A Common Reader . . .

Review: Kahn and Englemann - Hans Eichner

The English translation of Kahn and Englemann was published this year by the Canadian publisher Biblioasis, just three days after its author Hans Eichner died at the age of 87.  Eichner, an Austrian Jew, was well-placed to write this story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary as they made their way through the trials of the last century, for much of the book echoes his own family and personal history. 

In the midst of the story is of course the Holocaust, but it features more as an ironic exit room for many of the Kahns and Engelmann's, for Eichner does not dwell on the horrors, but reports that such and such "turned his face to the wall and starved to death in the Theresienstadt concentration camp" - after all, the horrors are well known, and perhaps Eichner realised that he had little to add to those more detailed accounts from other authors.  However, more on this towards the end of this review.

The story begins in Tapolca, near Lake Balaton in Hungary, where the Kahn's are wealthy estate owners.  However, the story begins with the narrator's grandmother, Sidonie, at the age of 17 deciding to marry a poor shoe-maker.  Nobody can persuade her otherwise, and she even escapes from virtual house-arrest to go to the boy she has chosen for herself, before long returning home expecting a baby. 

Sidonie is a resourceful girl and much to her parents' disgust, starts selling vegetables from a market stall.  She is an ambitious young woman and gets her way in everything she sets her heart on, and soon the young family are loading all their belongings onto a cart and making a terribly arduous journey to Vienna. 

Despite initial hardship, the family prosper in Vienna and another generation takes the stage, as prosperous clothing retailers.  We read their stories and hear how they bicker and fight, but remain united in the face of increasing anti-Jewish feeling during the 1930s.  By this time, the narrator is a young man, and manages to escape out of Austria into Belgium where he manages to get on one of the last ships taking Jewish émigrés to London.  This is very much the author's own story,for the book is at least partly autobiographical.

In the second-half of the book, the narrator describes a lengthy episode in the 1930s when his father and his father's brother were in dispute over their joint business enterprise.  Eichner reproduce pages of correspondence between the two men, showing the extreme bitterness which led them to break up their business.  The wrangling and personal attacks reached a terrible pitch causing the family to try to intervene.  Alas, the two men could not be reconciled and a terrible tragedy occurred as a result. 

There is much Jewish-related content throughout the book.  Hans Eichner frequently digresses from his narrative to tell Jewish stories and jokes and to tell folk-lorish tales of encounters with rabbis and ancestors.  He also keeps flashing forward to describe the narrator's own situation as a veterinary surgeon in modern-day Haifa.  These interruptions to the narrative show how a family is linked across the generations by its own culture and its own saga, with people from earlier generations still influencing events in the present. 

In the final section of this book we read of the narrtor's life after the war-years as an academic in Canada.  He taught German, speaking with his students "about Goethe and Holderlin, about Keller and Storm, about Kafka, Thomas Mann and Brecht, but never about the Holocaust".  With increasing realisation of his ignorance of this subject he went to the library and began to read.  Within a few days he had appalling stomach pains and "images of horror pursued me into sleep until I hardly dared to go to bed any more". 

When he finally stopped reading the Holocaust literature, the narrator realised that he had hardly done a thing while these dreadful events were taking place other than to live a life of pleasure and sleep with his girlfriends.  A realisation dawned on him that he had to be part of the new state of Israel and to serve it in a productive way. An idea comes to him to re-train as a veterinarian and to emigrate to Israel to look after the livestock, and before long he has enrolled on a five year course to achieve his aim. 

I am pleased that I was able to read this book and can say that it sits well among other books describing this period by authors such as Thomas Mann or Stefan Zweig.  It is a very "European" book and I would say that is is an useful contribution to an understanding of what mid-20th century persecution meant for Jewish-European families.  Despite its fictional form, the author explains that he ended up writing a novel, although "there is little in it that didn't actually happen".  The freedom of the novel form and the use of the narrator's voice has brought the book to life far more than would have been possible if he had simply recounted these events as they happened. 

Review: The Orient Express - Gregor von Rezzori

The The Orient Express, was the last novel to be written by Gregor von Rezzori.  It was published in 1992, six years before his death, and it allows his un-named narrator to reflect on his life's journey as a wealthy business man, well into the last era of his life, as he travels the world alone, taking "time-out" from his marriage, his career and his responsibilities. 

Generally Von Rezzori's is thought of as a chronicler of the first half of the 20th century when Europe's old alliances were crumbling and one war after another redrew the Continent's boundaries.  Von Rezzori was a mid-European, finding himself transferring nationalities every few years as the nations traded citizenship with one another.  It is therefore strange to read this later novel, which is far more "modern" than his other work, being set firmly in the last decade and dealing with modern Western culture rather than pre-war Germany or the aftermath of the Austro Hungarian Empire. 

