The Snows of Yesteryear

"Von Rezzori’s most famous book is called Memoirs of an Anti-Semite , and it is also partly autobiographical. Like The Snows of Yesteryear , which is a straight autobiography, it evokes a time and a place that no longer exists. Von Rezzori is from Czernowitz, in Bukovina, where I’ve been – it’s described in my book Between East and West – in the far corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was a German speaking town, and its architecture is still vaguely reminiscent of Vienna. And yet it’s now a located in a distant corner of Ukraine, where it languishes, a borderland city between nowhere and nowhere. I doubt very much if many people speak German there anymore. Von Rezzori’s central theme is the constant change of borders and nationality, and their impact on his childhood. He was born an “Austrian,” then became a Romanian, though the Romanians didn’t consider him a “real” Romanian. In that part of the world, the experience of such shifts was once quite common. It’s hard to generalise. In Between East and West , I describe an old man who was born in the Russian Empire, then lived in Poland, then the Soviet Union and then Belarus – all without leaving his hometown. To survive all of that, he attached himself to one of those identities, and defined himself as Polish. He absorbed himself in Polish literature, became attached to the Polish history of the region in which he lived and even wrote poetry about it. Rezzori’s book is also about other, more universal themes. His father was a nobleman obsessed with hunting, he was left alone much of the time with a neurotic mother, he kept getting kicked out of school. There’s a wonderful section of the book about his nanny, a Ukrainian woman who effectively raised him."