.

[Andrew]

My continuing obsession with pre-WWII Mitteleuropa culture has landed me at the doorstep of Herr Gregor von Rezzori (obviously). The Snows of Yesteryear is by no means a masterpiece, but it is an incredibly charming, witty, enlightening memoir describing the sort of lost world characterized by children with flaxen curls and sailor suits, fascist uncles and communist daughters, beery Germans and oniony Romanians and gloomy Hasidim, daring youthful romances, saber-scarred cheeks, courtly love, all that. More or less exactly what I expected. I love that shit, and so I loved every minute of reading this book.

[Anna Gotowska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jezu, ale to była UCZTA.

Książka o odchodzeniu starego świata, w której trzeźwa nostalgia nie jest sztywnym więzieniem bezkrytycznej pamięci, a impulsem do głęboko ironicznego, choć i pełnego ciepła powrotu do miejsca, gdzie granica między XIX a XX wiekiem była jeszcze płynna.

To świat Lampedusy, Canettiego, Rotha, Singera, świat La Grande Illusion i Pułkownika Blimpa, równie mocno obśmiany co opłakany. Wnikliwy portret epoki i ludzi, którzy byli jej emanacją, karykaturalny korowód cyrkowych dziwadeł i pereł Mitteleuropy.

Fraza Rezzoriego, wycyzelowana do perfekcji a jednocześnie nieokiełznana i rozbuchana, płynie z Bukowiny do każdego krańca ck monarchii, przywołując duchy klasy ludzi, którym kiedyś, przez chwilę, mogło się wydawać, że są kulturową solą europejskiej ziemi.

Kryzys wielonarodowego projektu splata się z kryzysem rodziny, stare formy odchodzą do lamusa, nowe rodzą się w bezlitosnych bólach nowoczesności. To demoralizujący czas schyłku, obnażenie moralnego i intelektualnego skostnienia warstw, z niesmakiem ale biernie a często nawet z aprobatą patrzących w stronę Republiki Weimarskiej.

Ciężko nie myśleć o naszych aktualnych końcach świata, naszych grzechach skostnienia i biernych spojrzeniach, w końcu i teraz rzeczywistośc o której lubimy myśleć że jest stałą, trzeszczy w szwach.

Tłumaczenie Gralińskiej to jest mistrzostwo świata, z resztą kolejne po Kempowskim. Nowy Kempowski już we wrześniu NO CZEKAM JAK SZCZUR NA OTWRACIE KANAŁU.

[Elwira Księgarka na regale · Rating 5 out of 5]

To niezwykle piękne dzieło otwiera opis wczesnego dzieciństwa narratora i Kasandry, jego mamki, niańki, opiekunki, która stanowiła nierozerwalny element jego świata, gdzie to znerwicowana matka nastręcza zmartwień, a ojciec walczy na wojnie. Skrywa się we włosach Kasandry, w jej nieokrzesanych opowieściach, miksturze języków i pochodzenia, by stopniowo pojąć różnice klasowe i wyjść spod kloszu dzieciństwa w stronę dojrzałości. „Niezłomny chłopski zmysł rzeczywistość” walczy tutaj z „fanaberiami mieszczuchów”.

Z niebywałą czułością i wnikliwością opisuje mikrokosmos swojego dzieciństwa poprzez relacje z Kasandrą. Odnosząc się do jej języka, wyglądu, ubioru, sposobu bycia zestawiając to genialnie z rozpadem jego własnej rodziny i ojczyzny. Obraz rodziny i utratę naiwności dziecka autora zestawia z rozpadem cesarstwa Austro-Węgierskiego, co niezaprzeczalnie miało wpływ na dramat wielu rodzin. Rezzori, austriacki mistrz modernizmu, zapuszcza sondę w bebechy swojej rodziny i osób, które miały na niego silny wpływ. Po Kasandrze, opisuje swoją matkę, ojca, siostrę oraz guwernantkę.

To powieść intensywna. Miesza autobiografię i fikcję, by obnażyć kłamstwa, które rządzą wyższymi sferami, ukazać jak po cichu może rodzić się nacjonalizm i płytkość rodzinnych relacji. Rezzori jest mistrzem w opisywaniu ludzkich biografii. Tworzy portrety postaci pełne szczegółów, głębi mieszając surowy obraz z nostalgią i czułością czyniąc ze swojej powieści znakomitą ucztę językową.

[Rambling Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75

[Ionut Babă · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Life in Bukovina between the wars, when the Austro-Hungarian crown territory was transferred to Romania, before being partitioned with the USSR. Nowadays Czernowitz is in Ukraine, although that lies beyond the end of this memoir, written in 1989 and with an epilogue about returning to the city in that year.

