Abel and Cain

Gregor von Rezzori

Contents (12)

GREGOR VON REZZORI (1914–1998) was born in Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one “spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest.’’ After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for radio and film and began publishing books, including the four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society. From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear.

DAVID DOLLENMAYER has translated works by Bertolt Brecht, Elias and Veza Canetti, Martin Walser, and many others.

JOACHIM NEUGROSCHEL (1938–2011) translated works from the French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish and was the editor of several anthologies of Yiddish literature.

MARSHALL YARBROUGH is a writer, translator, and musician. He has translated works by such authors as Wolf Wondratschek, Michael Ende, and Anna Katharina Hahn.

JOSHUA COHEN is the author of nine books, including Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction and the novel Moving Kings. He is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine.

OTHER BOOKS BY GREGOR VON REZZORI PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

An Ermine in Czernopol

Translated by Philip Boehm

Introduction by Daniel Kehlmann

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Translated by Joachim Neugroschel

Introduction by Deborah Eisenberg

The Snows of Yesteryear

Translated by H. F. Broch de Rothermann

Introduction by John Banville

ABEL AND CAIN

GREGOR VON REZZORI

Translated from the German by

DAVID DOLLENMAYER, JOACHIM NEUGROSCHEL, and MARSHALL YARBROUGH

Introduction by

JOSHUA COHEN

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Cover image: Vasily Kandinsky, Sky Blue, 1940; photograph by Philippe Migeat; © CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Death of My Brother Abel originally published in German under the title Der Tod Meines Bruders Abel by C. Bertelsmann/Mosaik Verlag. Cain: The Last Manuscript originally published in German under the title Kain: Der letzte Manuskript by C. Bertelsmann Verlag.