Profile: Elinor Naeun, editor of Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend

When songwriter Julie Styne penned “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” he couldn’t have known that it would apply not only to jewelry, but to green fields and wood bats.
Elinor Nauen recognized the dual meaning when she edited an anthology of baseball writing by women. The collection features a lineup of heavy literary hitters including Edna Ferber, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Molly O’Neill, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Anna Quindlen, and Jane Leavy, author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy.
Nauen (pronounced like “Now’n then”0 told NJ Jewish News that the inspiration for the project came after she saw A League of Their Own, a film about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. “All of a sudden, all these women were coming out of the woodwork as baseball fans,” she said.
Nauen, a freelance writer and editor specializing in health issues, recalled going to the ballpark as a young girl and keeping a scorecard. “Invariably, some guy who I didn’t know would lean over my shoulder and correct me,” she said. While attending a game many years later with a bunch of friends, she noticed “all the women were keeping score and none of the guys were.” It was then she realized there were many more women interested in the national pastime than anyone had thought.
“After the book came out, so many people — men and women — came up to me and said ‘Oh, yeah, I got baseball from my mom,’” a departure from the traditional notion that the game was passed down, like a family heirloom, from father to son.
The majority of sports anthologies are written and edited by men. Yet Nauen, who served as visiting poet at the Pingry School in Martinsville, NJ in the mid 1990s, had no trouble finding female contributors, although the process was kind of slow going in those pre-Internet days (Diamonds was published in 1993). She did her research the old fashioned way, by going to libraries. “Every time I found something, I would ask the person, ‘do you know of something else, do you know of other women who are interested [in baseball]?.’”
Nauen could not pin down when she developed her own love for the game. Her father came to America from Germany in 1939; her mother was a divorced “war bride” from England. The family settled in Sioux Falls, SD, not a locale considered a hot bed of Jewish activity. “There wasn’t a lot of Yiddishkeit there,” she said. “We had to import our Passover stuff, so if you didn’t plan properly you’d finish all the macaroons in three days and have nothing but matza for the last five.”
These days, Nauen, 55, is a member of the Town and Village Synagogue in Manhattan, where she blows the shofar, as well as at Ohel Ayalah, a free, walk-in High Holiday service. “It’s a very satisfying thing to do, it’s so primal sounding. It really does what it’s supposed to: it makes you sit up and pay attention.”
Is a Diamonds sequel in the future? “It would be fun to do another one,” she said, but at the same time, “My dream is that women have been integrated into the general population and you don’t need a ‘women’s’ book quite so much.”