Von Rezzori's family were of the Austrian administrative class who were left high and dry after the end of Empire, but chose to stay on in the new world where they were suddenly a despised ethnic minority, although they eventually drifted back to Vienna. We hear about his parents' views, including an honest recounting of his father's anti-semitism and how it was compatible with a low regard for Hitler and the Nazis, who were just vulgar little provincial philistines from the perspective of an aristocrat for whom Greater Germany was a spiritual community. Mother tries to keep up with fashion and even becomes a feminist. There is plenty of background detail about the multicultural worlds of the Empire and its successors, and what it feels like to have and lose privilege.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four stars is more accurate as the book was very well written. But I have so many other favorites it wouldn't be fair to give it more than three that basically says "I liked it". My problem with the book was my own unfamiliarity with the writer and his works and the fact that world history is not something I am too concerned with even in light of its importance. I do enjoy personal history which there was plenty of in this book, but the wars and politics of the time probably bother me more than interest me. I had difficulty connecting to all the different characters and never became emotionally involved with any of them. But I do know how respected and admired Gregor von Rezzori is to some and I wish I felt differently about this fine work.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautifully written evocation of what is something of a lost world - the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire between the two world wars.

There are some excellent reviews on here - e.g. Declan's - that do the book much more justice than I can.

Why not 5 stars? Well firstly I set the bar high on that award. But secondly, as a matter of personal taste, I prefer fiction to non-fiction, albeit that this is my favourite type of autobiographical non-fiction, told by a fiction writer so that it reads more like a novel, just one very grounded in real events and some very memorable real people.

Recommended.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title drew me in, then I highly enjoyed this book, a memoir about Rezzori growing up in Berkovina, with a polyglot of minorities and how the area changed from 1914 until after WWII. He spends a long section each on the people who he felt raised him: his early nanny, his mother & father (who were mismatched and wildly neurotic) , a sister and a governess/tutor. He is the author of "Memoirs of an Anti-semite" which I haven't read, but will now.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

wonderful autobiography of growing up and old in eastern and western europe. born in the bukovina (austo-hungro empire)in what? 1914, which changed to Romania, which changed to ukraine. this is a reprint of nyrb 2010, originally in german from 1989. goes well with orringer's "invisible bridge" and Patrick fermor's "a time of gifts". intro by john banville.

[David Partikian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Snows of Yesteryear
---Gregor von Rezzori

Few memoirists have the perspicacity to observe ethnic nuance and the Rabelaisian vocabulary of a true raconteur. Gregor von Rezzori first regaled English-speaking readers in the late 60’s when a translation of vignettes that later became Memoirs of an Anti-Semite appeared in the New Yorker. In that earlier work, Rezzori patched together reminiscences of his boyhood and youth in the moribund outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, concentrating—as the title implies—on the ingrained anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe. Rezzori, a scrupulously honest memoirist, evoked his childhood, warts and all, for an audience still grappling with the Holocaust.

With The Snows of Yesteryear, Rezzori continues along the path of self-reflection, once again relating his childhood and adolescence, but this time with specific portraits of his nanny, mother, father, sister and governess. All have precise descriptions and sociological observations that accurately paint an era and locale long gone. This on his mother’s perception of socioeconomic class while living in a region separated from the Russian Revolution by a river:

Mother’s arrogance, occasionally erupting from the constantly smoldering fire of her repressed rage, paralyzing her at such moments into a mute and rigid statue, did not improve her dealings with the people around her in a setting that was going to seed. Ever since the pillaging bands in the first weeks after the breakdown of 1918, she suspected the entire population in both city and country of waiting only for an opportunity to turn into marauders, to slit the throats of their betters, to skewer the children. It was obvious to her that this ragged and unwashed populace, coughing and spitting and pissing against the next fencepost, was composed of militant carriers of infectious germs. Any and all occasions for us to come into contact with ordinary people was restricted to an absurd minimum.

And this decidedly un-PC description of Ukrainians (Ruthenians):

Dr. Z, a physician who had a practice in Cirlibaba, a dump of a place in the deepest Carpathian woods; he was the only doctor for a hundred miles around. The Huzules—a Ruthenian-speaking tribe said to be the direct descendants of the Dacians, since whose times they barely had been touched by the hand of progress—hesitated for years before entrusting to him their bone fractures, wolf bites, the eelworm nests in their lungs and their syphilis-eroded noses, instead resorting to their own herb-brewing witches ; but ultimately they came to him, since he was covered by the state health insurance plan, and they did not have to pay him anything besides occasional voluntary contributions in the form of cheese, wild berries, or trout and grouse hens from their poachings.

