The press release for King of Jerusalem by Hans Georg Jakobowicz (new from Prater Press) claims that this 148-page entertainment is an old-school "beach novel, modeled on those of Lincoln Kirstein and Edwin Denby." I didn't pay much attention to that, but since I knew the author by another name, began it nervously and then forgot everything and gobbled it up voraciously. In fact, I could not put it down unless I had to.
I don't know how large the audience can be for a recherche piece like this – balletomanes, queers who survived the AIDS era. But this very slim volume gave me a huge rush of a forgotten reading pleasure: avid curiosity that invaded the novel and took it by storm, running almost ahead of the storyteller. Many a young bookworm used to read like this; many will remember the boys' books that gave us an alternative reality and a stalking horse for our ambitions in the golden-boy hero who makes it in the great world through wit and charm.
I attached myself to the career of Joshua Haburghe, who's the orphaned illegitimate lost child of the Hapsburgs, not to mention gay and half-Jewish, in the same way I did to Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd, hero of a dozen novels in which Lanny played "fly on the wall" at all the great events of the 20th century, starting with the Versailles Peace Conference. As new doors open for Joshua, into the bedrooms of hard-bodied godlike youths, opening nights at New York City Ballet, breakfast with a Czech countess, a family reunion with the head of the Imperial family of Austria, a steam-shrouded orgy in a Viennese gay bathhouse, and so on, the pages turned themselves, and my hopes and fears hurled themselves upon the march of events almost faster than the author evoked them.
The tale opens on a beach: our boy is walking on the strand, sees a naked golden youth swimming in the East River (near the United Nations, where Joshua works as a translator), who soon emerges from the waves, and after desultory chat invites our boy back to his luxurious flat, high in a glass tower overlooking a brownstone. But their liaison has to be a quickie, since Joshua has to be at Lincoln Center for opening night of Balanchine's Vienna Waltzes, for which he has written the program notes.
Although the story is tightly plotted, chapters short, scenes brief, dialogue often implied, otherwise spankingly sharp, this scene is extended, as it contains the germ of the novel. The ballet opens with a girl flitting teasingly from the advances of a cadet, but noticing he wears the Hapsburg colors, and finally yielding to his pursuit. This, it will turn out, is how Joshua's mother, a daughter of the Heine banking family, and cousin of the poet, met his father, the crown prince, before WWII, and despite the Nazis, who eventually murdered the "traitorous" prince, fell in love with him, married in secret, and had a child, who was spirited away to America and raised in a monastery. The ballet ends with the great scene of Suzanne Farrell (pictured on the cover, photo by Costas, as if this were an issue of Ballet Review) dancing with a now-you-see-him, now-you don't partner to the throbbing harmonies of the Rosenkavalier Waltz. It is germane that Farrell was both Balanchine's muse and the first of his ballerinas who would dance with him and for him, but would not marry him.
On the other hand, in the audience, the stunning man sitting next to Joshua bristles at the ballet, despising it (he later says, when they can talk) for lacking rigor. They argue about it at the after-party, which contains veiled cameos by artists of that legendary era, including the current director of the San Francisco Ballet, who danced in that performance. The novella has many such appearances – it is a dance of masques, of "only make-believe" mixed with very real things in a milieu of high style and great reputations.
Indeed, the author is himself wearing a mask, since for 50 years Jakobowicz has been a well-known dance critic (Washington Post, Ballet Review) with an Americanized name. But he was born Jewish in Vienna in the 30s, emigrated to London to escape the Nazis, and three years later reunited with his mother in Chicago. He came of age during the period when being queer was like living in an alternative reality. So his fantasy, in which a repentant family comes looking for you to take you back, should have wide appeal among queers, especially if, like me, you grew up fearing your family would disown you. And you might recognize some patterns if you'd find yourself sexually attracted to someone who would abuse you (I fell in love with one asshole after another). Joshua falls into a S/M relationship with that rigorous, brilliant choreographer, who is also a crypto-Nazi, and will ultimately destroy him.
Revenons aux moutons. Joshua is summoned to Europe. The head of the House of Hapsburg has given up the title to the crowns of Austria and Hungary. But there is an ancient title, going back to the Crusades, "King of Jerusalem," to which the Hapsburgs are also heir; and a petition has come forward from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect based in Jerusalem who want the title reinstated, since they need a titular head to handle day-in, day-out bureaucratic matters, but can't have a leader who is Jewish, since they must wait for the Messiah. The joke here is, Joshua would be a glorified Shabbas goy, the Gentile who can do things on the Sabbath when all observant Jews must refrain from work.
But of course, Joshua wants to take the job seriously. After passing muster in Vienna, he must be vetted by the Vatican, then meet all the players in Jerusalem. The play of dialectic is subtle and complex, with almost Shavian wit. Palestinian and Jewish groups make irreconcilable claims, but each side is treated with compassion. Comic relief comes from some Christians, relics of 19th-century Rapturists who came to Jerusalem for the latter days, only to find they had time on their hands when the world didn't end, so they settled down and became hoteliers, with a branch espousing nudism. The only group to whom the author gives no sympathy is the neo-Nazis.
I was still flying along, agog with it all, when the tale took a dark turn on the shore of the Dead Sea. I had not anticipated this. I won't spoil it further by going into detail. Were I not reading it in such a naive spirit, I would have seen this coming, and if I had, it might have spoiled my pleasure in the play of ideas. But the tone of the writing, and the fantastic nature of its appeal, gave the whole a fizzy, almost unbearable lightness of being – like that of the ballet – that buoyed me along and kept the ending, at worst, bittersweet.
Available from Amazon.