Word: czernowitz
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Rezzori was the son of a minor aristocratic family living on the outer fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire near Czernowitz in the Bukovina, which became part of Rumania in 1919 when Rezzori was five, and was later swallowed by the Soviet Union. Rezzori's tale is not a continuous narrative but a group of character studies of five people who presided over his childhood and youth -- pillars of the writer's adult imagination around whose base the boy's life was lived...
...Trenches. "Everything I am," says Reder, "I owe to Czernowitz," the Ukrainian city where he was born, the son of a Jewish innkeeper. Czernowitz, now Russian but then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was a town that thrived on folklore and legend, and even the grim periodic pogroms added to the sense of drama. At 17, Reder was drafted into the Austrian army, spent World War I in the trenches as one of the most wretched and incompetent of privates...
...never went back to secondary school, decided instead to become an artist, put in a year at Prague's Academy of Fine Arts. Reder earned a meager living doing statues for the Czernowitz cemetery until a fresh outburst of anti-Semitism drove him away, and for the next 20 years he was never to settle in one place for long. He worked in Prague and in France, where he became the devoted friend of Sculptor Aristide Maillol. He escaped to Spain when the Nazis swept into France, only to be thrown into jail for illegal entry. Released without explanation...
...whimsy. His people may be half bird; he invents preposterous musical instruments, designs costumes and headdresses that are pure fancy. His ideas come from almost anywhere-from the Old Testament, from Rabelais, from the memory of a statue of Napoleon (see color) or of a dwarf back in Czernowitz with a large head. "All I know is that when the time comes, the idea is there. It comes from my stomach, from my blood. And I never ask my blood...
Biddle (in Czernowitz, Poland): "No I haven't any idea...