 Hank Greenberg: AmericanbyMike YawnHank Greenberg was baseball’s first Jewish superstar, and his ethnic identity was inextricably intertwined with his public life. He defied cultural stereotypes of the 1930s and 1940s, a time when Americans saw the Jewish male as a “nebbish,” small and intellectual. But as the six-foot, four inch Greenberg was slugging his way into history books, he also faced a more subtle battle, the expectations of his own family, who preferred for him a life of law or medicine. Greenberg was the first ballplayer to seriously threaten Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs in a season, one of the first to enlist in the service during World War II, and his battle to be accepted on the ball field as simply an “American” foreshadowed the struggles of Jackie Robinson and baseball’s integration. His is a life worth examining. Greenberg’s accomplishments received welcome attention in 2011, the centenary of his birth. Mark Kurlansky completed Hank Greenberg: The Baseball Hero Who Didn’t Want to be One, an entry in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. Aviva Kempner released an updated version of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, her award-winning documentary originally released in 1998. Mike Yawn interviewed both Kurlansky and Kempner, probing their views on Greenberg and his impact on baseball and society. * * * Aviva Kempner is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has focused on Jewish heroes. She has written, directed, and produced four films, including the 1998 feature, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, which won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best non-fiction film. As part of Greenberg’s centenary celebration, Kempner rereleased the Greenberg documentary with approximately 200 minutes of new, special-feature footage. Mike Yawn: You were the writer, director, and producer on the Greenberg documentary. Aviva Kempner: Well, no one else will work for free most of the time. Mike: Tell us a little about how the project came about. Aviva: Well I grew up in Detroit, the daughter of a Jewish immigrant who, like a lot of immigrants Jewish and non-Jewish, became a baseball fan. One of the ways that immigrants became American was by following baseball. My dad took us to many games and talked a lot about the Jewish baseball players, with Hank Greenberg being the most prominent. We would also hear about Hank when we went to a Synagogue for Kol Nidrei, which was the most holy night for Jews, for Yom Kippur. And dad would always talk about how Hank didn’t play on Yom Kippur in the 1934 pennant race. I heard so much about Hank Greenberg going to Kol Nidrei services, I just assumed he was part of Kol Nidrei. Mike: That reminds me about how Greenberg’s mother convinced him that Americans made such a big deal about January 1 because it was his birthday. Aviva: Yes, that was Sarah Greenberg. In any event, I decided I had to make a film because he had been so much a part of my childhood and a hero of my father. My first film was about Jews fighting Nazis, but I also wanted to address domestic anti-Semitism, and Hank played under great adversity. Other than Jackie Robinson, I don’t think anyone endured more. Mike: Greenberg is often identified as the first Jewish superstar athlete. Who were some prominent Jewish sports figures prior to Greenberg? Aviva: Well, there was Lipman Pike, one of the first Jewish baseball players. And there were Jewish boxers. It just wasn’t something that was emphasized in the community. Sports, well, boxing, was a way to get out of the ghetto. But baseball was a more intellectual and gentler game that Jewish immigrants and their kids would watch. Mike: When Greenberg played in Beaumont (Texas), one of his teammates met him and expressed surprise, saying “You don’t look Jewish. My mom said Jewish people had horns.” Aviva: That’s based on the misconception in the Torah, where it was said that Moses had “rays coming from his ears” and then Michelangelo depicted them as horns and then everything from there got all screwed up. Mike: Can you give us a little flavor of the anti-Semitism that Greenberg faced? Aviva: He faced a lot of ignorance and outright anti-Semitism from his fellow players, but I always say the best revenge is just trying to knock the ball out of the park. Mike: Even sportswriters shared a lot of these prejudices. I think he was referred to as “Super Jew” in the paper fairly regularly. Aviva: Right, some of the headlines were unbelievable. Although when he chose not to play on Yom Kippur, the Detroit Free Press had a Hebrew headline wishing him Happy New Year. Mike: It seems that a lot of Jews embrace Greenberg and Sandy Koufax because they dispel stereotypes of Jewish men. Greenberg and Koufax were as big and tough as any other athlete. Aviva: Absolutely. It’s interesting because often times the image of Jewish men on the screen is the nerd, the nebbish, which was another reason I decided to cover Greenberg. I mean, I not only do unknown Jewish heroes, but I also try to counter stereotypes of Jews. Mike: In the 1936 Olympics, Jesse Owens’ performance was seen as a literal and symbolic victory against Hitler. Did Greenberg’s performance on the field send a similar message about Jews to the world? Aviva: Part of the film’s purpose is to show Hank’s accomplishments and the adversity he faced, but I also wanted to show what he meant to his fans. He was doing a great job in terms of not only playing, but just making a statement of brawn and courage and of moving forward, not