Greenberg was progress incarnate. But there was another Jewish sports story of that decade—one far less uplifting, and therefore far less retold.

Once upon a time, Jews ruled basketball. Not the way they do now—with the NBA’s commissioner and a majority of its owners all Jews—but on the court. If baseball was Middle America’s sport, basketball at the time, like boxing, was redolent of city squalor and shady dealings. Images of those short, pale men in belted shorts launching set shots in poorly lit, makeshift gyms are today virtually ignored; basketball has just evolved too much since then, and Jews played too little of a part in its development. That history is like a dream or, at worst, a bad joke.

But that history is also the subject of Jewball, Neal Pollack’s new Kindle novel about the real-life Jewish team that is generally regarded as the best basketball squad of the era. The Philadelphia Sphas—the name came from the acronym for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, which sponsored the team—dominated early pro basketball, winning seven championships in 13 seasons with the American Basketball League in the 1930s and 1940s. Pollack delivers crisp, vivid episodes of the team in pitched battle, capturing the era’s style as well as that of key players. Around these scenes, he weaves a fast-moving tale of underworld intrigue, the looming Nazi threat, love lost and found, and plenty of sharp-tongued banter.

In Alternadad and Stretch, Pollack brought his outwardly prickly but secretly warm persona to bear on parenting and then yoga; he was an outsider learning to fit in on his own terms. In Jewball, described in the acknowledgements as “a true labor of love,” Pollack pays homage to these unsung Jewish athletes and their colorful milieu. But for all his historical detail, Jewball ultimately tells us not only what was, but what Pollack would like to have seen.

Take Inky Lautman, the Sphas’ sure-handed point guard from 1937 to 1947. Though plenty is known about Lautman’s on-court exploits—he was one of the top scorers in the league—and about the Philadelphia of the time, Pollack creates his Lautman from scratch, bringing to life a cynical, scarred anti-hero for whom basketball is an escape from doing dirty work on the streets. (The real Lautman did quit high school at 15 to earn money for his family.) This kind of invention allows Pollack room to provide both startlingly well-researched game scenes and a madcap adventure that, plausible or not, makes the sports go down easier for those who aren’t fans.

In Pollack’s story, Eddie Gottlieb, the coach-owner-impresario of the Sphas, owes money to the German-American Bund, U.S. Nazi sympathizers with a strong base in Philadelphia. To pay off his debt, Gottlieb must have the Sphas take a dive against a team of Aryan supermen in Minneapolis, thus demonstrating the inferiority of the Jewish race and ceding their sport to the Nazis. Inky Lautman, so alienated and broke that he occasionally works for the Bund on what the character calls “non-Jew matters,” finds himself asked to make sure Gottlieb complies. Inky gets religion, so to speak, after being forced to attend an enormous Bund rally at Madison Square Garden. But the debt remains, Minnesota beckons, and the Bund isn’t exactly out for a fair game.

How will the Sphas get out of this jam? Answer: lots of violence. And a barnstorming tour that allows Pollack to show us more of the great teams of the 1930s, like the African-American Harlem Rens, or the all-female All-American Redheads. The history is fascinating but at times can drag, especially given the pending collision with the Bund.

Historical novels are inherently speculative, but Jewball is something else altogether: a fantasy that doesn’t politely look for space to imagine, but instead proposes that an entire period is one best understood through the imagination. As Pollack explains in a “Notes on History” section at the end of the book, Gottlieb was never in debt to the Bund, and Lautman had no affiliation with it. The Minnesota game, too, is his invention. So little is known about the off-court lives of most of the Sphas, including Lautman, that Pollack created characters where history had left none. The book’s bad guys—figures such as William Dudley Pelley, founder of the American fascist group the Silver Legion, and German-American Bund leaders Fritz Julius Kuhn and Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze—are more faithfully portrayed, perhaps because they left more of a historical record to work with.

Thus Pollack’s characterization of Lautman is less about revealing a real person than it is about imagining the ideal protagonist for the Jewball era—a nasty, uproarious, and at times glorious one. This isn’t a historical novel so much as it is a tall tale, or, better yet, an attempt to at once reclaim the past and lend it the same antic, outrageous quality that the shtetl took on for I.B. Singer. Pollack wants to find new ways to revitalize to a dead era.

Jewball’s brand of nostalgia may play right into the hands of the book’s villains, or the history that has deified Hank Greenberg and consigned Inky Lautman to the shadows. Or just maybe, it’s entirely the right note to strike when reclaiming Lautman—not as a source of shame or consternation, but as another kind of Jewish hero who not only fought back, but liked to fight—and almost always fought dirty.

