This morning my sister informed me that she had learned from Maureen Wijnschenk (his sister) that my distant distant cousin, classmate, and friend, Arthur Wijnschenk died. I have known Arthur, and his family, my whole life. Before his coming out he dated my oldest living friend, Liora the youngest daughter of my father's best friend (Chaim), in high school. (I sat next to Arthur at her wedding.) We were not mates in high school, but each in our own way, we tried to escape our childhood environment by fleeing into the wider world--Arthur more boldly and with more panache. But despite cultivating a bad-boy, go-happy, work hard, party harder image, he was loyal to his roots and kept in touch. From my distant perspective, he was one of the early hackers; then let himself be paid by financial firms to protect them from attack; serial entrepreneur (including his favorite, Barcelona Car Tours), moving among Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Madrid, Barcelona, and even our Amsterdam in restless fashion celebrating each trip with a champagne toast in first class. Even so, he would always track me down all over the world and, when I was broke or trying to make ends meet on an academic salary, would treat me to lavish meals in fancy restaurants always just before they were to become famous. Often at the end of a night, as I went home, the night would start for him. Sometimes I saw pictures of his adventures in the clubs on social media the next day before he went to the gym.
When my family moved to London a few years, I learned I was not his only regular on his itinerary. There were other distant relatives he kept track off, happily being drawn into their family milestones--giving and accepting nurture along the way.
I tell you about Arthur, dear readers, not just because I can't think of anything else right now, but because he is one of the proximate causes for my blogging. A decade ago, when I was trying to turn myself into a Dutch public intellectual, I mentioned to him I couldn't get a piece published by any of the main newspapers. Arthur asked to read it. Then told me he had created a website and started advertising the piece on Google up to €50 per day. The effect was shocking: I got an endless stream of hate mail, threats, including death threats, and for many years you could find my name denounced on far-right websites.* To me this was eye-opening because I recognized that one didn't need mainstream media to find an audience; and this helped me reconcile myself to my failure as a public intellectual and develop into this different kind of authorial persona.
You can read a translation (by his friend Brian Gross) of the piece on NewAPPS. If you look at the NewAPPS archive, you'll see it is one of the very first pieces I published at NewAPPS when it was just a week old (and we had a few dozen daily readers). Arthur read nearly all of my blogs, always welcoming the pieces in which I dropped my scholarly guard and shared my views in forthright manner. Sometimes, he would send me a quick note thanking me for the occasional, lucid paragraph in the middle of a digressions.
Eventually Arthur stopped advertising my piece, and discontinued the webserver that hosted it. The right-wing websites that polemicized against it mostly disappeared (today I could only locate one that notes its existence).
Recently, after I won a grant to study debt, just before the corona-lockdown, I was contacted by a leading Dutch banker to come meet with her and discuss. I thought she had read about the grant in the newspaper, but it turned out Arthur had nudged her into meeting me. During our last dinner, a few weeks ago on the back balcony at “Bickers a/d Werf” during one of the endless corona-Summer days, he told me he knew her since his membership of the JOVD, the youth wing of the Dutch main right wing party, and that they had stayed in touch.
To my delight I found a splendid essay by him (1993) in the JOVDs zine, railing against the internal shenanigans and lack of internal democracy at the JOVD's annual conference -- the article makes clear he was a regular --, and in it he unmasks self-serving careerism and opportunism and he pleads for one-man-one-vote. Anyway, behind the bad boy, there was true engagement. I dont think Arthur had much formal education, or that he was especially bookish, but, not unlike our classmate Arnon Grunberg, he had the gift of an excellent polemicist.+
I mention Arnon not just to name-drop; as it turns out that for a few years we had an intense three-way email correspondence, which started with a note by Arthur to Arnon in September 2000.** The note congratulates Arnon on his literary success and implies that Arthur is earning money as a porno-producer.*** In our letters we recognized ourselves as prisoners/wardens of 'caravan camp sollicitude' (woonwagenkamp de eenzaamheid).
Because Arthur and I traveled a lot, we started talking about Corona in January. We were both mystified, even outraged by the utter lack of care and reaction by national authorities. We found the role of the WHO mysterious. I tried to nudge him into developing mobile and airport testing capacity. Corona has been very tough for him. It hurt his businesses and undermined his life-style. He was (quite rightly) angered by the ways governments supported better connected businesses than his own. But most importantly it threw him back onto himself.
In response, while he tried to keep his businesses afloat, he checked in almost daily, including with my mom--they both would express concern for the other to me. (Early in the lock-down with PPE shortages everywhere, he surprised her with state of the art face-mask.) I found their mode of contact reassuring, perhaps too re-assuring.
Arthur and I came from families shaped by the Holocaust, by betrayal and by great acts of compassion and rectitude. It would be tempting here to write something about our shared sense that all of that was not an aberration, that we're sleepwalking into more disaster. So often he would ask me what we could do.
I wish I were better at capturing the cocktail of survivor guilt, perseverance, love, and hardness of those we grew up with; the focus on money-making, the impatience with official delusion; the moving between many different worlds at once; the sense of connection with distant relatives who had to stand in for never-born cousins and uncles/aunts. But we rarely talked about the past; we were immersed in a present haunted by omissions and ellipses. Adult friendship is the art of tactful silence. And during the last few years, after my dad died, and as he quietly become a more regular fixture in my life, I learned from him to be more accepting of good fortune as our lives glide too closely alongside the precipice.
Arthur's mom, (like my own) youthful when she had her first child, died early at the age of 45 from cancer. My heart goes out to his dad, and Maureen.
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