Jewish Baseball Novels — A Bibliography
Auster, Paul [as Paul
Benjamin]. Squeeze Play.
1982. New York, Penguin, 1990.
A New York private eye investigates the death of a
baseball star.
Chabon, Michael. Summerland. New York: Hyperion, 2002.
Written for (sophisticated) children, this Jewish Harry
Potter-ish epic is set in the Pacific Northwest and enacts the struggle between
good and evil through baseball. Like
Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2001), Summerland
features a multitude of voices that are usually at the margins and invokes a
vast amount of American history and culture, all set against a sprawling
fantasyland that is firmly rooted in baseball.
Charyn, Jerome. The Seventh Babe. New York: Arbor House,
1979.
A mysterious, driven man assumes various identities,
including orphan and heir to a copper fortune, in order to play in the major
leagues and then to lead a tortured, magical-realistic existence barnstorming
after he’s banned for life.
Goodman, Eric. In Days of Awe. New York: Knopf, 1991.
A tale of redemption in which a Jewish pitcher, in exile
after he’s thrown a ballgame, falls in love with the daughter of an axe
murderer.
Greenberg, Eric Rolfe. The
Celebrant. New York: Everest House,
1983.
A Jewish immigrant jeweler becomes the “celebrant” of
Giants’ pitcher Christy Mathewson. This
novel is one of the finest recreations of its era in American historical
fiction. Notable for its combination of
research, realism and poetry, it is often cited as the best baseball novel of
all time.
Harris, Mark. Bang
the Drum Slowly, by Henry W. Wiggen, Certain of His Enthusiasms Restrained by
Mark Harris. New York: Knopf, 1956.
The second of four Henry Wiggen novels, this one sees
Wiggen, ace pitcher of the Mammoths, narrate the story of a championship season
that ends in the death of his roommate and catcher Bruce Pearson.
Havazelet, Ehud. Like
Never Before. New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 1998.
Ten interrelated stories about three generations of the
Birnbaum clan. Baseball makes brief but
important appearances.
Klinkowitz, Jerome [as
Jerry]. Basepaths. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995.
A rookie minor-league manager rides herd on a team of
kids while his family and the team’s eccentric ownership group provide plenty
of complications.
Klinkowitz, Jerome [as
Jerry]. Short Season and Other Stories.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
A set of 28 linked short stories that follow a single
season of A-class professional baseball in Iowa. Based loosely on Klinkowitz’s own experience as a minor-league
executive.
Levine, Peter. The
Rabbi of Swat. East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 1999.
A Jewish pitcher from Brooklyn becomes a rookie sensation
for the 1928 Giants. The ghost of Babe
Ruth adds a counterpoint narrative.
Malamud, Bernard. The
Natural. New York: Farrar, 1952.
A young prospect goes to Chicago to try out for the Cubs,
is shot by a madwoman, recovers, joins the New York Knights years later and
almost leads them to a pennant, resists throwing the decisive game, and loses
it anyway.
Mayer, Robert. The
Grace of Shortstops. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1984.
An eight-year-old rabbi’s son in the Bronx follows the
1947 Brooklyn Dodgers while unearthing secrets about his dying grandmother, his
adulterous mother, his kidnapped cousin, his gunrunning father, and a tragic
neighborhood bag lady.
Neugeboren, Jay. Sam’s
Legacy. New York: Holt, 1974.
A small-time Brooklyn gambler, Sam Berman, finds his life
intertwined with the memoirs of a former Negro League pitcher. The novel features an embedded slave
narrative and a love affair between Mason Tidewater, the “Black Babe of the
Negro League,” and Babe Ruth, and a murder when a teammate deliberately ruins
his pitcher’s chance at a no-hitter.
Potok, Chaim. The
Chosen. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1967.
Baseball is the privileged allegory in this coming-of-age
story of the son of a Hasidic rabbi and his Orthodox friend.
Roth, Philip. The
Great American Novel. New York:
Holt, 1973.
A garrulous, profane, alliterating old sportswriter tells
the suppressed story of the Patriot League, effaced from American memory after
World War II, and of its most hapless and hopeless ballclub, the Ruppert
Mundys. This novel still has a claim to
be the great satiric novel of baseball literature.
Rutkoff, Peter M. Shadow
Ball: A Novel of Baseball and Chicago.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.
In the summer of 1919, Charles Comiskey hatches a plot to
get the great Negro shortstop John Henry Lloyd to play for the White Sox. Pivotal characters are the Jewish lawyer,
Sam Weiss, and Rube Foster, black baseball's great entrepreneur.
Shaw, Irwin. Voices
of a Summer Day. New York:
Delacorte, 1965.
The sight of his son playing in an amateur baseball game
sends a middle-aged man into a wry reflection on his life.
Sturm, James. The
Golem’s Mighty Swing. Montreal:
Drawn and Quarterly, 2001.
Comic-book style novel about the Stars of David, a
barnstorming team that travels across 1920s middle America in a broken-down bus
to play local minor-league teams in exhibitions.
Tennenbaum, Silvia. Rachel,
the Rabbi’s Wife. New York: William
Morrow, 1978.
Baseball features infrequently but to great effect in
this story of the trials and tribulations of
Long Island rebbetzin-artist Rachel Sonnshein.
Winegardner, Mark. The
Veracruz Blues. New York: Viking,
1996.
Different voices, assembled by a frustrated
sportswriter-turned-novelist who acts as overall narrator, tell the story of
the 1946 Mexican League and the fortunes of the American players, black and
white, who played there. This ambitious
novel decenters the usual Big Game archetype with a more dialogic approach. Well researched and written, this is perhaps
the best baseball novel of the 1990s.
*These novels are all worth
reading; I’ve left the potboilers and the pulp fiction in the bin where they
belong. They’re not all great, nor are
they all particularly Jewish, but for those interested in baseball fiction,
each of these has its merits.
**I’m indebted to Tim
Morris, University of Texas at Arlington, for his very fine work on baseball
literature, including Making the Team:
The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997) and
his website: http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/baseball/index.html
Roxanne
Harde