We meet the narrator in Venice, a place that disgusts him with its faded splendour, its tourist-infestation and general seediness.  His opulent hotel makes no impression on him, for his life has been spent in such surroundings.  He finds his hotel room more like a bordello, with its mirrors tilted towards the bed and its gold-framed Birth of Venus on the wall.  

While flicking through tourist brochures in the hotel lobby, he finds a brochure for the newly launched Orient Express.  The narrator finds himself both intrigued and disgusted by the thought of reviving this once great expression of romantic European travel.  For he had travelled extensively in Europe when such trains were the main way of transporting yourself across the Continent and he well-remembered their style and opulence. 

He recalls, "the gleaming windows of the restaurant car", where, "one saw the glint of soft lights on cut-glass decanters and silver champagne buckets, and the waiters' geometrically stark black-butterfly bows against chalk-white shirt-fronts". The narrator sees the revived service as "an abortive ham-fisted rendition reduced to cheap parody, a vain endeavour to convey to a world sold on cheap criteria something that had once been sublime reality". 

Over the next few days, the narrator spends his time reflecting on his life, recalling many scenes that typified his experiences and his relationships.  The narrator typifies world-weariness, for although he has had an eventful life, as he nears the end of it, he experiences a sense of utter meaningless which brings him to see the futility of all the encounters and adventures which seemed to important at the time.  Meanwhile, the Orient Express brochure keeps beckoning to him and eventually he succumbs to the call to participate in the dream presented within its pages and books himself a passage.

The train is fairly much as he expected, the facilities are good and the staff attentive.  The train lacks modern conveniences such as air-conditioning and showers, but the narrator is happy to be lulled back to an earlier time and takes advantage of the time to relax in comfort. 

As he travels he recalls his own lost Europe and looks out of the windows with contempt at the pollution and dirt which covers so much of the industrial areas he passes through.  He remembers the border crossings when passports had to be inspected and visas stamped.  It is all so much easier now, but something has been lost.  He meets a fellow passenger, a female tour guide and dines with her, eventualy managing to wangle an assignation, as he has done in many foreign cities in the past. 

Alas, things do not work out as he expected, and with an ironic flourish, von Rezzori deposits the narrator on a the ferry at Calais surrounded by "an array of colourful parkas, adolescents . . . already masters of the world".  Now, he thinks,

we shall embark on the last, only truly great adventure.  The adventure we seek throughout our lives, above all in carnal knowledge and in love.  Now its time to enter the Black Hole which gobbles everything up and regurgitates it, in the eternal process of maintaining business as usual.  Stillness would reign at last, probably.  But all this he would find out.  The mere passage of time would prove it.

The Orient Express is a fitting way of saying goodbye to Gregor von Rezzori.  We have accompanied him through his childhood in Bukovinia (The Snows of Yesteryear), seen him explore the cultural precocities of pre-war Europe (Memoirs of an Anti-Semite). We have seen him sparkle in pre-war Berlin (Oedipus in Stalingrad) and heard his verdict on the aftermath of the Second World War, and in particular, the  Nuremburg Trials (The Death of my Brother Abel). 

Now we say farewell to this author who surely describes mid-20th century Europe like no other.  The range of his interests and experiences covers all the key themes of the period and his artistic vision allows us to see behind the events of history into the European mind, which he understood in a unique way, allowing it to express itself so surely in his many-faceted writings.

Review: The Snows of Yesteryear - Gregor von Rezzori

This is one of a set of reviews of books by Austrian writer Gregor von Rezzori which, with some biographical and introductory material, will eventually form a separate category in this book-blog. 

It may not be of interest to most readers as many of von Rezzori's books are long out of print.

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The Snows of Yesteryear has the sub-title, "Portraits for an autobiography", which describes it perfectly.  Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998) was born and spent his early childhood in Bukovinia, in the Carpathian mountains, a region which, since the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has passed through several nationalities including Romania and Ukraine.  Gregor von Rezzori likewise was a citizen of the Empire, and then became Romanian, Russian and finally Austrian (the latter after a period of statelessness following World War II). 

Von Rezzori was a fine writer and I am convinced that it is only a matter of time before he is rediscovered as a classical author in the mould of other writers or his period such as Stefan Zweig. I was first drawn to read his books by an article I read in Slightly Foxed magazine in which John de Falbe of Sandoe Books, Chelsea wrote of von Rezzori's book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.

