Who is this dandy confidently staring at us from the height of his 80 plus years? His family hailed from Sicily, his native land is the Bukovina, his roots are in Vienna, he lived Paris and Berlin, and he made his fame in the 1980's with Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, an evocative Bildungsroman set in the confines of the Habsburg lands in the mythical 20's and 30's. Many years later I came across his memoir, The Snows of Yesteryear - a wonderful collection of portraits of his maid, his mother, his father, his sister and his governess. What was he up to during the war? There is no great clarity on this point, but then Von Rezzori was no moralist. He was a storyteller and he lived long enough to get wise. Nostalgia tinged with emotion powered by loss, but no false feeling. Before he became a great writer, Rezzori lived his uprooted, difficult, challenging life. Only then did he remembered things past, for our benefit.
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