Memories of an anti-Semite

“My father hated the Jews, all of them, even the elderly, even the humblest. It was an ancient, ancestral, deep-rooted hatred that needed no explanation; any argument you could come up with to justify it, no matter how absurd, was considered legitimate. Stories of sinister conspiracies, like those described in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were considered nonsense. All these were fairy tales that we told the maids when they could stand us no longer and threatened to go work for some Jewish family, where they would earn more money and be treated better. We reminded them in passing that the Jews had indeed crucified our Savior. "However, people of our own kind did not need weighty arguments to see Jews as second-class people. It was very simple: we did not like them - or at least we liked them less than our other fellow human beings. And this was as natural as liking dogs more than cats."

The narrator of the five stories that make up this novel is the scion of a fallen aristocratic family from central Europe. He recalls his past and, at the same time, the darkest years of the 20th century - in Bukovina, Bucharest, Vienna, Berlin, Rome.

He is not a Nazi; his memories are full of Jewish lovers and Jewish friends. He is, however, taught to define himself in opposition to an imaginary enemy, the Jew, which creates a pernicious relationship of attraction and repulsion.

With relentless honesty, disarming apathy, and a poisonous humor that unsettles the reader, highlighting his own possible complicity, the author presents the world of pre-war Europe as being led sleepwalking into crime and destruction, driven not so much by malice as by spiritual laziness.