Von Rezzori's current obscurity is shown by the ease in which it is possible to obtain second-hand copies of his mostly out-of-print books.  I have found excellent hard-back copies at prices as low as £0.99 on both ebay and Abebooks, and as the photograph below shows, I have managed to build up a set of von Rezzori's main works with very little trouble at all. 

In The Snows of Yesteryear, von Rezzori recalls his Bukovinian childhood by presenting pen-pictures of his nurse, mother, father, sister and governess. Von Rezzori was born into a comparatively well-off family, but with more than a little of what we now call dysfunction.  His father was a robust hunting-man, happiest when in the forests with his friends.  When not hunting, he was womanising, much to his wife's distress.  He has what von Rezorris describes as a "pathological" anti-Semitism, but loathed National Socialism because of its socialism.  When viewing a magazine cover containing a portrait of Adolf Hitler, von Rezzori's father commented, "Germany rises once more.  But have a look at this fellow:  I wouldn't hire him as a stable boy!" 

In a region of highly mixed ethnicities but with a surprising degree of tolerance, the young Von Rezzori found his father's Anti-Semitism highly embarrassing and we read of several episodes in which his father's outbursts against Jews led to a cringing desire to hide-away.   No doubt these experiences were the raw material for von Rezzori's book, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.  

Von Rezzori's mother was a sickly obsessive who kept her children close to her, not even letting them play freely in the garden.  Towards the end of her long life (she died when she was 86), the family realised that in fact her health had been excellent and her constitution tough, but while Von Rezzori was growing up, his mother convinced everyone that "as someone in poor health, even the simplest of tasks were beyond her". 

The author's sister was four years older than him and was his chief tormentor during his childhood.  He writes, "one thing is certain to her.  I had to be a thorn in her flesh. For four years she had lived alone in the radiance of her father's love, unmolested by her mother's shifting emotional outbursts.  Then one day I appeared on the scene and forthwith the splendour faded away".  I picture of intense sibling rivalry emerges, but von Rezzori alas was unable to develop a more mature relationship with her in later years for she died of cancer at age 22.

Perhaps the most vivid portrait in the book is of von Rezzori's nurse, Cassandra.  He writes, "when she joined the household, it was said, she was hardly more than a beast".  Dressed in traditional costume of a wrap skire, sleeveless sheepskin jacket and leather buskins, von Rezzori's mother called her "the savage one".  von Rezzori believed that Cassandra was in fact his wet-nurse, a fact denied by his mother.  Von Rezzori tells many tales of this eccentric and much-derided figure, but when the family had to feel to Trieste before the Russian advance after World War I, Cassandra, who spoke no language correctly was able to negotiate safe passages by use of snatches of Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Ruthenian, Turkish and Yiddish, "assisted by a grotesque, grimacing mimicry and a primitive, graphic body language that made everyone laugh and that everyone understood". 

Despite the sadness of experiencing his parents' separation at an early age and many other childhood traumas and disappointments, this book is no Angela's Ashes.  It would not fit into the "tragic childhood" genre so popular today.  For one thing despite the dramas of a mid-European life in the early 20th century, von Rezzori is far too stylish a writer to deliberately pull the heart-strings.  There is no sorrow in this book, rather a practical, no-nonsense description of events and a set of sympathetic portraits of the people who featured in his young life. 

The book would be of interest to anyone interested in this period of time, but makes a worthwhile read in itself because of the quality of von Rezzori's writing and the vividness of the images he produces. 

Review: Oedipus in Stalingrad - Gregor von Rezzori

I have recently discovered the books of Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1988) and feel that I have stumbled upon a layer of gold down in the deeper mines of 20th century literature.  Its just surprising that at this point in time that publishers of such authors as Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Gunther Grass etc, aren't falling over themselves trying to get out a unified edition of Rezzori's works, and I'm sure its only a matter of time before von Rezzori is well-known as a classic writer of 20th century mid-Europe.  