only against what Hitler was doing, but also against some of the things Jews faced in the workplace. Mike: Greenberg was one of the first major athletes to sign up for WWII. What kind of extra pressure did he have on him to fight against the Nazis? Aviva: Well, actually, he could have gotten out of it for flat feet, but he felt very committed to fighting against Hitler. Mike: What kind of numbers do you think Greenberg would have compiled had he not missed four years to war? Aviva: His numbers would have been incredible. That’s why I think they need to put an asterisk by his, [Joe] DiMaggio’s and [Ted] Williams’ career totals. Mike: Doing a little math in my head, he would have reached . . . Aviva: Oh, 500 home runs, yeah. And he led such a clean life. I think he’d be appalled by the steroids. Mike: Today, not a lot of people know the players from baseball’s Golden Age. And there are lots of people unfamiliar with the adversity faced by Jews in that period. How would you convey to people just how important Greenberg was and what his numbers mean? Aviva: It’s so different today, because we live in a much more politically correct time. Can you imagine going to work in the environment he endured? I mean we have catcalling between rivalries, but to base that on race, or ethnicity, or religion? You’d be fired in a minute. You just don’t have that in today’s world. Which is great, but it makes it hard for people to understand the past. Mike: Tell me a little about his transition to management. He hit 25 twenty-five home runs in his last year as a player, but decided to hang it up. Aviva: Well, he partnered with one of his best friends, and they were innovative owners. They hired the first African American in the American League, held the first Women’s Day, and won some pennants. Hank was a good negotiator. He loved baseball, and he wanted to contribute in management. He still had that competitiveness, was still winning at the game, and he wasn’t willing to leave it entirely. Mike: Tell us a little about the commemorative DVD. Aviva: I’m redoing the DVD. Not the film itself, but the 100th birthday commemorative DVD. It will be out in the spring, and it will contain up to 200 extra minutes including interviews with Ted Williams, Birdie Tebbetts, Bob Feller, and Walter Matthau. And we have a new website up, which will announce that the DVD is coming out in the spring. * * * Mark Kurlansky has written numerous books on diverse topics, including: Cod, Salt, Oysters, non-violence, and baseball. Prior to his publication of Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One, Yawn interviewed him. Below is an excerpt from that interview. Mike Yawn: You seem to have broad interests. How do you turn your diverse interests into books? Mark Kurlansky: Well, yeah, I think I’m just interested in a lot of things. I write a lot of books. I like the feeling of writing a new book that’s nothing like the last book I wrote. It keeps it interesting. I come out of this old-fashioned news tradition, where they think that a good reporter can report on anything. When I worked for newspapers, I did a very broad range of things, places, and kinds of stories in every section of the paper. Maybe that influenced me, but I only write about things in which I am interested. Mike: It’s tougher to create a brand when each book is different. Does your diversity affect your sales? Or do you have a loyal following that jumps from topic to topic with you? Mark: I think I do have a loyal following. I mean I meet people all the time who have read seven or eight of my books. They think they’ve read all of them, and I don’t have the heart to tell them (laughs). Mike: Do you choose your writing topics because those topics interest you? Or do you try to gauge the interests of the public and write about topics that will find a market? Mark: No, I don’t really worry about it that much. I write what interests me. I assume, or I hope, that it will interest somebody else. Mike: What’s the best-selling book you have written? Mark: I’m not sure. I think it’s probably Salt. It’s either Salt, or Cod, or 1968. If you are talking about world-wide sales, it’s one of those three, I’m not sure which. Mike: Tell me how your book on Hank Greenberg came about. Mark: It’s funny; it’s the only book I’ve done that wasn’t my idea. Yale University Press was doing a series, Jewish Lives, where they have Jewish writers write biographies of Jewish subjects. When they asked, I suggested a number of people: Louis Brandeis, Emma Goldman, and Sandy Koufax. I think the Koufax suggestion prompted them to come back and say, “Well, how about Hank Greenberg.” And I realized Greenberg is a much better story. One of the things that’s so interesting to me about him is that his whole image and who his fans, or at least his Jewish fans, held him up to be is completely different than who he really was. Mike: Tell me about that. Mark: Well, according to the Jewish Greenberg fans, he was portrayed as very religious: wouldn’t play on Yom Kippur; never changed his name. In reality, Greenberg had no interest in religion at all. He had no religious practice. What happened was that, in 1934, when Yom Kippur came around, the Tigers had pretty much won the pennant. They didn’t need him to play. And out of respect for his parents, who were very religious, he agreed not to play on Yom Kippur. From that one act of chance, a whole mythology about Greenberg has developed. Mike: In his interviews he comes across as very likeable, but also self conscious. Mark: Most of his career was in the 1930s, which was the most