Chapter 24 The Passage of Time #4
As Fr?ulein Eissler had told him, James Winslow was a Pferd mit Scheuklappen—a “horse with blinders.” He was always imagining; he was always writing.
He seemed more engaged with the characters he created than with what was happening or being said around him.
An exception was how closely Jimmy paid attention to Vienna, and the friendship Jimmy maintained with Jolanda and Miele was no less constant.
Their travel between New Hampshire and the Netherlands became routine.
Jimmy and Mieke didn’t want to get divorced; they liked being married.
In 1971, when Jimmy and Mieke could have filed for divorce in Amsterdam—without Jimmy admitting to adultery—Vienna Winslow was a six-year-old.
She was old enough to have friends whose parents were divorcing, or already divorced.
Vienna was a happy little girl; she wouldn’t have wanted her parents to get a divorce.
Jolanda’s parents and Mieke’s mother didn’t want their happy grandchild to go through a divorce.
As Jolanda’s lawyer father, Jeroen Lammers, said: “The only reason for Mieke and Jimmy to get divorced is if Jimmy wants to remarry.”
James Winslow liked to say he was happily married to a Dutch girl.
After a pause, he liked saying (even more) that they shared a child together.
“My Dutch wife has a lesbian partner—they’re a happy couple,” he added, after a longer pause.
This kept his more serious-minded girlfriends at bay.
Why would Jimmy be in a hurry to get divorced?
He didn’t want to remarry. The girlfriends would come and go; they were transitory.
Being married to Mieke, and being a full-time father, kept the girlfriends at arm’s length.
Being a writer was what made James Winslow a Pferd mit Scheuklappen.
And a horse with blinders is just a German way to describe a workaholic, as a writer like Jimmy is more commonly called in North America.
Vienna Winslow’s Dutch passport could be renewed at the Dutch consulate general in New York, but Jimmy, Mieke, and Jolanda always did it in Amsterdam.
This took them back to the office at the town hall where Jimmy and Mieke had been married.
That’s where they were in 1971, when the American Academy of Pediatrics found “no valid medical indications for routine infant circumcision.”
Was there a correspondingly weird symmetry to Esther’s not allowing Jimmy to be Jewish? As a father, Jimmy could appreciate how Esther had protected him. Jimmy wouldn’t want Vienna to be Jewish.
James Winslow’s fourth book, his second Vienna novel, would be published in English in the fall of 1981.
Not an Egyptian is another roman à clef.
In Jimmy’s first Vienna novel, Roommates in Vienna, there’s no wrestling (not even any wrestlers).
There’s no Turnhalle for wrestlers on W?hringer Stra?e.
The focus is on the three roommates and their local Kaffeehaus, not called the Nachtmusik, where the Dagmar character is named Maria, and Hard Rain is the only dog—there are no dogs with balls.
James Winslow had saved the wrestlers for Not an Egyptian, based on Jimmy’s first time back in Vienna since he’d been a student—in 1978, when he was promoting the German translation of Roommates in Vienna. He went to Leopold Spiegel’s gym on W?hringer Stra?e, but the gym was gone.
“Keine Turnhalle mehr—Gott sei Dank!” Helene told Jimmy, when he went to her hairdressing salon.
(“No more gym—thank God!”) “Kleiner Spiegel ist weg,” she said.
(“Little Mirror is gone.”) It was fourteen, almost fifteen years ago that, as Helene put it, Leo had followed “his people” to Israel—to a wrestling club in Haifa.
Given Jimmy’s “awful injury,” Helene said she was happy to see he wasn’t limping.
With the help of a publicist from his German publisher, Jimmy tried to locate the belly-dancing club in the Favoriten district.
It turned out the club wasn’t called Die ?gypterin—that was just the name of the belly dancer.
No one could remember the name of the club.
Jimmy inquired about the belly dancer herself, but no one knew what had become of her.
In a Turkish coffeehouse in Favoriten, Jimmy’s German publicist spoke to some older Turkish men, only one of whom remembered seeing Die ?gypterin.
His ears didn’t look like wrestlers’ ears, but the older man agreed with Jimmy: “The belly dancer was not an Egyptian,” he confirmed.
In Not an Egyptian, Jimmy’s roommate in Vienna is a fellow IES student—a Jewish wrestler from New York.
