Abramowitz Martin - Jewish major leaguers in their own words: oral histories of 23 players

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

All photographs are from the George Brace Collection unless otherwise noted.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-0-7864-8966-4

2012 Peter Ephross with Martin Abramowitz. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: Cleveland Indians Al Rosen, 1954 (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York).

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To four generations of baseball fans:
my Grandpa Al; my parents, Paul and Joan;
my siblings, Sara and David; my wife, Bonnie;
and my two sons, Jacob and Samuel.P.E.

All books have many parents, and this is especially true of an edited collection like this one. First and foremost, thanks to the players themselves, who shared their life stories and gave permission for these stories to be published. Thanks also go to the many individuals who conducted interviews for the collection, most notably Elli Wohlgelernter, who did several of them.

I also owe immense gratitude to Jewish Major Leaguers, the nonprofit organization that has sparked awareness in Jewish baseball players during the past decade, and the American Jewish Committee, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s sponsored many of the interviews that form the bases for the oral histories in this book. The New York Public Library, where those interviews are stored, helped me to obtain them. Mary Brace provided almost all of the photos in the book from an archive created by her father, George, during his decades as a baseball photographer in Chicago. Without the help of the Brace family, this book would not be as rich.

My wife, Bonnie Kerker, provided valuable comments on the introduction and loved and supported me in innumerable ways while I worked on the book. Yigal Schleifer and Rhoda Schlamm also provided comments that improved the introduction. Jeff Yas and my brother, David, helped with photo scanning. I thank them all.P.E.

My connection to this project started in the summer of 2004. Then an editor at JTA, a Jewish news service, I jumped at the opportunity to cover a weekend honoring Jewish Major Leaguers at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. As a lifetime fan, it was a dream come true, especially since I had never been to Cooperstown. Plus, I was thrilled to turn a lifelong hobby of following Jewish sports into one of my journalistic beats. During the weekend, I met Martin Abramowitz, the founder and president of Jewish Major Leaguers, a nonprofit organization devoted to chronicling the ties between American Jews and baseball. Martin and Jewish Major Leaguers not only organized the event, but JML was in the midst of producing what turned out to be several baseball card sets honoring the Jewish connection to the game.

Martin soon asked me to conduct an interview with Mickey Rutner, who in 1947 played 12 games for the Philadelphia Athletics, for a proposed book of oral histories of Jewish baseball players. In January 2005, I traveled to Texas to interview Rutner. I thoroughly enjoyed my few days hearing his baseball stories, which were the loose basis for a novel, Man on Spikes, written by Rutners good friend Eliot Asinof. A few years later, Martin asked me to take over the editorial reins of the book. Not knowing how much work lay ahead, I said yesand in the summer of 2008, at a Hall of Fame event honoring the seventy-fifth anniversary of Hank Greenbergs rookie year, Martin gave me a large box containing about twenty-five interviews.

About half of the interviews were commissioned by Jewish Major Leaguers and conducted by journalists, scholars, and other interested parties, mostly between 2005 and 2007. Several of the other interviews were conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of a larger American Jewish Committee project interviewing well-known American Jews. These interviews, ably conducted by Elli Wohlgelernter, a journalist now living in Israel, give us fascinating recollections from Al Schacht, Andy Cohen, Hank Greenberg, Goody Rosen, Cal Abrams, and Saul Rogovin, all now deceased. The interview of Al Rosen, the oldest living Jewish Major Leaguer as of the winter of 2012, was conducted by Cliff Chanin, also part of the American Jewish Committee project. All of the American Jewish Committeecommissioned interviews are published courtesy of the American Jewish Committee William E. Wiener Oral History Library and are housed at the New York Public Library. Journalistic prodigy Louis Jacobson conducted the Bob Berman and Cy Block interviews in the late 1980s. Then a teenager and now a political journalist, Jacobson did his work as part of a Confirmation project. Rich Topp interviewed Marv Rotblatt (with questions supplied by Jacobson). The Ron Blomberg chapter is excerpted with permission from his autobiography, Designated Hebrew: The Ron Blomberg Story, as told to Dan Schlossberg.

The other interviews were conducted by John Woestendiek (Harry Danning chapter), Joe Eskenazi (Sam Nahem, Ed Mayer), Marc Katz (Lou Limmer, Jose Bautista), Bob Ruxin (Larry and Norm Sherry), Susan E. Cayleff (Mike Epstein), Rebecca Alpert (Elliott Maddox), Howard Goldstein (Jesse Levis) and myself (Adam Greenberg).

As I leafed through the interviews, it became apparent that editing them down would be my largest challenge: Some of them run more than two hundred pages. Balancing the number of baseball tales with the amount of Jewish content was also difficult: Was it more important to showcase a detail about a players minor league days, his jobs after his playing days were over, or his thoughts, as a Jew, about the state of Israel? I based each of my judgment calls on which experience shed more light on the players life, as well as on the length of the interview. Most of the interviews came to me in question-and-answer format, which I converted into first-person narratives. I edited the interviews to make them compelling reads, which included reordering some sections to improve narrative flow. At all times, however, I strove to keep the voices of the players intact. I hope that I succeeded in doing so.P.E.

Nearly all fans of baseball history have heard of Hank Greenberg. Most have heard of Al Rosen. But fewer have heard of Cal Abrams, and hardly any, its safe to say, have heard of Lou Limmer. All four are part of a compelling teamthe 165 American Jews who have played Major League Baseball between the 1870s and the end of the 2010 season. They are also among the twenty-three players, from Bob Berman, who played in 1918, to Adam Greenberg, who played in 2005, interviewed in these oral histories of Jewish Major Leaguers.

Why should we care about Jews who played in the Major Leagues? As the interviews in this book demonstrate, baseball helped American Jews feel at home and helped nonJewish Americans feel comfortable around them. Theres the famous Hank Greenberg story, recounted by Greenberg himself in the book, of sitting out a game on Yom Kippur in 1934. As he modestly describes it in the interview: