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(More customer reviews)Kurlansky's biography of Hank Greenberg, part of the "Jewish Lives" series of Yale University Press, places Greenberg's career within the context of the anti-Semitism of the Depression and early post-World War II era. The author is at his best in describing how Jews in various sports changed their names to avoid anti-Semitism and to hide their involvement in sports from their parents who disapproved of such activities. Even a number of popular Hollywood actors and actresses also changed their names. (Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, and Paulette Goddard are such examples.)
Greenberg responded to anti-Jewish tauts by fans and opposing players with restraint and used such insults to motivate him. Early in his minor league days, he employed physical confrontation on the diamond, but quickly came to realize such action was self-defeating. His restraint, coupled with his superstar status, made him a hero to the Jewish community, something he did not want to be. Kurlansky suggests that Greenberg's way of dealing with blatant racism was used by Branch Rickey as a model for Jackie Robinson.
The author also shatters a number of myths surrounding Greenberg. One such myth concerns his quest to shatter Babe Ruth's single-season homerun record in 1938. With five games left in the season and sitting at 58 homeruns, no one in baseball, the story goes, wanted a Jew to break the record of 60. Therefore, the anti-Semitic owners, managers, pitchers conspired to throw him nothing to hit in the season's final days. Kurlansky skillfully demolishes this myth, pointing out that Greenberg himself renounced it on several occasions.
However, the book provides limited information about Greenberg's baseball career. For example, the author goes from the homerun chase in 1938 to a quick summary of the 1940 season, skipping the year 1939 altogether. Mickey Cochrane, the Hall of Fame catcher and manager of the Detroit Tigers in the mid-1930s, is not even mentioned in the book. A table of Greenberg's career stats and any citation of sources are also absent.
Yet, Kurlansky presents some interesting stories about Greenberg's years in baseball and after. When the slugger was called up to the Tigers at the tail end of the 1930 season, no veteran spoke to him. Greenberg swore that he would not do the same, and later in his career he befriended youngsters like Rudy York and Ralph Kiner. In his only year with the Pirates, he negotiated a one-year contract without the reserve clause. He also testified on behalf of Curt Flood in the law-suit involving that clause. Once he retired from baseball as a player and a general manager, he became obsessed with tennis and played it competitively until his early 70s.
If you are interested in a typical sports biography with a lot of stats, memorable confrontations between batter and pitcher, rivalries between teams and/or star players, thrilling pennant races, game-by-game World Series clashes, and a season-by-season account of the player's life, this book is not for you. However, if you are interested in Greenberg the person, what obstacles Jews faced during these years and how and why he became a hero to fellow Jews, then Kurlansky will help you understand these things in an lively and engaging manner.
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One of the reasons baseball fans so love the sport is that it involves certain physical acts of beauty. And one of the most beautiful sights in the history of baseball was Hank Greenberg's swing. His calmly poised body seemed to have some special set of springs with a trigger release that snapped his arms and swept the bat through the air with the clean speed and strength of a propeller. But what is even more extraordinary than his grace and his power is that in Detroit of 1934, his swing—or its absence—became entwined with American Jewish history. Though Hank Greenberg was one of the first players to challenge Babe Ruth's single-season record of sixty home runs, it was the game Greenberg did not play for which he is best remembered. With his decision to sit out a 1934 game between his Tigers and the New York Yankees because it fell on Yom Kippur, Hank Greenberg became a hero to Jews throughout America. Yet, as Kurlansky writes, he was the quintessential secular Jew, and to celebrate him for his loyalty to religious observance is to ignore who this man was.
In Hank Greenberg Mark Kurlansky explores the truth behind the slugger's legend: his Bronx boyhood, his spectacular discipline as an aspiring ballplayer, the complexity of his decision not to play on Yom Kippur, and the cultural context of virulent anti-Semitism in which his career played out.
What Kurlansky discovers is a man of immense dignity and restraint with a passion for sport who became a great reader—a man, too, who was an inspiration to the young Jackie Robinson, who said, "Class tells. It sticks out all over Mr. Greenberg." (20110617)
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