Valerie Thornhill's Reviews > Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I met Gregor von Rezzori many years ago when I was teaching his sons at St. George's English School and also giving them private English lessons. I wasn't much older than them, and that created an interesting situation! The father never seemed to want to pay for the lessons, so I went to his house and asked for payment as no other messages were ever answered. Well, he was having a shower. I was summoned to the bathroom, told where to find the cheque book, and a hand reached out from behing the shower curtain to sign the amount I was asked to fill in. So I jumped when his name was mentioned by the friends we stayed with in Bucharest last October.
'We've read his books!' they said,'he grew up in Romania.'
I've just finished the first section of this uncompromisingly titled book. It's in the old, rich plum-cake style of 19th more than 20th-century literature, but the observations are penetrating, the cast of characters memorable and the picture of the dying influence of the the former Hapsburg empire unforgettable.Of old customs, societies, sports, habits and manners, all gone.These are said to be novels, but told in the first person, the first one feels like a memoir of childhood.