anti-Semitic period in the history of the United States. He was a superstar, one who was always labeled as a Jew. He received an incredible amount of anti-Semitic goading and all kinds of unpleasant stuff. He was embraced by the Jews of Detroit and the Jews of America as this super Jewish hero. So, yeah, he was self conscious about it because his career was all about it, even though he didn’t want it to be. He just wanted to be a baseball player. Mike: What would have Greenberg’s numbers have been had he not gone off to war? Mark: Well, it’s impossible to say. You can’t predict when someone will go into a slump or something, but it certainly looked like you could add a third more to his numbers. He went off to war when he was really hot and presumably, you know, 41, 42, 43, 44, he would have been still hitting like that. Mike: Greenberg walked away in 1947 after having a solid year. Nowadays it seems as though players have to be dragged off the field under the most dismal circumstances. Mark: There were a bunch of reasons Greenberg wanted to leave. First, being traded to Pittsburgh really hurt him. Second, neither he nor his wife really liked the town. Third, he didn’t like most of his teammates, with Ralph Kiner being the most notable exception. He was a real mentor to Kiner, but the rest of the team was something different. He talked about how, in his last year, Jackie Robinson was breaking the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers. With the Pirates, however, there were a lot of racists, and they said these horrendous things to Robinson when the Pirates played the Dodgers. And Greenberg thought, “what jerks these guys are. The Dodgers are a great team. Jackie Robinson is a great player. We’re in last place, and these guys can’t play baseball, and they are stupid. Why even talk to these people?” But Greenberg was also just interested in other things. He was ready to move on, and he was smart. Not educated, but he was quite smart. He read a lot, and was interested in the world. Mike: What were the qualities about Greenberg that impressed you—as either a player or a man? Mark: First, he was incredibly humble. He never boasted. He also had this idea which he would reiterate to other Jews. You should never let anti-Semitism or any type of bigotry become an excuse for failure. It should motivate you to do better. And that’s a really important message which he gave to lots of people, including children. Mike: You’re researching someone who is not alive. He probably told different stories to different people in different ways. How do you reconcile these different versions? Mark: It’s tough, and you know one thing I’ve discovered with Greenberg and I’m discovering it with the biography I’m working on right now, Birdseye, which are the only two biographies I’ve ever done, is that the person is not always the best source. Greenberg said a lot of things that were not accurate in that [Ira] Berkow book [Note: Greenberg collaborated with Berkow on his autobiography]. Not that Ira wasn’t accurate, but I guess Greenberg’s memory wasn’t. He said a number of times that when he was in the Majors, he was the only Jew in the Major Leagues, and that wasn’t true at all. He was not a bull shitter. He just got things wrong. Mike: Did you read Jane Leavy’s book on Koufax? Mark: I did. Mike: One of the themes that she has in there is the flaws of memory. She quotes people who clearly remember, say, hitting a game-winning home run in the ninth. But the closest she can come to is that the guy hit a home run in the 7th inning that brought the team within one run or something. Mark: We talked about this. I ran into her at a party in Miami a few months ago. We traded stories and talked about this very situation. She had a great story, too, about how Koufax went to this Bar Mitzvah, and the young man was talking about pitching. I don’t remember the story exactly, but the kid knew it was Sandy Koufax he was talking to. And he was telling Koufax how to throw a curve ball. And Koufax said, “No, that’s not how you throw a curve ball.” And Koufax showed the boy how to do it, and said, “that’s how you throw a curve ball.” But the kid said, “No, it’s not. I’ve talked to my coach about this.” The kid just insisted he was right and that Koufax was wrong. Finally Koufax said, “That’s not how you throw a goddamned curveball, kid.” Mike: That’s pretty funny. With regard to the problems with recall, I don’t think people are lying. Psychologists have shown that shortly after an event, people’s recollections and retellings of the event start to replace the memory of the event itself. Mark: Right. That’s crept into my research. There was a home run that Greenberg remembers hitting in the 10th inning, a walk off, and there are corroborating witnesses. But I looked in the box scores and it was the ninth inning. So it’s pretty nightmarish as a researcher. Sometimes I just talk about the discrepancy in the book and let people come to their own conclusions. Mike: Speaking of conclusions, I’ll let you get back to your research. Thank you for your time. Mark: Thank you. Books mentioned in this column:
Mike Yawn is a professor of political science at Sam Houston State University, where he has published articles in The Journal of Politics, American Politics Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, American Review of Politics, Political Behavior, and Film and History. For fun, he writes about almost everything but politics. You can learn more about him at Mike Yawn, his blog. Contact Mike.
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