Between The Pages
The Rabbi of Swat by Peter Levine
(Michigan State University Press;
$19.95) is a re-imagining of the baseball
season of 1927 — the year Babe Ruth
hit 60 homeruns and led the Yankees to
the American League pennant.
Using baseball as a template to
reflect and explore the immigrant
experience, religious prejudice, class
issues and the relationship between
fathers and sons, the novel is in a
sense a coming-of-age story.
L
Eii
'v
Author Peter Levine takes us
out to the ballgame in his
brand-new novel.
The hero of the novel, Morrie
Ginsberg, pitches for the New York
Giants and struggles with his team to
win the National League pennant and
face the Yankees in the World Series.
At the same time, he must reconcile
his father's expectations, societal pres-
sures and his own desires to become a
man in the new American world.
Babe Ruth also is a narrative voice,
speaking to his own struggles in corn-
ing to terms with intergenerational
differences in the pursuit of the
American dream.
Author Peter Levine is a professor of
history and director of the American
Studies program at Michigan State
University. Also the author of Ellis Island
to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American
Jewish Experience, his latest novel
employs simulated newspaper accounts
as well as actual newspaper stories to
provide an authenticity to the story.
His mixture of fictional characters,
such as Ginsberg, with real historical fig-
ures, like Rogers Hornsby, John McGraw
and Arnold Rothstein, provides an
authenticity to The Rabbi of Swat that
will please lovers of history and baseball.
Curtain Call
Michigan native Lisa Kron last
appeared as a wisecracking, wheel-
chair-bound rabbi in Paul Rudnick's
current Off-Broadway hit, The Most
Fabulous Story Ever Told. Now she's
perfOrming at New York's Public
Theater in her own one-woman
show, which she also wrote.
Titled 2.5 Minute Ride, the 70-
minute play ties together her fami-
ly's annual visits to Cedar Point, the
Ohio amusement park, with a
sojourn to a concentration camp
with her father — whose parents
died there.
A comic exploration of the para-
doxes and ironies of life, the play's
title refers to a roller coaster ride.
Despite his heart condition and dia-
betes, her father loved going on
Cedar Point favorites like the Iron
Dragon and the Mean Streak. Now
retired, he still lives in Lansing.
But she mingles these humorous
memories with stories about visiting
Auschwitz with her then 77-year-old
father in 1990. "Today we can talk
about the Holocaust as a historical
event with 20-20 hindsight," she
told the New York Times. "We know
what happened. But I was struck by
the fact that these people were deal-
ing with their day-to-day mundane
existence."
During the show, Kron projects
blank images on a large screen and
goes on to describe them as if they
were images the audience can see.
"Blank slides are the perfect
metaphorical container," she has
said. "The blankness speaks not
only to the difficulty in representing
the Holocaust, but in telling a story
in someone else's life. It also allows
the audience to envision their own
stories and project them into my
particular story."
During the show, Kron, a mem-
ber of the Off-Broadway troupe Five
Lesbian Brothers, repeatedly refers
to her brother's marriage to an
Orthodox Jew, contrasting its
impact on her family to her own
relationship with a woman named
Peg. "I wanted them to know we
accept them even though they're
straight," she says.
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1999
Detroit Jewish News
85