A Befuddled Aristocrat

...The first, "Skushno"-a Russian word meaning melancholy torpor-is an account of an adolescent friendship with an aggressive and brilliant Jewish boy and its breakup, told against the background of a provincial aristocratic household in the marshes of Bukovina...

...Youth" concerns a love affair with a Jewish widow somewhat older than Gregor in the languid atmosphere of Budapest between the wars...

...In this revealing scene, Gregor's perplexity is unmixed with horror, and we begin to get a notion of the guiltless yet sinister complicity he shared with the millions who were equally blind to the evil around them...

...Facts and characters from the previous episodes are summoned forth in "Pravda," the last story and the only one told in the third person rather than the first...

...The denouements of his various affairs with Jewish women, for example, are due less to his anti-Semitism than to comparatively flimsy motives that might have been more clearly analyzed...

...He is simply left with a nostalgia for the "real life" that he never lived, and the realization of the emotion's futility...

...In fact, von Rezzori's book demonstrates with disenchanted impartiality how a person with an old-fashioned upper-class background can absorb traditional prejudices and still feel friendliness, admiration and love for some of the Jews he encounters during his wandering, cosmopolitan life...

...A delicate romance with a "petite Christian Jewess" that fails to burgeon into love is the burden of "Loewinger's Rooming House...

...Gregor's anti-Semitism stems more from a lack of firm moral convictions and political consciousness that leaves him to be buffeted by the ambiguities of Jew-hatred in Mittel Europa's ethnic and cultural free-for-all...

...Gregor's immaturity, coupled with arrogance and thoughtlessness, brings the platonic tie to a miserable and shameful end...

...Reviewed by Silvio F. Senigallia Like the author, the first-person narrator of four of this novel's five semi-autobiographical episodes is a Mittel Europa aristocrat, born in one of the far Eastern provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the outbreak of World War I. Too late to partake of the real essence of Old Europe, he is fated to go through life as an "epigonus" (von Rezzori particularly likes the word), at once fascinated and repelled by a stable, brilliant past that he barely knows...

...The title (under which the fourth story, "Troth," was published by the New Yorker\n 1969) may be somewhat misleading...

...On his way to her house one night, the narrator finds himself by chance in a paradecele-brating Austria's annexation to Nazi Germany...

...The narrator's relations with a number of Jewish characters early in his life tenuously connect the five stories...

...The narrator (also named Gregor) is not a bigot who despises the "deicide" Jews, nor a paranoid Nazi denouncing their inferiority, nor a racist shrinking from their presence...

...The story ends suddenly, for unfathomable reasons...

...Gregor, now grown older, recalls the failure of a marriage (to a Jew, of course) and seeks the truth of his own experience by baring his soul to an elderly relative, a Russian noblewoman dying in Rome...

...This truth escapes him, however, for it is as elusive as his own fluctuating identity...

...Troth" (both this story and "Loewinger's Rooming House" were written in English) is a gentle recollection of an amitie amour-euse with a spirited Jewish girl in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss...

...something never explained happens to the young man that makes him feel he no longer "belonged to a caste enjoying authority by dint of universal respect" and "could no more change his nature than a Jew could...