The Austrian novelist Gregor von Rezzori (1914–98) remained for all of his wandering life the stubbornly loyal subject of a vanished empire. Born in Czernowitz, capital of the Bukovina, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was the quizzical child of a fiercely contested region. A dozen or so nationalities, and at least as many languages, seethed together there in uneasy symbiosis. In the Bukovina, Austrians and Romanians, Ukrainians and Poles, Jews and Turks defined their identities not only by who they were but by who they were not. Small wonder that von Rezzori would become a man who slipped from one nationality, one citizenship, to another with the same seamless ease with which he moved among the several languages at his command.

In his remarkable “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories” (NYRB Classics, 305 pages, $15.95), originally published in 1981 and now re-issued, von Rezzori brought his lost homeland back to life so sharply and in such pungent detail that we feel from the first sentences as though we have lived there ourselves. One of the stories von Rezzori wrote in English, another he translated from the German himself, and the remaining three were translated by Joachim Neugroschel; this new edition comes with an informative introduction by Deborah Eisenberg as well. NYRB will be re-issuing his fabulous autobiography, “The Snows of Yesteryear,” as well as another novel, “Ermine,” in coming months.

For all its poignancy, “Memoirs” is no foray into nostalgia but a deliberately fragmented, and often quite funny, version of the classic German bildungsroman’ — what might be termed the novel of formative influences. Goethe in his “Wilhelm Meister” and Thomas Mann in “The Magic Mountain” created masterpieces of the genre. Like his great predecessors, von Rezzori sets out to track the slow, stumbling formation of an individual sensibility — in this case his own, thinly disguised — but unlike them, he admits to bafflement at every turn. Ironically enough, it is only by exploring and confronting his own ingrained anti-Semitism that the narrator can achieve a brief and tenuous sense of himself. As his sensibility develops, it becomes ever more elusive. His inmost self evaporates as it matures.

Even his narrator’s name shifts mysteriously. Though he has half a dozen given names, he is known formally as Arnulf. To Minka, his Jewish mistress, he is known as Brommy. In Czernowitz, he possesses one identity; in Bucharest or Berlin or Hamburg yet others, each distinctive and each different. When he switches languages, he doffs one personality and dons another. And yet, he asks himself, isn’t the act of changing one’s name suspiciously Jewish? The narrator’s anti-Semitism is never virulent. Unlike his father, who hated all Jews “with an ancient, traditional, and deep-rooted hatred,” the narrator is torn. His own anti-Semitism is a form of snobbery. He would never stoop to hating Jews, not because that’s morally repugnant, but because to hate is to concede a certain equality. Worse, hate is like love; it presupposes intimacy.

But in this unsparing depiction of self-delusion, a deeper motive is in play. Arnulf, or Brommy, can only achieve a sense of himself by entanglement with those — almost always Jews — whom he considers radically different from — and inferior to — himself. He’s irresistibly drawn to Jewish women. In one story, he falls into a torrid affair with a Jewish businesswoman whom he simultaneously despises and adores. And in “Troth,” the most powerful of the stories — and the one that von Rezzori wrote originally in English — he goes so far as to propose to the vivacious Minka (who flatly refuses to marry him because he’s too “goyisch.”) The more he distances himself from Jews, the more he becomes enmeshed in Jewishness. He boasts of learning Yiddish and speaking it more fluently than any “Prague Jew.” He spouts the Hasidic maxims of distinguished rebbes. By the end, he has unwittingly taken on all the traits he associates with Jews. He has become a wanderer, rootless and stateless, though desperately attached to the traditions of the Habsburg Dynasty and the Kingdom of Rumania, which form the ancient protocols of his own lost tribe.

Though “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite” provides a caustic analysis of a deep moral malady, rendered all the more ominous by being set against the horrors of the Nazi rise to power, the novel is much more than this. A tremendous exuberance underlies its irony. Von Rezzori drew a long-forgotten world out of oblivion without the slightest note of sentimentality. It was as though he could rescue that world in its astonishing fullness only by exposing its deepest flaws. States and empires break up, borders are redrawn, the old local names assume new accents, new spellings. The Bukovina has long been part of Romania, and Czernowitz itself is now Chernotsvy in Ukraine. But in the end, von Rezzori was not simply the elegist of a fabled homeland in a region erased from the maps. He was a faithful subject in the empire of remembrance, that uncharted dominion where all boundaries coincide.

eormsby@nysun.com