Chapter 14 Like You #2
One of Wiesenthal’s more current cases was Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who’d arrested Anne Frank.
Silberbauer was working as a police inspector in Austria in 1963 when Wiesenthal identified him to the Vienna police.
Silberbauer would be suspended, but the Austrian government let him off the hook.
This happened in November 1963, when James Winslow was a student in Vienna, but his tutor never mentioned it, and Esther didn’t write a word about it.
The Austrian government stated that Anne Frank’s arrest didn’t warrant Silberbauer’s arrest or his prosecution as a war criminal.
And Otto Frank, Anne’s father, testified that Silberbauer had “behaved correctly” and “only done his job.” The police review board exonerated Silberbauer of guilt; the Vienna police gave him a desk job.
Honor Winslow was weirdly reminded of the time she wrote Esther about how much she and Jimmy liked High Noon, the Western with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly.
It was 1952; Jimmy was only eleven. When Esther wrote back, she told Honor to take Jimmy to the movie again.
Fred Zinnemann was the director; his parents were Austrian Jews who’d been murdered in the Holocaust. Like Billy Wilder, Zinnemann was a European Jew who had a wonderful influence on American movies.
“Fred Zinnemann made a Jewish Western,” Esther wrote.
All the Winslows went to see High Noon again; the first time they saw it, they hadn’t realized they were seeing a Jewish Western.
They didn’t get what was Jewish about it the second time, either.
“Maybe you have to be Jewish to get what’s Jewish about it,” Constance Winslow said.
But the Rosenthals saw High Noon a second time, too; they knew Fred Zinnemann’s story and what Esther thought of the film.
“The Grace Kelly character is a Quaker and a pacifist—she certainly isn’t Jewish,” Daniel Rosenthal said.
“Maybe you have to be Esther to get what’s Jewish about High Noon,” Naomi said.
The folks in the small town in New Mexico Territory, the ones who won’t support the town marshal, reminded Thomas Winslow of the townspeople of Pennacook. “Maybe Esther thought the townspeople in High Noon were like anti-Semites, Connie,” Thomas said.
“I think that’s your idea, Tommy—not Esther’s or Fred Zinnemann’s,” Constance told him.
The following year, Fred Zinnemann directed From Here to Eternity.
Strangely, Esther didn’t write to tell everyone to see it.
Thomas and Constance learned their daughters snuck Jimmy into the theater, along with Arnaud and Chantal, to see the film.
Like Chantal, the senior Winslows doubted those boys were old enough to watch it.
They needn’t have worried. Young James was bored, Honor told them.
It was no High Noon; there was nothing as good as the gunfight, or Tex Ritter’s singing “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’. ”
Thomas Winslow was serious when he asked the Rosenthals if they’d seen anything Jewish in From Here to Eternity.
“Jews don’t have sex outdoors—especially not on a beach, Tommy,” Daniel told him.
Constance and Naomi laughed, but Thomas was speechless with embarrassment.
“I was just kidding, Tommy,” Daniel Rosenthal said.
Esther wasn’t kidding when she wrote the Rosenthals and the Winslows advising them to ignore what Freud had called the Austrian novelist and playwright Arthur Schnitzler.
Esther explained that Freud and Schnitzler were fellow residents of the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna.
Freud called Schnitzler a “colleague” in the study of the “underestimated and much-maligned erotic.”
“Believe me—the erotic has nothing to do with why I want the kid to read Schnitzler’s The Road into the Open before he gets to Vienna.
The rest of you will hate it—especially you, Tommy,” Esther wrote.
She did not mention modernism, a literary movement Thomas Winslow loathed, but Esther knew an oppressive novel about a Christian aristocrat whose principal friendships are with Jewish intellectuals in pre–World War I Viennese society—at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise—would not be Thomas’s cup of tea.
Der Weg ins Freie, the German title, was first published in 1908—the English translation in 1913.
Esther praised Schnitzler for his prescience of the anti-Semitism to come.
In what she wrote to the Rosenthals and the Winslows, she emphasized that Judenha?—the word for anti-Semitism in German—means “hatred of the Jews.”
Schnitzler’s books were banned by the Nazis in Austria and Germany. Hitler called Schnitzler’s writing “Jewish filth.” In 1933, when Goebbels was organizing book bannings in Berlin, Schnitzler’s books were burned with the works of other Jews—Einstein, Marx, Kafka, Freud, and Stefan Zweig.
