Gregor von Rezzori’s 1989 memoir, originally published in German, portrays his family during a momentous period of European history. He was born in 1914 at his mother’s estate in Bukovina, which at that time was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lived for his first few years in Czernowitz, the provincial capital, his family belonging to that class of administrators any large-scale colonial enterprise requires for its smooth operation. The First World War forced the family to leave Czernowitz for Trieste, then Austria, before they could return to their home city.
In 1919, following the Empire’s collapse, Bukovina was occupied by Romania, becoming Cernăuți. Rezzori and his German-speaking family lost their status and became outsiders in their own country, disliked and treated with a measure of suspicion by Romanian authorities keen to flex their nationalist muscles. His parents’ upper-class attitudes were archaic in a society alien to the one they had known, yet ironically they were considered outsiders in Austria because of their provincial background, their existence a reminder of humiliating defeat.
Then further upheaval took place with the Russian occupation in 1940 and the eventual partition of Bukovina between Romania and the Ukrainian SSR, Cernăuți becoming Chernivtsi. The city, diverse before the Second World War, had hummed with a multi-ethnic vibrancy that was lost after the upheavals of conflict and ethnic cleansing, along with its particular sense of identity.
The book, subtitled ‘Portraits for an Autobiography’, is structured as a series of five sketches of individuals that combine to provide a group portrait of Rezzori’s family and their influences on his life. In their combination we learn about him, as the narrative moves back and forth through the decades, treating each in turn.
His mother was physically attractive but self-absorbed, insisting early in her marriage that her delicate health required regular cosseting away from her husband in the Alps and in Egypt. She was interfering and overprotective of her young children, perpetually disappointed by life, her loss of status, and particularly by her two husbands, both of whom she divorced, though the second seems to have been a perfectly decent man. Having been brought up in a culture where roles were predetermined, hence her marriage to an unsuitable first husband, father of her children, she struggled to adapt to the loss of certainty that came with the changing situation in Europe.
Father was obstinate, distant emotionally, unfaithful and often away from home. While anti-Semitic, he possessed an aristocratic disdain for the petit-bourgeois Nazis. He was an obsessive hunter and murderer of wildlife on a massive scale. Yet he was cultivated and worked for the Romanian Orthodox Church, advising on the preservation of artefacts. He may have favoured his daughter, but some of Rezzori’s happiest childhood moments were spent in his company.
His sister was four years older, and while he loved her she overshadowed him growing up, and he could only look on with envy at her easy intelligence, certainty about life, and the companionable rapport she enjoyed with their father. She was always careful to remind Rezzori of her seniority and her memories of early family travails he could not have known at the time. Her memory was preserved by her death at the age of 22, falling ill despite her mother’s neurotic worries about childhood ailments. Rezzori was robbed of any opportunity to become her equal, leaving her memory as a yardstick for all his future actions.
In addition to his immediate family, he bookends the chapters with portraits of two individuals who had a significant influence as mother surrogates. Cassandra, his nursemaid, was of uncertain origins, uneducated, speaking a mishmash of languages that could barely be understood, and was so earthy they had to burn her clothes when she arrived. More authentic than his blood relatives, she transmitted a love of folk tales to her young charge and anchored him, until he outgrew her.
Finally, there was Mrs Strauss, known as Bunchy, the warm, nurturing Pomeranian governess who had once been a friend of Mark Twain’s. A gifted teacher who inspired lifelong devotion in her charges, she was able to manage the Rezzori family adroitly. She gave Gregor the necessary perspective to assist his development as a young man.
In recalling the group, Rezzori’s memories range from amused and affectionate to exasperated, overlaid with melancholy, as summed up in the title derived from François Villon’s Ballade des dames du temps jadis. He is detached when writing about his parents, ambivalent when writing about his sister, and warm when writing about Cassandra and Bunchy. The sections devoted to his family members are only headed with their family relationships to Gregor (‘The Father’, ‘The Mother’, The Sister’), while those devoted to Cassandra and Bunchy are headed by their names.
Family dynamics, notably his parents’ unsatisfactory marriage, intersect with larger political forces, particularly the growth of Nazism. They were a damaged family in damaged times. Rezzori charts how his family coped after the First World War, but there is always in the background the knowledge of the dramatic changes a new war and its aftermath will bring. A sense of loss pervades the book, both personal and geographically, his family dispersed or dead, their fortunes declining. The glowing quality to the account of his childhood throws later events into relief.
There is a stylistic unity to the memoir until the end, when he recounts a visit to Chernivtsi as an old man. In 1989 he was able to return for the first time since 1936. Describing his trip in an epilogue, he sees fewer physical changes have occurred in the intervening years than he had expected; but with the loss of the minorities and the establishment of its unambiguously Ukrainian identity there is a dullness in place of the vibrancy he remembered.
But then, what place can ever compare with the mythic quality with which we imbue our childhood? Rezzori concedes he had invented his own Czernowitz, and nostalgia brings disappointment in its wake. In these last pages literalness crashes into the delicate web of reminiscences of a lost age he had woven. While Rezzori stared at a new world and struggled to map the city onto the one he had conjured up in his mind, his vivid description of the old has brought it alive for the reader and ensured it will endure forever on the page.
