A film documenting

the life and triumphs

of baseball great

Hank Greenberg

comes to metro

Detroit.

DEBORAH WALIKE

Special to the Jewish News

E

very-one knows the old joke,
"Ask two Jews a question and
you'll get three answers." But
ask American Jews who were
around in 1934, when the Detroit
Tigers' Hank Greenberg chose to go to
synagogue on Yom Kippur rather than
play in a possible pennant-deciding
game, what that moment meant to them
and you are sure to get identical answers.
It meant everything.
This remarkable decision is just one
example of the character of the late
Henry Benjamin Greenberg. Born the
son of observant Jewish Romanian
immigrants, he became a folk hero for
American Jews.

Deborah Walike is a sta f f reporter for

the Baltimore Jewish Times.

DANIEL BELASCO

Special to the Jewish News

T

he arrival of September is
a reminder of the synergy
between Jews and base-
ball. In the pace of
American life, the High Holidays
and the World Series happily coex
ist in the same season, providing
American Jews the ability to express
their commitment to both religious
values and the American pastime.
In Aviva Kempner's new docu-

"PW'r
Am

1/14
2000

78

Touching
All The

The award-winning documentary
The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
— which took filmmaker Aviva
Kempner 13 years to complete —
pays fitting homage to the slugger
known as "Hammerin Hank."
It makes its Michigan debut
Saturday, Jan. 29, at Ann Arbor's
Michigan Theater, where Kempner
will be on hand to present the film and
answer questions. The event is spon-
sored by the University of Michigan
Hillel, Jewish Community Center of
Washtenaw County, Jewish Federation
of Washtenaw County, Congregation
Beth Israel and Temple Beth Emeth.
Drawing raves at film festivals
across the country, the documentary
recently found a distributor in
Cowboy Booking International and
opened commercially this week in
New York, prior to a national rollout
to over 40 markets. The film travels to

the Detroit Film Theatre at the
Detroit Institute of Arts for screenings
on March 31, April 1 and 2.
Filmmaker Kempner, who grew up
in Detroit, recalls that on every Yom
Kippur her father would recount the
tale of Greenberg's decision not to
play. "I thought that was the story of
Yom Kippur," Kempner says from her
home in Washington, D.C. "This film
is my father's legacy, even though he
never lived to see it."
The film depicts Greenberg's life
through a series of interviews with
fans, friends, players, sportswriters,
family members and Greenberg him-
self, weaving them artfully together
with timeless footage and sounds of
1930s Detroit. The film relies heavily
on music (including Mandy Patinkin's
Yiddish version of "Take Me Out to
the Ballgame"), film clips and remem-
brances of the antisemitism of the era.

mentary, The Life and Times of
Hank Greenberg, two longtime fans
recount a version of baseball they
would play vcihile in synagogue.
Reading down the first letters of
each line on a randomly selected
page in the siddur would constitute
an inning: A shin would be a strike,
a tet a triple, and so on.
Generations of American Jews
have cut their identities on the
baseball diamond. The story goes
that, rarely seen on the field, Jews
have positioned themselves instead
as privileged outsiders, the writers
and commentators who make
meaning out of the sweaty men
playing in the summer heat. In
both fiction and non-fiction, base-
ball has been a touchstone of 20th-
century American Jewish literature.

Bernard Malamud chose the
sport as the subject of his first
novel, The Natural; Philip Roth sat-
irized the trinity of Jews, baseball
and American culture in The Great
American Novel; Chaim Potok
employed the game as a privileged
allegory in The Chosen; and Roger
Kahn memorialized the old
Brooklyn Dodgers in The Boys of
Summer, to cite merely a few
prominent examples.
Eric Solomon, a professor of
English at San Francisco State
University, is completing a study
titled "Jews, Baseball and the
American Novel." American Jews
have made significant contributions
to the practice and literature of
other sports like basketball and box-
ing, but. Solomon discovered that

It took Kempner more than a
dozen years to complete the documen-
tary because she had to raise funds to
cover the cost of rights of footage. The
film resonates with Cole Porter and
Benny Goodman music, scenes from
Gentleman's Agreement and the Marx
Brothers' A Night at the Opera and his-
toric baseball footage that all costs lots
of money to use.
Kempner started the nonprofit
Ciesla Foundation to seek donations,
and benefits were held around the
country to cover the $1 million price
tag. Celebrities like Kirk Douglas,
Neil Diamond, Norman Lear and
Steven Spielberg pitched in to help.
Most of the fans interviewed for the
film — some of whom are now rabbis
— revert to childlike awe when recalling
watching their "Moses of baseball" play.
"He was part of my dreams and
aspirations," actor Walter Matthau

Jews have written a disproportion-
ate number of serious baseball
books.
Baseball is "a way of becoming
American and yet retaining their
identity as Jews," Solomon recently
explained in the Jewish Bulletin of

Northern California.
Jews were drawn to baseball
because they "loved the intellectual
aspect of baseball, all the stuff with
arguments [about the statistics and
history]," Solomon said. "That's the,
Jewish cultural heritage, remember-
ing the past while living in the pre-
sent.
While many Jews seemingly
blended into the grandstands to
become more American, Los
Angeles Dodger Sandy Koufax has
been lauded for his Jewish values.

"