The Institute for European Studies is wise to put them together.
The novel is a flashback to the days when the two IES students see more of their wrestling teammates in a gym on W?hringer Stra?e than they see of their fellow Americans.
Jimmy’s fictional roommate is a conflation of Jonah Feldstein and Claude, but his future is modeled on what happens to Arnaud Beaudette.
The roommate is a Feldstein—a Noah, not a Jonah.
The gym is Turnhalle Daniel, but Daniel is still a Spiegel.
The suplay master is a Danny, not a Leo, but he’s still called Little Mirror.
James Winslow didn’t change the names of the Soviet or the Israeli wrestlers; their names might not have been real in the first place, he decided.
In Not an Egyptian, the Noah character has Claude’s panicky but lovable qualities. A virgin, Noah is seduced by a dangerous dishwasher at a Bierhalle the wrestling teammates go to after practice. (Jimmy decided not to change Hildegund’s unsuitably old-fashioned name. It served her right.)
Not an Egyptian is the first James Winslow novel where the character based on Jimmy becomes a writer.
He’s back in Vienna, on a book tour for a German translation, when he discovers that Turnhalle Daniel no longer exists and that Danny has joined his people in Israel.
Unlike Jimmy, his fictional character is contacted by the belly dancer after he makes inquiries about her in the Favoriten district.
She remembers that he wanted to be a writer, from when they whispered in each other’s ears; she’s happy for him that he got to be what he wanted to be.
As for her, she’s too old to be a belly dancer anymore, but she tells him she’s still not an Egyptian.
The underlying story is what happens to Noah, the character based on Jonah Feldstein and Claude—and a little bit on Arnaud Beaudette.
(Noah is killed in action in Vietnam in 1968.) In Not an Egyptian, the belly dancer also remembers what Noah wanted to be—they’d whispered in each other’s ears, and Noah had told her he was going to be a soldier.
“He had no doubt about it,” the belly dancer says.
Yes, the belly dancer notices that the former wrestler, now a writer, has a limp.
There’s a flashback to his intentional knee injury in Turnhalle Daniel; all his teammates are in on it.
He tells Noah that his mom is hoping for an injury worthy of a draft deferment; Noah tells the Soviets and the Israelis.
Danny, the little suplay master, is in on the intended injury, too.
James Winslow would publish four novels in a span of twelve years, from 1969 until 1981.
Those Winslow sisters were not surprised that Jimmy’s first novel, The Dickens Man, got the best reviews; his homage to Dickens found favor with the critics.
The later novels, in their different ways, were political.
“Your social conscience isn’t everyone’s social conscience, you know,” Jimmy’s mom told him about The Doctor’s Rules—his “abortion novel,” she called it.
“What you see as one of society’s injustices, Jimmy, is not shared by homophobic dickheads,” Faith was first to say about Roommates in Vienna—his novel about the lesbian couple modeled on Mieke and Jolanda.
Hope clearly admired the Jewish German tutor who cures the family of their anti-Semitism in that novel. “Annelies was definitely working for Esther, Jimmy,” she said.
As for the doomed roommate in Not an Egyptian—the Jewish boy who becomes a soldier and will die in Vietnam—Prudence would prepare Jimmy for a few of his unfavorable reviews. “Sure as shit, Jimmy, between the gung-ho Vietnam vets and the anti-Semites, you’ll make some enemies.”
Nor did it surprise the Winslow sisters that Jimmy’s two favorite European publishers were Jewish.
His Swedish and French publishers knew Jimmy was an ally—to women’s rights (including abortion rights), to lesbian rights (including the rights of other sexual minorities), and to the rights of Jews.
Because of these European Jews, James Winslow had an Israeli publisher from the beginning.
Jimmy had confided to his Swedish and French publishers about his birth mother, and how she had protected (even prevented) him from being Jewish.
Maybe Jimmy was hoping one of these European Jews would tell him he should be a Jew.
“Just be an ally to us Jews and call it a day, Jimmy,” Matthias said—he was Jimmy’s Swedish publisher, a German-born Jew.
“Keep being a good writer, Jimmy—that’s enough of a burden,” Gabrielle told him. She was Jimmy’s French publisher; she’d somehow evaded the Vichy Nazi puppets in a Catholic convent school for girls.
“Be a good father, Jimmy—that’s your foremost job,” Matthias said.