When we swing, we swing for the fences.

Perhaps more than any other sport, Jews have been drawn to baseball, both on and off the field, and in so doing, have established a kind of tradition, passing on stories from generation to generation. Hank Greenberg blasting two homers on Rosh Hashanah before sitting out on Yom Kippur, Sandy Koufax taking the bench for the first game of the 1965 World Series, even the latest jaw-dropping run by Team Israel in the World Baseball Classic—these Samsonian strongmen represent something bigger than themselves, and their success and failures have become a liturgy for the emerging Jewish baseball fan. Following suit on the page, authors—some members of the tribe, others playing for different ball clubs—have used blended Jewish ideas with baseball to create a new mythology.

The first stab at stitching Jews and baseball together on the literary field comes as early as the Roaring Twenties, although the scouting report is ill-favored for the home team. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has survived perhaps rightfully as a commentary on the tarnishing of the American Dream, but perhaps wrongly for how it veers from crediting the affairs of apathetic WASPs to blaming a caricature of the Jew as a loyalty-less grubber: Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim appears as one of Gatsby’s shadier connections—to really drive the point home, Fitzgerald dresses him in human-tooth cufflinks—but the true source of his corruption is revealed later by Gatsby:

“Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

“He just saw the opportunity.”

Wolfsheim, as it turns out, is a barely disguised Arnold Rothstein, often attributed with doing just what Gatsby accuses—fixing the World Series and getting away with it. It is clear from Gatsby’s distaste that he sees something perverse in a Jew bleeding the sacred cow that is baseball for a couple coin, and in doing so he establishes the first of many strains of myth-making in baseball literature. Baseball’s original sin stretches so long that W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (more popularly known in movie form as Field of Dreams) is still trying to atone.

Not the most auspicious start for a lasting relationship, though the irony is that Jewish authors and Jewish themes have long elevated the game in prose. Although not Jewish himself, Pete Hamill’s Snow in August transplants the golem from Prague to mid-century Brooklyn, where it is brought to life by a Holocaust survivor and his young Irish Catholic friend. The book uses baseball as a canvas for its themes of intolerance, and though not implicitly drawn, the true golem of the story is Jackie Robinson, beginning his history-making turn in the majors, who echoes the golem’s traditional purpose as a symbol for the oppressed. James Sturm takes the opposite approach in his graphic novel, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, which demystifies the image of the golem in a story of a barnstorming Jewish baseball team during the Great Depression and exposes the limits of how far baseball can truly take the American Dream when it seems rotten at its core.

With a more cosmic perspective, however, comes Michael Chabon’s YA novel, Summerland, a blender of Native American and Norse mythologies, all centered around a belief that baseball is a tool of champions. Chabon provides a typical hero’s journey, but with a twist: the battleground? A baseball diamond. The stakes? The end of the world. The hero? A kid who only needs to catch one good game.

In this sense, all roads lead back to the quintessential baseball novel and the man who married Americana and Arthurian legend to build a new motley mythos: Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. It tells the story of a man named Roy Hobbs, returned to the game after being shot in his prime years before, and how he tries to rescue a slumping team with his Excalibur-like bat “Wonderboy” while battling his own tendencies to succumb to temptation. Nothing about the novel is essentially Jewish, except perhaps its ending. Whereas the movie adaptation provides a true Hollywood moment when cornfed Robert Redfield shatters the lights with his pennant-winning homer, the book ends, in true Arthurian taste, with Hobbs striking out, accused of throwing the game, and erased from its history. Maybe King Arthur learned pessimism from the Jews.

There can be miracles, however, if you believe. In Mindy Avra Portnoy’s timeless children’s classic Matzah Ball, a young fan feels ashamed schlepping to the ballpark with his Passover-approved lunch—and even more awkward when his friends eat his lunch instead of their own, leaving him in the lurch. In this dark hour, an old man appears and regales the kid with tales of boyhood games in Ebbets Field and gifts him a very special piece of matzah before disappearing. You know how it goes now—the kid catches a home run using his matzah as a glove, and we learn that while there may not be angels in the outfield, at least Elijah has a seat in the bleachers.

Photo of Sandy Koufax via Flickr

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There is an immutable law of Internet journalism that no article you write will be as appreciated as a goofy Tumblr created in a moment of idleness. (I’m sure Jeff Jarvis has a name for this.) That has been the case for me since earlier this year, when I started a Tumblr to catalogue all of the blurbs of author Gary Shteyngart, whose “promiscuous praise”—among today’s writers, he might be the most prolific blurber—had become something of a modern legend. Other writers might give me a small compliment for some review I’ve written, but upon hearing that I’m the proprietor of “The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart” and that I’ve made it a mission to catalog all of the outbursts of praise from an inveterate praise artist—well, that’s when my acquaintances nod their heads before politely excusing themselves.

Let us now praise the praiser. Over the years, Shteyngart has been interviewed about his blurbing compulsion, and his answers reflect his monkish devotion to the craft. Recently he talked to A.J. Jacobs, another compulsive blurber, about the habit for the New York Times, explaining how he decides to blurb a book: “I look for the following: Two covers, one spine, at least 40 pages, ISBN number, title, author’s name. Once those conditions are satisfied, I blurb. And I blurb hard.”

