The Other Diamond Business
Whitfield, Steve
THE OTHER DIAMOND BUSINESS STEVE WHITFIELD The first sustained piece of American Jewish fiction is Abraham Cahan's Kdt/(1896), and already on page 5 the conversation turns to baseball. Jake, the...
...It runs out of money...
...But Malamud understood that the heroism of the Arthurian legends is no longer credible in the modern age...
...this provokes Jake to taunt him with what Jake believes to be a decisive put-down: "How hard can you hit...
...Typical of the line-up are Gordie Kaufman, "who had once carried a banner that read No Pasaran through the streets of Manhattan and now employed a man especially to keep Spaniards off the beach at his villa on Mallorca...
...Though neither book was hailed as a classic by the critics, those bench jockeys of literature, The Chosen and Good as Gold both attempted to assess the impact of assimilation by depicting a Softball game...
...The Natural is not naturalistic enough...
...together they face the sudden onset of the inevitable...
...like other Jews, been in the diamond business and, instead of pondering the mysteries of b'reshet, have created scenes set "in the big inning...
...Nearly all the players are Canadian Jews living abroad, men in their forties who had been radicals amidst the Depression and the Spanish Civil War...
...Although Joseph Heller's 1979 novel is very different from The Chosen, the final page also describes a softball game among yeshiva boys wearing skullcaps...
...Asinof, who played three years in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies, assumes that the dugout is as appropriate a setting for human conflict as a New England whaling ship or a Mississippi raft...
...The Seventh Babe includes only one Jewish character, Billy Rogovin, a gambler who sets up Ragland for what is interpreted as a bribe, provoking the infielder's expulsion...
...Philip Roth solved this problem 21 years later in The Great American Novel...
...It is rare for baseball fiction to acknowledge the sadness that is so pervasive an element in human experience, but Eliot Asinof's Man on Spikes (1954) does so...
...It loses its supply of bats...
...He is a left-handed third baseman...
...Rosenfeld, whose death at 38 was a blow to American letters, managed to capture that sense of victimization that is the schlemiel ticket of the Jewish comedian...
...Thirty-nine years old, with 19 big league seasons behind him, he has lost his fastball...
...But the allegorical cargo of the book is so heavy that it threatens to sink respect for the particularities of the game itself...
...But in watching the kids play softball, mixing their American boys' profanity with Yiddish, Gold cannot help wondering how adaptable and enduring this ancient people is...
...No serious student of the written or spoken language can afford to ignore The Great American Novel...
...Like all effective satire, The Great American Novel cannot entirely disguise a fondness for the targets it so mercilessly assaults...
...For "the whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology," Malamud has observed...
...The last two novels in Harris' tetralogy are less successful...
...Not everyone can follow Bellow and Singer all the way to Stockholm...
...For better or for worse, baseball has helped to forge that consensus and has helped to make a disparate people one...
...A rookie named Roy Hobbs can assume the responsibility of a heroic quest and can end the dry season with the aid of a magical bat drawn from a tree struck by lightning...
...Many grandchildren of its readers would become still more conscious of what the immigrants had only sampled vicariously...
...The problem with Malamud's tale is that it is not quite baseball that the New York Knights are playing...
...Malamud claims to have been a fan "from the time I was a kid and went to Ebbets Field whenever I could," and he draws upon actual episodes in the history of the sport in plotting the novel...
...The grim jokes that play on aging and mortality are deftly recounted in Mark Harris' series of novels about a semi-literate pitcher, Henry Wiggen...
...The mansion of American Jewish fiction has room for many memorable and familiar characters, but there are also fielders on the roof...
...The Great American Novel is nasty and vulgar and wordy and disordered, and it certainly isn't deep...
...Contrary to popular belief, Roth's most important organ is his ear, which he has used to record the American idiom with stunning fidelity...
...Like Roy Hobbs, he fails to hit in the clutch, though Kutner appreciates through marital love how much more there is to life than baseball...
...Passed over for the position of manager, Harris' hero is released, and must accept not only his own limitations but, ultimately, his own mortality...
...But it is not, of course, a book for the serious...
...As a Canadian, Richler might have been immune to the charm of baseball, and could have been expected to stick to hockey and to the mocky opportunists from Montreal who have long been his targets...
...His article "Jazz Singers" appeared in the March-April 1981 issue of MOMENT...
...It is an extravaganza of comic inventiveness and inspired zaniness that is exempt from the preoccupation of his other books with the exorbitant demands of mothers and wives and lovers, which is where the gripes of Roth are stored...
...The Misfortunes of the Flapjacks" conveys instead a fundamental unfairness in the order of things, a primordial injustice that nothing—neither physical strength nor collective will—can rectify...
...But in the darkness of its subject, The Sensation points to the possibility that the aberrant underside of the game warrants the attention of adult writers and readers...
...But make them reek of verisimilitude and individuality...
...Many of our novelists have, Steve Whitfield, a contributing editor to this magazine, teaches American studies at Brandeis University...
...Then put them on the last-place team of a defunct Patriot League...
...that you growed to manhood over the summer...
