The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography

Rezorri writes of the five people who shaped his life and were entwined with the life and culture of Bukovinia;a country that was a crossroads for east and west;that had absorbed all the mish mash of languages and customs that had passed through and decided to stay. Rezorris family found themselves there at the tail end of the Hapsburg empire of which Bukovinia was part.His memoirs start between the first and second world wars;Bukovinia being ceded to Romania,then later to Soviet Russia.Always in the background is the sad knowledge that Bukovinia,with its gypsies,jews,colonials and uniqueness,is doomed by politics.If not Hitler,then Stalin.It made no difference. Rezorri returns to his old home and finds the vibrancy and life has been squeezed out of the place;made sterile by the drabness of communism after being exterminated in the war.The racial tensions and diversity of customs and languages that gave Bukovinia its vibrancy,wiped out for some skewed political ideal.It makes you realize that-as long as it doesn't boil over into holocaust-racial and social frictions are part of what makes humanity click. A great book;many of the anecdotes and reflections feature in arguably Rezorris greatest work,'The death of my brother Abel'.

Gregor Von Rezzori has quickly become a favorite writer and his works, companions in my life journey. The Snows of Yesteryear is a stylized memoir that reads much more like fiction. It is a non-linear memoir that has little regard to time or place as Rezzori jumps wherever his thoughts and reminiscences lead him. This jumping around leads to a lack of clarity and unevenness that at times hurt the overall work, however these relatively rare moments are offset by beautifully painful passages that evoke not only lost moments in his life, but in the readers as well. These moments are the heart of Von Rezzori's talent, at his best he can distill a fragment of time, or a time period down to its existential core, giving the reader that joyous, yet painful realization of a precious moment and the pain of its passing... and subsequently our passing as well.

This is an exceptional book. Everyone in von Rezzori's family is fascinating--including his governess, who was a friend of Mark Twain. The Bukovina, where the author grew up, is remote, strange, and beautiful. The politics of the period are byzantine, yet von Rezzori clarifies beautifully. His writing style is fresh, vivid, easy. He has a cosmopolitan vocabulary. If you like this book, definitely read his MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-SEMITE, also very fine.