But this wasn’t what Esther wanted Jimmy to notice about The Road into the Open. “The kid has to read it to the end—then he’ll see it’s not just a novel of manners, then he’ll know what this novel is really about,” Esther wrote.
Thus challenged by his birth mom “to read it to the end,” Jimmy Winslow would read the novel very carefully; he also read everything he could find about Arthur Schnitzler’s life.
Schnitzler had studied medicine at the University of Vienna; he worked at Vienna’s General Hospital before he stopped practicing medicine in order to write.
Schnitzler would separate from his wife; they had a daughter who committed suicide when she was nineteen. He himself died in 1931.
James Winslow was twenty-two in March 1963, when President Kennedy reintroduced draft deferment for men who had children.
JFK’s Executive Order No. 11098 stated that any man, married or single, could be classified 3-A if he maintained “a bona fide family relationship” with a child or children—“registrant deferred by reason of extreme hardship to dependents.” Honor Winslow was paying attention; she kept watch on Kennedy’s increasing involvement in Vietnam.
(In 1961, JFK sent four hundred Green Berets to train South Vietnamese soldiers.)
But Jimmy Winslow was up to his ears in Schnitzler’s Vienna; he couldn’t have told you what a 3-A draft classification was.
Jimmy hadn’t noticed the 1961 test runs of the U.S.
herbicidal warfare program in South Vietnam.
(In 1962, Operation Ranch Hand and Operation Trail Dust began; U.S.
planes would spray herbicides and defoliants over South Vietnam until 1971.)
Thomas Winslow knew his grandson was no Renaissance man.
Young James was a dreamer. A writer in the making is a novel in progress, Thomas thought.
Jimmy was focused on Baron Georg von Wergenthin, the standoffish Christian aristocrat in Vienna.
For a main character, Georg is not very likable—or so Jimmy complained to his grandfather.
The baron confesses to feeling consoled by his lack of closeness to other human beings.
He mocks Willy Eissler, a Jewish friend, for Willy’s seeming oversensitivity to anti-Semitism.
Georg von Wergenthin believes he has no grudge against Jews; yet he complains that he only encounters Jews who are ashamed of being Jewish, or those who are proud of being Jewish but afraid you’ll mistake them for Jews who are ashamed of it.
“It helps to be Jewish to get what anti-Semitism is,” Thomas told his grandson.
In The Road into the Open, they were both confused by the apparent anti-Semitism among the Jewish characters.
And there was so much contradictory dialogue about Zionism, it was hard to know what Schnitzler thought about it, but Jimmy and his grandfather agreed that Schnitzler probably sided with Herr Ehrenberg, who admits he’d like to see Jerusalem before he dies.
“Me, too, Grandpa—I want to see Jerusalem,” Jimmy said.
“Dear boy, that would make your mother worry more,” Thomas told him.
“The problem with The Road into the Open is that there’s too much dialogue—this is to be expected when a playwright writes a novel,” Thomas Winslow said, changing the subject.
Thomas was not only reverting to being an English teacher; he knew the two-moms idea didn’t include the possibility that James Winslow would go to Jerusalem.
Their quibbles with Schnitzler’s writing left both James and Thomas Winslow unprepared for the death of Baron von Wergenthin and Anna Rosner’s child—a boy, strangled at birth by his umbilical cord.
The doctor leaves Georg alone with his dead child, who strikes the Baron as a creature of undreamed-of perfection—destined to pass from one darkness to another.
Anna Rosner and Georg von Wergenthin aren’t married.
The death of their child absolves the baron of whatever sense of duty would have compelled him to marry Anna.
Georg’s friends feel no pity for the child who never lived; they believe Georg and Anna are fortunate to have avoided a questionable marriage.
Yet Georg and Anna are devastated by the death of their child; their relationship is over because Anna won’t undergo the agony again.
The baron wonders if an unborn child can die of insufficient love; he wonders if his child has died because no one truly longed for it to be born.
At the same time, Baron von Wergenthin realizes (more deeply than ever) how much he wants to be free.
As Esther had known Jimmy would see, a wanted child really matters. Both Jimmy and his grandfather were distraught. The child who never lived made James Winslow aware of how much his two moms had longed for him to be born.
“Esther was always a good reader, Tommy,” Constance reminded her husband.
“Right you are, Connie—I didn’t see the dead child coming,” Thomas admitted.