Indeed! And so I will testify, to you, reader, who accidentally clicked on this column. For I’ve gone deep into the Amazonian forests and gathered, like so many plump berries, 61 Shteyngart blurbs, though some of those were submitted by readers and others are evanescent things, unable to be pinned to a book cover, such as one about A.J. Jacobs’ Times article. There are still rarer, more delicate objects in my collection—Faberge blurbs—including a blurb about a tweet: “Simon montefiore has written a classic tweet that will endure for hours.” Aye, perhaps, but the record of that praise will now live on forever (or until Tumblr runs through its venture capital).

And however vain it might be, the most precious blurb under my stewardship is one that Shteyngart, who reportedly only writes fiction to support his menagerie of dachshunds (if he had his druthers, I’m told, he would do nothing but blurb, blurbing deep into the night), wrote upon my request. It is a blurb for the blurber, a blurber’s blurb, and I’ve positioned it, as one would a Picasso in the foyer, at the top of the site. It reads in full: “Gary Shteyngart’s blurbs are touching, funny and true. This is a blurber to watch.”

What makes a Gary Shteyngart blurb? First, it is in English. (This is no small matter, for Gary, nee Igor, was born in the Soviet Union and counts Russian as his mother tongue.) Second, it has words, usually complimentary words, many of them adjectives. There are periods and, sometimes, a wittily placed exclamation mark. Occasionally he allows a metaphor, catlike, to slink in. And surrounding all this: two quotation marks, staring fondly at each other across the expanse of neon prose.

Some people have told me that blurbs are meaningless, that they have long been despised as a low and disingenuous part of the book marketing machine. They are favors traded between writers; they are small kindnesses reluctantly given; they are a trick that agents, when they are resting their voices from screaming at their assistants, force their writers to perform. Others say that no one pays attention to blurbs or that, if they do, they are fools, seduced by puffery that probably originated in an infomercial testimonial for a food dehydrator.

But I think that blurbs are more than that—or at least that Gary Shteyngart’s, numinous and numerous, are. Sure, I have read and typed this word (“blurb”; bluuuuurb) enough times so that it no longer appears like language to me. Yes, I have spent so much time scouring book catalogs and googling “Gary Shteyngart blurb” (and, in more desperate moments, “Gary Shteyngart blurbs”) that I have lost all sight of where I came from, so that I now stand on some distant precipice, surrounded by a roiling sea of Tumblr tags, under a vaulted sky of reblogs and heart icons that, if only I stretched far enough, I think I could somehow click.

Yet on the way towards this place, I have seen things. I have seen the difference between “a brilliant, funny, humane writer” (Sayed Kashua) and a “highly entertaining debut novel” (George Hagen’s The Laments). More importantly, I believe—though we have only exchanged a few (masterful! irreverent! genre-bending!) tweets—that I have seen into the heart of Gary Shteyngart himself. Like Hunter S. Thompson, who retyped The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms to know what it was like to write a great novel, I have done the same with The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart. Fine, I have only cut and pasted them into Tumblr between games of Starcraft II, but in this age of brevity, that must count for something near the same.

And when Gary Shteyngart decides to hang up that well-thumbed thesaurus, I will be there, asking him, Why? Were we not good enough? Do we, do they, those undersung MFA graduates, no longer deserve your praise? And I am sure that he will turn to me and—with great delicacy and prefaced by several improvised flattering remarks—ask why I have violated the court order that is surely in my future.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

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Boardwalk Empire is easily one of the most talked about new shows of the season and for good reason: great cast, fantastic scenery, and well researched.

While the show features several Irish, Italian and African-American antiheroes and bad guys, it’s also given us one of the best pop culture representations of the greatest Jewish gangster of them all: Arnold Rothstein.  In Boardwalk Empire, Rothstein, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, is given something of a dandy persona.  But as you can see below, what is known about Rothstein is more fictional than fact.  The real Arnold Rothstein was a man whose life and death were shrouded in mystery, and he’s been represented several different ways over the years.

1. Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby

While there’s always been some debate as to whether Gatsby himself was a Yid (his real last name is Gatz), there is no doubt that his associate Meyer Wolfsheim had a bar mitzvah. F. Scott Fitzgerald leaves little to the imagination as Gatsby tells Nick Carraway that Wolfsheim is the man behind the thing Rothstein is most known for: fixing the 1919 World Series.

2. Tough Jews Rich Cohen and King of the Jews by Nick Tosches

Both books are great reads.  Cohen gives you a more straightforward account of Rothstein and his fellow Jewish gangsters, while Tosches attempts to use him as a springboard to explain Western civilization as a whole.

3. Mobsters

If ever there was a role that made people think F. Murray Abrams was a Jew, playing Rothstein with a pencil mustache may have been it.  Even though this early 1990s buddy drama was a total stinker, at least you can say you saw Patrick Dempsey playing Meyer Lansky, and an appearance by Fyvush Finkel.

4. Eight Men Out

Watch this 1988 film about the 1919 Black Sox scandal, then try and tell us you see any sort of resemblance between Boardwalk Empire’s Rothstein, and the larger sized version played by Michael Lerner.

5.  Hyman Roth in The Godfather 2

Possibly the most well-known fictional Jewish gangster ever says that Rothstein was his inspiration.  It’s good to have role models  — even if you’re a gangster.

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