CORRECTION, November 15: Due to an editing error, this article originally stated that Hank Greenberg led the Detroit Tigers to a World Series win in 1934. In fact, they lost the Series in 1934 but won in 1935. The error has been corrected.

Moment runs brief profiles of five of the top players, but we’ve been focusing on one. The Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun, in the fifth year of his career, is a legitimate candidate for the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award*, which would make him only the fifth Jewish MVP ever—after Greenberg, Lou Boudreau, Al Rosen, and Koufax—and the first since 1963. The Brewers currently have the third best record in the majors, and are likely to win their division (though a late-season surge by the St. Louis Cardinals has prevented them from clinching). In the Triple Crown categories, Braun leads the National League in average (.332); is tied for seventh in home runs (31); and is fifth in RBI (101). Best of all, he is number-one in OPS—on-base percentage plus slugging percentage—with a stratospheric .984. Bleacher Report (I know, I know) has him ranked the second-most likely MVP candidate, after the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Justin Upton.

Finally, the playoffs soon arrive. We will get around to endorsing a team when they actually do (although you probably just got a decent hint of whom we’ll be supporting), but already, the indispensable Ron Kaplan has asked the more pressing question: will any players have to Koufax? Rosh Hashanah seems safe. The last games of the regular season are next Wednesday night—after sundown of which, the Jewish New Year begins. Most of these games are during the day. Will Braun sit out the night-time contest against the Pirates, the team’s playoff spot theoretically locked up by then? What about Ian Kinsler, whose Texas Rangers play the California Anaheim Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim? And the two divisional-round games on Friday, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, will likely take place after sundown. But Yom Kippur? As Kaplan notes, if necessary, the fifth game of one of the National League Division series will take place on Kol Nidre; and the first game of the American League Championship Series will be the following day. Millions of Jewish boys and their mothers are watching … .

* I am, incidentally, in the camp of those who believe Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander should win the A.L. MVP, becoming the first pitcher to win either league’s award since 1992. Argue in the comments if you like.

Is This The Golden Age of Jewish Baseball? [Moment]
Preparing for the Yom Kippur Dilemma [Kaplan’s Korner]
Related: Hammer Time [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Braun Chases Pennant, Triple Crown

• Larry King would “Kill Wolf Blitzer. Even though he’s Jewish, the name sounds German. You have to kill the German when you’re Jewish.” [GQ]

• Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson announced a new $5 million challenge gift to Birthright Israel. [Press Release]

• Joseph Dorman gets much-deserved Joseph-Berger-in-the-Times treatment for his new Sholom Aleichem documentary. [NYT]

• For the first time, an Israeli ensemble performed will perform Wagner at the annual celebration of the famously anti-Semitic composer in Bayreuth, Germany. [Haaretz]

• Has Hank Greenberg been screwed out of the single-season American League RBI record? [Kaplan’s Korner]

The months-long NFL lockout ended today with top players’ representative (and premier center, for the Indianapolis Colts) Jeff Saturday announcing the good news and reserving special thanks for the late Myra Kraft and her husband, New England Patriots owner Robert. It is a very touching video. Meanwhile, there is one other essential video today:

But then there’s another class of player, the what-if-what-if. Caught in limbo, he fails to generate the same mystique: He is too accomplished to mourn yet not accomplished enough to become a legend. So, as the Major League All-Star game unfolds tonight, let us pay our respects to the almost-legendary Indians slugger Al Rosen, a four-time All-Star and the best Jewish ballplayer between Greenberg and Koufax. “If he had a couple of more good years, maybe one more good year, he would have been a candidate for the Hall of Fame,” Ira Berkow, the longtime New York Times sportswriter, told me. “He was one of the premier, if not the premier, third basemen of his time.”

***

Rosen, a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested asthmatic who had been an amateur boxer, made his debut with the Indians in 1947. He made five appearances that year; nine the next; and in 1949 saw action in 23 games. By the time Rosen got the chance to play a full season, in 1950, he was already 26.

Rosen had put his career on hold to serve during World War II, which accounts somewhat for his delay in becoming a regular in the Indians line-up. The primary culprit, though, was the lack of free agency and any real union presence—pied piper Marvin Miller (a Jewish labor lawyer from the Bronx) did not come over from the United Steel Workers of America until 1966 to become director of the MLB Players Association—which enabled franchises to hoard players. The Indians were grooming Rosen as All-Star Ken Keltner’s successor at third base and had little interest in seeing him flourish elsewhere. With no leverage, players like Rosen could do little more than wait their turn.