...Few contemporary novelists are as haunted by the corruption of flesh and spirit as Mordecai Richler, whose satiric thrusts have been so similar to Roth's...
...Roy-roi, get it...
...Bernard Malamud's first novel was The Natural (1952), and it is unique among his books in that no Jew—not even the word—appears in it...
...Man on Spikes relies on little conventional plotting, and imposes no demands upon readers whose technical knowledge of the game may be hazy...
...Wiggen's wife Holly presumably speaks for the author when she tells the southpaw that statistics "do not show...
...Isaac Rosenfeld was perhaps the first to grasp the sport's potential for fiction...
...Narrated in a staccato style, the novel employs the technique perfected in E.L...
...Finally the Flapjacks are so emaciated from hunger that they lose an exhibition match to a high school squad...
...Jake, the protagonist of the novella, is eager to abandon the stigma of being a greenhorn and to become assimilated...
...Only there did Portnoy enjoy the autonomy and "unruffled nonchalance" that make him wonder why he could not somehow have remained a joyous sand-lotter forever...
...he is a misfit on a Red Sox team composed of various outsiders, and he winds up playing in the Negro leagues for a team (the Cincinnati Giants) that is in fact homeless...
...Certainly The Natural is one of the most bizarre baseball tales ever written, fashioned, as it is, from the same medieval legends that provided the mythic pattern for T.S...
...Urbain's Horseman (1971) with a Sunday morning soft-ball game on London's Hampstead Heath...
...Their books must also be understood not simply as romances or yarns or satires but—even in the second and third generations—as final citizenship papers...
...If the national pastime is myth, then give the athletes names like Gil Gamesh (a Babylonian fire-baller who is "the greatest rookie of all time"), John ("Spit") Baal, and Jean-Paul ("Frenchy") Astarte...
...The surface of the novel seems familiar: this time the name of the sensational rookie center fielder is Mike Kutner, and he can hit, field, run and manifest an infectious will to win...
...The author himself is less interested in the intrinsic complexities of the game itself than in the comic betrayal of the amateurs' effort to revive a vanished innocence...
...Yet it is he who once revealed the wry secret that, "like most Jewish novelists," he would rather have been Sandy Koufax...
...The Flapjacks of the One Eye League can field only eight men when their 14-year-old mascot refuses to continue playing shortstop...
...It is superfluous—and irrelevant—to add that only a novelist who cherishes the game could demonstrate such intimate and intricate knowledge of its lore and lingo...
...Doctorow's Ragtime of blending fictional figures with historical actors like Ty Cobb and Kenesaw Mountain Landis...
...You will never be an island," she adds, "and that is the great victory hardly anybody wins anymore...
...Cahan himself was not content with a literary reputation for realistic depiction of the New York ghetto...
...Observing them from behind home plate are, well, not exactly fans, but their first wives, nicknamed "the Alimony Gallery...
...But a series of career reversals, including military service in World War II, conspire to keep Kutner in the AA and AAA leagues...
...Danny Saunders, the heir to a Hasidic dynasty in Williamsburg, can hit vicious line drives as well as read the Talmud with exemplary facility...
...Confined to the farm system of the Chicago Lions, he is exploited for so long that his chance to play in the majors arrives only when Kutner is 35...
...it is for anyone willing to risk being helplessly convulsed with laughter...
...force them to go through the rigors of spring training in Asbury Park, New Jersey...
...In his broken English, Cahan's Jake had defined himself as "an American feller, a Yankee," and Jewish fiction thereafter has consisted typically of parables of assimilation and its discontents...
...This article was written with the assistance of Marc Lee Raphael...
...The New York Mammoths boast a slugging first baseman named Sid Goldman, but it is no secret that Jews in the major leagues have been about as rare as a double steal...
...Endowed with its own distinct rituals, codes, sancta and traditions, baseball ought, on its own, to attract the student of manners and morals...
...A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957) limns the national fascination with science, technology and health, as embodied in a ballplayer named Piney Woods...
...Like the coarse and sinister Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, Rogovin therefore is based on Arnold Rothstein, who is alleged to have fixed the 1919 World Series...
...Instead, Jewish novelists, in disproportionate number, have preferred to write about the sport, which has given them the opportunity to explore glory rather than guilt and the possibilities of heroism rather than the certainties of failure...
...The vibrancy of the myth of baseball is largely realized in Jerome Charyn's The Seventh Babe (1979), whose protagonist, the scion of a Southwestern copper fortune, adopts an identity akin to Babe Ruth's...
...make them real ballplayers...
...The only Jewish intellectual to play the game rather than merely write about it, Berg was also the strangest fellah ever to study phonetics at the Sorbonne (during the off-season...
...Eliot's "The Wasteland...
...Now they are deeply immersed in the meretri-ciousness of popular culture...
...It is a savage version of the pastoral...
...The Southpaw (1953) traces Wiggen's career from childhood to his rookie year with the World Series-bound New York Mammoths, and shows how he learns to see through the emptiness of the struggle for success at all costs, of the dizzying emphasis on fame...
...and they too merit at least brief consideration...
...But several Jewish writers seem to have found Cooperstown instead...
...That victory comes in handy in Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) with Wiggen's friendship with Bruce Pearson, a third-string catcher dying of Hodgkin's disease...