While Rezzori’s voice in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite resembles a cross between a boastful Henry Miller and a Modernist wordsmith like Henry Roth, the voice in Snows of Yesteryear is more restrained, yet relating a world long gone like Thomas Wolfe’s. These memories and honest appraisals of different ethnic groups are an enjoyable read; the reading is—presumeably-- more entertaining than an anthropological tract on Romania or Galicia. With a voice that references Franz Werfel’s remarkable The Pure in Heart (Barbara Oder Die Frömmigkeit) and harkens Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern, Rezzori’s reminiscences are always a compelling read. The admirable translation by H.F. Rotherman saved me the scary task of attempting this book in the original German; Rezzori was a polyglot with working knowledge of German, English, Yiddish, Romanian and Italian. Some translations from Memoirs of an Anti-Semite are his own.

As a coda, Rezzori’s Wolfe-like description upon his horror at revisiting his childhood city, Czernowitz, then Chernovotsy in the 80’s: You must never undertake the search for time lost in the spirit of nostalgic tourism. Amen.

[aga bookish · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 🌟

[WillemC · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Je moet nooit met de instelling van een nostalgische toerist op zoek gaan naar de verloren tijd."

Een bij momenten geniale autobiografie die is opgebouwd rond vijf belangrijke figuren uit Rezzori's jeugd: zijn ouders, zijn zus en twee kindermeisjes. Hier en daar verliest hij me wel wat door verwijzingen naar de complexe politieke achtergrond waartegen zijn jeugd zich afspeelde.

[Russel Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful reminisce about a world, or at least a small slice of it, gone by. Rezzori spent his formative years in Czernowitz, a provincial capital cum backwater that had three peacetime masters in the first three decades of his life. Rezzori was quintessentially Habsburg, with an Italian last name and a German first name; he chances to grow up in Romania because his father was a Habsburg functionary in its Easternmost city of consequence. Some of Rezzori’s reminisces are deeply personal, but his work shines as a picture of a world that still echoed its Habsburg past, that had yet to become fully something else. He speaks of the melange of communities and costumes and tongues mixing in the city, the animosities and the interchange that made it work, and of the melting pot’s intrusion even into his own household. His nursemaid, a folksy Hutsul woman, his worldly Austrian governess, his very Viennese mother, and his Germanophile father each exercise their influence over his upbringing and stamp his life. Czernowitz of his youth is both an anachronism and a idyll of a cosmopolis on a small scale, and his portrait is quite a compelling one.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

gregor von rezzori is creeping his way to the top of my most-exciting-authors list. he has an astounding ability to arrange his thoughts with insight and poetry, and he manages to do so while remaining a few paces away from the threshold of self-indulgence and "purple prose."

the snows of yesteryear (that's blumen im schnee in german, or "flowers in the snow") is more directly autobiographical than his also amazing memoirs of an anti-semite, but the two make a perfect pair in the long run. with even deeper intimacy, snows examines the peculiar, multifaceted personalities that populated his youth in czernowitz, which during his lifetime began as an outpost of the austria-hungarian empire, then became part of romania, was eventually claimed by the soviet union and, following its collapse, is now currently part of the ukraine. rezzori's precarious upbringing as the pseudo-aristocratic child of a dying empire filled his head with all sorts of contradictory (and often hilarious) prejudices, which he examines with merciless scrutiny and sensitivity.

the book is split into five sections, each devoted to a different figure from his life. three are devoted to direct members of his family (mother, father and sister), and two involve servants. the first chapter, devoted to his servant cassandra, is probably the memoir's highlight, because it sets the stage for his various obsessions (race, class, cultural idiosyncrasies, child care, superstition) and offers him the strongest figure through which to unravel the chauvinism at the root of his own psychological development. cassandra is described in terms that would never be used in any such inquiry today ("simian," for example), and rezzori's assessment of the cultural sphere in czerowitz is often quite curmudgeonly. but his warts-and-all approach also avoids a lot of the obvious sentimentality implied by the memoir form (and the book's awkwardly-translated title, while we're at it). rezzori's tough love is so insistently introspective that his cruelest thoughts are often circular in form. as soon as he shares them, he immediately pivots to the roots of his own biases - and applies the same scalpel to his own life story. surprisingly enough, this approach is never cool or detached. in the case of cassandra, she emerges as a character of great strength without confirming to the "magical" stereotypes of idealized otherness.