Reached at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., Rosen, now 87, is matter-of-fact about his strange career path. “I was a walk-on when I played in Thomasville, North Carolina, in 1942,” he told me. “I wanted to play baseball, and Thomasville needed a third baseman. I made $75 a month. I was happy, I was young, energetic, I loved every minute of it.”

But at some point, you get antsy. “I think that, given the chance in 1948, I could have played at the major-league level,” Rosen said. “Definitely in 1949.” The numbers back him up. In 1950, with Keltner finally out of the way, Rosen got his first full season in the majors. He hit .287 with 37 home runs and 116 RBIs. Perhaps more important, his OPS—a stat favored by sabermetricians that combines on-base percentage and slugging percentage—was .948, the second-highest of his career.

Once Rosen finally got his chance, he almost immediately established himself as one of the best players in the game. From 1950 to 1955, he made four All-Star Games. In 1950 and 1951, Rosen was very good; in 1952 and 1954, he was fantastic; and in 1953, Rosen was sublime, winning the American League’s Most Valuable Player honors and narrowly missing the Triple Crown—he led in home runs (43) and RBIs (145) and came in second to Micky Vernon in batting average by .001. (He also led the league with a 1.034 OPS—an OPS above 1 being considered spectacular.) But injuries struck in 1955, and after the 1956 season, he retired at 32, right when he should have been at the height of his powers.

How good was Al Rosen? Baseball writer Jonah Keri, author of The Extra 2%, made the case to me with the metric called Wins Above Replacement (WARP), which takes a “replacement-level player”—essentially, some hypothetical player a notch or two below average—and, using both batting and fielding stats, measures how superior the actual player is to this imaginary mediocrity in the number of extra wins the actual player would generate over a full season. “How much better was Al Rosen than a replacement-level player?” Keri asked by way of explanation. “In his MVP season, he was more than nine wins better. If you have an 85-win team and you add Al Rosen, instead you have a 94-win team. So, you’ve gone from a pretty good club to a club that has a chance to win the World Series. He had a couple seven-win seasons, which are also tremendously good, and a few seasons just below that.”

Keri added, “If you are a two-win player, you’re a solid starter; if you’re a four-win player, you’re an All-Star; if you’re a six or seven player, you’re considered for the MVP; if you’re nine or more, you’re getting into some Albert Pujols-type seasons.”

Rosen also, of course, became an icon for the Jewish community, earning the nickname “The Hebrew Hammer” (though he chose to inscribe “Flip” on his bats). He also met with his fair share of anti-Semitic taunts. The newly arrived black baseball players may have made for bigger targets in the early 1950s—Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947—but Jews were by no means off the hook. When it came to voices from the crowd, Rosen never let his anger show. “You’d hear things from the stands after you would make a bad play or struck out,” he told me. “I had the feeling that anybody who felt as badly as I did could say anything they wanted.”

Other players, though, were a different story. Rosen didn’t hesitate to challenge, and fight, opponents who tried to make his ethnicity an issue. “There’s a time that you let it be known that enough is enough,” Rosen tells an interviewer in the 2010 documentary Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story. “You flatten [them].” He offered a more nuanced picture of anti-Semitism in our conversation: “I always felt that it was much better to ignore it until the point came when you really had to speak up, or else your entire reputation would be damaged. Then, I would assert myself.”

***

The Indians won the pennant in 1954, only to lose the World Series to the New York Giants. That was also the year that Rosen’s injury problems began. He hit .300 with 24 home runs and 124 RBIs—strong numbers, but a marked comedown from the previous year’s heights, the result of having missed 17 games. The fans made their displeasure known, and Rosen’s confidence began to suffer. His numbers dipped further. The Indians tried to arrange a deal that would have sent him to the Boston Red Sox; he rejected it. He was then offered a steep pay cut. Rosen, who had worked as a stockbroker during off-seasons, chose to retire. “Every person has their own ego,” he recalled. “I was used to being the best, and when I couldn’t be the best in my own mind, it was time for me to move on because I didn’t want to start moving around from club to club.”

His injuries were far more extensive and overwhelming than people realized at the time. A fractured finger never healed. He got into a car accident the day before spring training began one year. “Things just began to deteriorate physically, and it became a mental thing,” he said. “Instead of being something I looked forward to every day, the game became something I dreaded.” Nor did this “mental thing” start only when his physical prowess began to wane: As early as 1952, a Baseball Digest profile described Rosen’s “exaggerated capacity for worrying over his batting troubles.” In the previous off-season, disappointed with his hitting, he had traveled to South America to clear his head and had given up golf so he could spend even more time on baseball, working out his legs well before that kind of training was the norm.

