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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 833.912
EAN num: 9781590172810
ISBN number: 1590172817
Label: NYRB Classics
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: December 02, 2008
Publishing house: NYRB Classics
Release Date: December 02, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 84322
Studio: NYRB Classics
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Gregour von Rezzori was born in Czernowitz, a onetime provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine—a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear.
The book is a series of portraits—amused, fond, sometimes appalling—of Rezzori’s family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children’s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance.
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Rated by buyers 
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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 very 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'.
Rated by buyers -
Gregour 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.
Rated by buyers 
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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.
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