I've filed this post under "Austrian fiction" on the basis that von Rezzori took on Austrian nationality after World War II, when his home region of Bukovina, originally part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had passed through the hands of Russia, Romania and Ukraine.  Truly, von Rezzori was highly qualified to chronicle the maelstrom of mid-Europe in those tumultuous years, and as I read his books I find a unique voice which is quite impossible to pin-down as German, Romanian, Russian or Austrian.  

von Rezzori is primarily a writer of novels.  Even where the writing seems to be autobiographical, the reader is never too sure how authentic the memoirs are.  In an interview with Bruce Wolmer, when asked about the conflation between the first-person narrator of his books with himself, von Rezzori replies, "this is such an old discussion:  To what extent are books autobiographic?  Its ridiculous.  You can't eliminate yourself totally unless you're Shakespeare".  And yet, in von Rezzori, we find completely authentic voices, whether its "Gregor" in Confessions of an Anti-Semite, or Baron Peter in Oedipus in Stalingrad, von Rezzori's characters have a convincing, if unappealing world-view.  Von Rezzori understood these people, he knew where they were coming from, and he was unashamed to tell their stories without the need for constant corrective commentary - their words alone are their judge. 

Review: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite - Gregor von Rezzori

I came to read Gregor Von Rezzori through reading an article, Chronicle of Loss, by John de Falbe in Slightly Foxed magazine no. 15.  As a book reviewer, it is easy to concentrate on new books to the exclusion of many excellent novels which are fast-fading from public gaze.  Who for example reads Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene or Daphne du Maurier these days?  Slightly Foxed magazine publishes articles about writers from the last 100 years or so and reminds its readers of so many 20th century gems that the subscription seems well worth-while.

Gregor von Rezzori is a deeply reflective writer.  He writes what might be called memoir-based fiction, but he is not just interested in his stories, but wants to bring out the meaning behind them.  His mind is hugely inventive and the reader gets the impression of someone who can see all points of view and incorporate them into his stories.  He seldom allows his characters to get away with expressing their prejudices and long-held opinions but always sets them in juxtaposition with someone holding an opposing view, or else shows the absurbity of their statements by setting them in a context of personal decline and ultimate failure. 

Review: Chess - Stefan Zweig

Ever since reading Stefan Zweig's longest novel, Beware of Pity, I tend to pounce on any book I find by this early 20th century  Austrian author.  Chess is what may be called a "slim volume", being only 73 pages long, but readers of Zweig will be used to slim volumes - for with such a small oeuvre, publishers seem unable to resist issuing Zweig's novellas and short stories in small portions.

Regular visitors to A Common Reader will know that I don't hesitate to comment on the physical attributes of a book - binding, cover art, price and anything else that strikes me about the production before me. In this case, while the production is excellent the price is silly - I am only grateful to ebay which enabled me to pick up Chess for £0.99 rather than the £5.99 cover price allocated by Penguin. 

Quibble over, the novella is as well-nigh perfect as might be expected.  A wealthy passenger on a Buenos Aires bound ship, discovers that a famous chess-master Czentovic is also on board.   Czentovic, the chess-master was an infant-prodigy peasant with no education or talent in other fields, but has risen to prominence in the world of chess with this single talent which has failed to civilize him in other ways, leaving him brutish and insensitive.  

The narrator decides to challenge Czentovic to a game, but the chess-master replies that he is unable to play any game for a smaller fee than $250.  The narrator clubs together with a group of aquaintances and take on Czentovic as a team, only to be roundly beaten and in very few moves.  During the next game, a mysterious stranger approaches the group and offers advice, leading to a draw, much to the surprise of Czentovic. 

Review: The Post Office Girl - Stefan Zweig

Many thanks to Sort Of Books for publishing yet another posthumous work by Stefan Zweig - even if as in the case of the Post Office Girl, Zweig's intentions for the book were somewhat unclear.  In an Afterword, the the essayist and literary critic, William Deresiewicz, points out that Zweig "nibbled away at the Post Office Girl for years . . . and given that he chose his own time of death (by suicide) . . . it seems clear that he never managed to hammer the novel into a shape that satisfied him". 

Despite its less than perfect state however, we can be grateful for substantial segments of "classic Zweig".  In some ways, it could be seen as a short story (although nearly 250 pages long) and that would allow us to be tolerant of its less than satisfactory ending.  We could then perhaps put its incompleteness down to modernism, or to an attempt by the author to create a deliberate literary enigma.  Most readers will in any case be quite able to supply their own ending depending on whether they share Zweig's doom-laden state of mind in 1940, or whether they choose to lift the novel into another sphere where some sort of happier ending is posited.

The story briefly, is of Christine, a Post Office assistant in a remote village in Austria some two hours by train from Vienna.  Christine has led a miserable life, suffering the pervasive poverty of Austro-German people after the First World War.  She lives with her ailing widowed mother, and her life is one of endless drudgery and "making do", until suddenly out of the blue, her mother's sister who emigrated to America sends a telegram to say that she is arriving in Europe for a vacation and would Christine like to travel to the Swiss Alps to spend time in their hotel with them.