The comparisons to Greenberg were always obvious. Both men were enormous, muscular, and proud, feared hitters who were good for power and average alike. Both were Jewish ballplayers who made it clear they wouldn’t tolerate anti-Semitism. Rosen had grown up idolizing Greenberg. And, as it happened, Greenberg was a member of the Indians front office, in charge of the club’s minor league operations when Rosen broke in and general manager soon thereafter. With Rosen starring, Greenberg working behind the scenes, and Hall of Famer Lou Boudreau (Jewish on his mother’s side) as player/manager, the Indians probably had as much Jewish cachet as any organization before or since.

So, it’s of special, if morbid, curiosity, to Jewish sports fans that Greenberg played a not-insignificant role in Rosen’s retirement. In 1956, the player Rosen had grown up idolizing gave Rosen a choice between a second pay cut or a trade, neither of which suggested the former superstar had much faith in an Al Rosen comeback.

Rosen told me he prefers not to talk about his relationship with Greenberg. Leaving baseball was not an easy decision, and having Hank Greenberg push him out the door certainly didn’t help matters. “Too much has been written about my relationship with Greenberg, and I prefer not to go there,” he said.

“Was there some jealousy from Hank to Al, with Al being a prominent player with the Jewish community when Hank was now a front office guy?” said Berkow, who interviewed Rosen when putting together Greenberg’s posthumously completed memoir The Story of My Life. “Maybe, but I can’t go into Hank’s head.”

“Hank was a general manager in a time when general managers were tough,” Berkow added. “There wasn’t a lot of sentiment.” If he was looking to trade Rosen, maybe Greenberg pragmatically saw he could get some value for Rosen. “He wasn’t looking at it as a Jew and he wasn’t looking at it as a friend. He was looking at it purely as a baseball man.” In the end, it was the system that cost Rosen a shot at immortality.

Rosen remained in Cleveland until 1973, sitting on the Indians’ board of directors and working with hitters in the spring. In 1978, he returned to baseball as the president of the New York Yankees, caught in the crossfire between George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin. Rosen resigned halfway through his second season and headed back to Las Vegas, bearing a World Series ring for his troubles. There was a front office stint with the Houston Astros from 1980 to 1985 and, from 1985 to 1992, time with the San Francisco Giants that won him Major League Baseball’s 1987 Executive of the Year award. A decade ago, he was briefly a consultant to Steinbrenner.

“I don’t have many contacts in baseball anymore, but I still watch the game with great relish,” Rosen told me. “I think these guys are unbelievable. I watch third basemen make plays, and I say to myself: ‘Rosen, do you think you could make that play?’ I tell you, those guys are terrific.”

Well, Koufax and Yom Kippur and New Jersey Jewish News, oh my! The profile (titled “Promised Land”!) lays it on thick. It is a fun read, though, so have at it.

Meanwhile, in the same article, SI came up with a sketch for the all-time Jewish-American starting lineup:

Rod Carew, 2B, Hall of Famer
Buddy Myer, SS, career .303 hitter
Al Rosen, 3B, had 145 RBIs in ’53
Hank Greenberg, 1B, Hall of Famer
Sid Gordon, RF, 202 career homers
Benny Kauff, LF, lifetime .311 hitter
Elliott Maddox, CF, career .989 fielder
Moe Berg, C, spoke 12 languages, hit in none
Sandy Koufax, P, ranked up there with Moses.

It goes on to note that Gordon could very well be replaced by Green, then at his career’s midpoint; now that Green has retired with 328 home runs and a lifetime .283 average, and set the record for most total bases hit for in a single game, he has sealed that deal. The problem remaining is Carew. He is famously claimed in Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song”: “He converted,” Sandler sings. But Carew did not convert—he married a Jewish woman and raised Jewish kids, but was not himself a Jew. Meaning we need a second bagger! Ian Kinsler, it’s time to step it up.

Baseball Chronicle [NYTBR]
Promised Land [SI]

There is a specific generation of American Jews, mostly men, who came of age alongside Sandy Koufax and ever since have taken tremendous pride in Jewish athletes. They are the reason the phrase “Is Stephen Strasburg Jewish?” was a suggested search term on Google last summer. (He’s not.) They’re the reason a market exists for sets of Jewish baseball cards. Were it not for them, Amar’e Stoudemire probably wouldn’t have tried to claim Jewish roots upon signing with the Knicks.