...and Moey Hanover, "who had studied at a yeshiva, stood up to the committee, and was now on a sabbatical from Desilu...
...Harris, nevertheless, was shrewd enough to envision the fictional possibilities of modelling his first-string catcher, Red Traphagen, on Moe Berg, whom Casey Stengel called "the strangest fellah who ever put on a uniform...
...It is too late...
...A notoriously weak hitter, whose .243 lifetime batting average must have been only slightly higher than his I.Q., Berg nevertheless testified to the persistent allure that the game exerted upon even the most scholarly of grownups...
...But Norman Keifetz's novel has a more peculiar theme—a psychological examination of an extremely talented center fielder, Potter Cindy, who exposes himself in front of little girls...
...The narrator, Reuven Malter, can hurl blazing sinker-curves while yielding to some of the forces of modern secularism...
...His players and sports announcers and newspaper "scribes" sound exactly as they should...
...So obligatory have such characters become that another gambler, named Scruffy Levinson, contemplates fixing baseball games in The Sensation (1975...
...There is also something distinctly modernist (and perhaps Jewish) in Charyn's conception of Babe Ragland, for he is an oddity...
...So poignant is his account of the indignity of aging that the reader almost accepts this assumption...
...The regular manager is taken away to a mental institution...
...throw them into an exhibition match against a team of lunatics from an asylum...
...But while talented members of other minorities have gone from coal fields and cotton fields to win fame and wealth on the playing fields, the Jews have left professional competition to the goys of summer, despite the relative absence of violence in baseball...
...The character was undoubtedly inspired by a professional football player arrested on such charges in the 1960s...
...But Silver makes it apparent that Jake's poor form would have prevented him from slamming the horsehide much past the infield...
...His coach is a rabbi who— in Yiddish, of course—exhorts the team to hustle, and the Hasidim regard with contempt athletic and religious opponents they deem apikorsim...
...Ever since Cahan, Jewish novelists have included among their characters not only rebbes and revolutionaries, fixers and fressers, all-rightniks and anarchists, vulgarians and violinists, but baseball players as well...
...But careful readers of Portnoy's Complaint (1969) may recall that the sole exception to the squalor of the narrator's interior life is the lyrical memory of the boyhood hours he spent in center field...
...Wiggens insists, in his contract with the Mammoths, that Pearson not be dropped from the roster unless the pitcher is as well...
...as the most influential Jewish journalist of the century, he used the Forward to ease the pain of immigrant adaptation to the New World...
...Richler is a master of the comic set-piece, like the filming of the bar mitzvah in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz...
...It Looked Like for Ever (1979) juxtaposes the game's promise of renewal (we're back to Malamud's vegetation myth) with the aging of Henry Wiggen...
...The son of immigrant Russian Jews who settled in Newark, Berg got a degree in romance languages from Princeton and a law degree from Columbia...
...and therefore the Holy Grail can become the league pennant, the Fisher King a manager named Pop Fisher, and the knights the name of a New York team...
...But the scholarly Bernstein is indifferent to discussions about "pitzers and catzers...
...At the age of 70, his dying words took the form of the least metaphysical of questions: "How did the Mets do today...
...When Joan Micklin Silver, the daughter-in-law of the Zionist tribune Abba Hillel Silver, adapted Yekl for the screen in 1975, she added a scene to Hester Street that shows Jake in Central Park teaching his son how to hit a baseball...
...But the opening and closing episodes of two other novels clinch the case for the pertinence of baseball to the American Jewish imagination...
...and his 1947 story, "The Misfortunes of the Flapjacks," precedes The Great American Novel in chronicling a team's devastating penchant for defeat...
...He therefore informs another sweatshop worker: "You must know how to peetch...
...Keifetz's book lacks artistic grace, psychological subtlety or even narrative drive as a sports saga...
...You will throw no more spitballs for the sake of something so stupid as a ball game...
...Protagonist Bruce Gold is returning from a visit to his mother's grave, though he is unable to mourn her passing and cannot read the Hebrew letters on her marker...
...But his fable, unlike Roth's novel, is not out for laughs...
...Meeting intellectual challenges should have been easy for Berg, but playing catcher for the Dodgers, Red Sox and other teams must have been a more interesting way to fulfill the dream of a second-generation American...
...In one game the team surrenders 38 runs...
...In the first chapter of Chaim Potok's 1967 novel, one team of Orthodox Jewish boys is pitted against another that is even more pious...
...When Hobbs strikes out at the end of the novel, a fan is heard to mutter: "He coulda been a king...
...he nearly tops it in St...
...he displayed a flair for science and a command of a dozen languages (including Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Sanskrit...
...give them a Jewish owner who knows how to take in the waist on their uniforms—and the result is a tour de farce, a true screwball comedy that also emits a Bronx cheer against virtually everything most Americans have deemed sacred...
...With some hesitation and a few qualifications, most Jews have shared the hunger of other ethnic minorities for acceptance and for full participation in the national consensus...
...No wonder, then, that as early as 1909, his newspaper published an article on the fundamentals of baseball...
Vol. 6 • October 1981 • No. 9
