There was a time not too long ago when Jewish parents would argue with their sons about wasting time playing baseball. Stick to more academic or artistic pursuits, they implored. A nice Jewish boy doesn’t try for a career in professional sports.
Could it be that because, as one observer said, “Jewish sons should not…actually play baseball professionally, many wrote plays, novels, stories, songs, and poems about the national game”? Some of the greatest contributions to baseball fiction have come from Jewish pens. These authors wrote about the game in general or worked Jewish themes into the story lines. Their novels contain not merely evocative sports writing but great writing, period.
Among these authors are such major players as Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, whose baseball stories are but a portion of their greater output, and Mark Harris, who writes almost exclusively on the game.
The Brookyn-born Malamud (1914-1986) is given the most credit for wresting baseball fiction away from juvenile literature, away from the Frank Merriwells and Jack Armstrongs, young men — universally Caucasian and Christian — whose noble qualities of sound mind and body appealed greatly to the youth of America. The home team always won at least moral victories and the action took place mostly on the field.
But Malamud’s The Natural, published in 1952, introduced adult themes into the genre. The author based Roy Hobbs, his doomed hero, on real-life ballplayer Eddie Waitkus, a first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies who was shot by an obsessed fan in 1949. The author also incorporated gambling and corruption problems that hindered Hobbs from his long since lost goal of being known as “the best there ever was.” Producers of the movie version felt compelled to change Malamud’s original ending — in which Hobbs deliberately strikes out to tank the game — to the implausibly pyrotechnical home run that won the pennant.
Gambling is a common theme in baseball fiction. One wonders if it has anything to do with the fact that Arnold Rothstein was the mastermind behind the granddaddy of all sports disgraces, the 1919 Black Sox scandal in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox received lifetime bans from organized baseball for throwing the World Series.
Desire to fit in
Every writer dreams of producing The Great American Novel. Philip Roth pulled it off, even going so far as to use that somewhat vainglorious title. His version, published in 1999, centers on the efforts of an old sportswriter to prove the existence of the fictional Patriot League, purged communist-style from baseball’s historical annals after World War II, and one of its teams, the Port Ruppert Mundys, operating out of New Jersey. This band of misfits — another oft-used literary convention — was forced to wander around the league (like the Jews of ancient Egypt?) because their home stadium was used as an embarkation point for American troops.
Mark Harris is most known for Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), the story of Henry 
Wiggins, a bright and talented pitcher for the New York Mammoths (think Tom Seaver), and his dimwitted and mediocre catcher, Bruce Pearson. When Pearson is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Wiggins nobly takes on the burden of watching over him, trying to keep the routine as regular as possible. Bang the Drum Slowly is actually part of “The Southpaw Trilogy,” all of which are narrated by Wiggins. A more recent addition, It Looked Like Forever, picks up the story as the pitcher approaches the end of his career.
The conflict of maintaining old traditions juxtaposed with the desire for acceptance, to fit in with the larger society, is another common theme in baseball novels that feature Jews as lead characters.
The Celebrant (1983), by Eric Rolfe Greenberg, is one of the most acclaimed offerings of the past half-century, focusing on immigrant Jews striving to assimilate into American culture. And what better way to do that than to adopt the American national pastime? Jackie Kapp (nee Yakov Kapinski) is a jewelry designer with a special affinity for New York Giant ace Christy Mathewson. Kapp, a pretty fair amateur pitcher in his own right, recalls his glory days on the ballfield: “I threw a submarine ball, my knuckles grazing the dirt as I released it. ‘Get those knuckles dirty, Jackie!’ my infielders would shout — Jackie, not Yakov.”
Peter Levine’s The Rabbi of Swat (1999) involves an anomaly of a Jewish superstar, also playing for the Giants. The team’s manager, John McGraw, made a conscious effort to seek out Jewish athletes in a marketing effort to attract the city’s large Jewish population. (Levine also wrote From Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, a nonfiction examination of Jews and sports.)
Both Levine and Greenberg play up ethnic stereotypes, referring to Jewish mothers and Sabbath meals, as well as the anti-Semitism of both opponents and teammates in a less tolerant era. They both mix in real-life players, in the manner of many historical fiction writers. Rogers Hornsby — an early superstar although not much of a human being — makes an appearance in The Rabbi of Swat, where Levine uses him as an example of an intolerant boor.
Elliot Asinof — whose Eight Men Out (1977), a nonfiction treatise on the “Black Sox Scandal,” is still a sports classic — was a minor league player in his youth. Perhaps that gave him the insight to write Man on Spikes (1955), a tale about the frustrations of a bush leaguer trying to advance through the system. Asinof was one of the first authors to deal with African-American players, which in this story pose an impediment to Mickey Kutner, the hero of this sad tale.
For some reason, Jewish baseball fans of a certain age, at least in the New York area, have a special affinity for the Brooklyn Dodgers, more so than for, say, the Yankees (too waspy) or the Giants. Perhaps it was because “Da Bums,” who opened the door to Jackie Robinson, were more sensitive to minorities. When it comes to playing a role in baseball fiction, the Dodgers seem to be the favorites, especially circa World War II, when baseball in the Big Apple enjoyed its golden era. (Although not a Jew, Pete Hamill tells the story of a young Irish Catholic who befriends an immigrant rabbi through a shared admiration of the Dodgers in Snow in August, 1997.)
Philip Goldberg cashes in on this boomer nostalgia in This Is Next Year (2000), a paraphrase of the annual Dodgers fan warning, “Wait’ll next year!” (Next year in Jerusalem?) Goldberg’s novel follows the relationship between the ball club and the Stone family, including the obligatory teenage boy of boundless faith.
So what is it about the Jewish sensibility that has produced such an impressive block of work? Stephen Riess, a history professor at Northeastern Illinois University, believes that “by and large these are simply excellent writers, writing about what’s most American. They grew up in the 1930s to 1950s, when baseball was the quintessential element of what it meant to be an American.” He singles out The Celebrant as a “good history and a good story.”
Eric Solomon, an English professor from San Francisco State University, goes further. Speaking at a panel discussion on “The Charisma of Sport and Race” sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley in 1996, Solomon observed, “Since Jewish sons should not, according to their families’ oldest beliefs…actually play baseball professionally, many wrote plays, novels, stories, songs, and poems about the national game.” He elaborated much further on this phenomenon in his paper, “Jews, Baseball and the American Novel,” published in the Spring 1984 issue of Arete, an academic journal of sport and society.
Over the past 60-plus years, Jewish fans have had few stars to call their own. First it was Hank Greenberg. Then Sandy Koufax. Now it’s Shawn Green. Such players come and go in relatively quick fashion, but literary superstars like Malamud, Roth, Greenberg, and company enjoy more staying power and have the ability to enthrall across generational lines.
This article appeared in NJ Jewish News, April 8, 2004
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