My father is of this generation. So is Shel Wallman. A retired public school teacher living on the Upper West Side, Wallman is the founder of the Jewish Sports Review, a bi-monthly magazine available only in print and by subscription. The JSR exists to solve a simple problem. “We wanted to know who the Jews were when we watched a game,” says Wallman, 72. “Now we usually do.”

Wallman’s being modest. He always knows.

For the past 14 years, Wallman and his partner, a retired Los Angeles parole officer named Ephraim Moxson, have been poring over rosters, pestering sports information directors, mailing postcards, calling parents—whatever it takes to figure out whether an athlete is Jewish. That shared obsession—together they put in more than 40 hours per week—has led to the definitive source on the matter, an encyclopedic data dump of Jewish athletes and their stats. “We fact-check like mad,” says Moxson, 68. “There’s some satisfaction in being the foremost authority.”

They typical JSR issue is 24 pages and contains very few, if any, traditional articles. The writing is in the style of Peter Gammons’ famous Sunday notes columns for the Boston Globe: a string of short paragraphs and lists, grouped by sport, heavy on statistics and light on transitional sentences. Wallman does most of the writing. When he chooses to editorialize, the tone is almost always that of a booster.

While the highest-profile athletes get top billing, the JSR does not limit itself to covering the pros. The latest issue recapped the 2009-10 NFL season (10 Jews suited up) and announced the annual Jewish Sports Review College Football All-America team (Oberlin sophomore Josh Mandel got the nod at QB). But it also listed 118 softball players preparing for the upcoming collegiate season, all the way down to Division III.

And it carried this scoop, tucked away in the “Sports Shorts” section toward the back and written in typical JSR shorthand:

Over 20 years late on this item but MICHAEL POLLAK, a U of Texas walk-on PKer in 1990, set a school record (since broken) for FGs at 20 and was named All-Southwest Conference (dissolved in 1996), 1st team.

Why include a blurb about a player who hasn’t taken the field in more than two decades? Because not every athlete wears a Star of David on his trunks. And back when Pollak was kicking those field goals in Austin, there may have been someone in the stands, perhaps one of these guys from the Koufax generation, who wondered whether the record-setter was a Jew. That’s the mission of the JSR: to eliminate the wondering wherever, and whenever, it can.

“We both just always wanted to know,” says Moxson. “There’s a sense of pride. You always root for the Jewish guy.”

***

Not since the days of Koufax and Hank Greenberg have things been this good for the Jewish sports fan. Baseball, far and away the JSR’s most popular sport, has entered into something of a golden era. Fifteen Jews took the field for major league clubs last season and three—Kevin Youkilis, Ian Kinsler, and Ryan Braun—are perennial all-stars.

Off the field, Jewish sports fans are catered to like never before. Jewish sports-hero halls of fame have popped up everywhere from Long Island to Michigan to Orange County. Last fall, a documentary called Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story premiered to a packed house in New York’s West Village. And, of course, the requisite slew of blogs and sites—Jews in Sports, Jews in Baseball, On Jews and Sports—provide daily updates on everything from spring training box scores to the potential lockout plans of Omri Casspi, the NBA’s lone Israeli.

So, how are Wallman and Moxson adapting to the competition? By refusing to change a thing.

Unlike just about every print publication in the country, the Jewish Sports Review has no interest in—or anxiety over—its digital future. There will be no JSR iPad app, the editors say. No @jewishsportsreview Twitter handle. The Jewish Sports Review does not want to be your friend on Facebook. Though the magazine has a home page, it carries the following disclaimer: “Note: This website is for information about the Jewish Sports Review. We do not host our issues online. Our website is for promotional purposes only. This is *not* an e-mag.”

“We like to feel the magazine,” says Wallman when asked why he’s avoided publishing a digital version. He’s sitting in his home office; the full JSR archive, 84 issues in all, is stacked in a FedEx envelope near his desk. He seems annoyed by the question.

And maybe that’s fair, considering that the Jewish Sports Review has what many sites don’t: actual money coming in the door.

The JSR costs $36 a year, a price more than 1,000 subscribers are willing to pay. Renewal rates hover around 80 percent, well above industry average. For a two-man operation with little overhead beyond postage, the revenue adds up. So, perhaps it makes sense that they don’t give their content away online. They’ve got a business to protect, right?

“Business?” says Wallman, even more annoyed by this question than the previous one. “There is no business.”

And that’s the rub: Wallman and Moxson say they’ve never pocketed a penny from the Jewish Sports Review. Everything left over after the costs of producing the magazine—they won’t offer specifics, but after 13 years it could potentially be six-figures—is sitting untouched in a bank account.

“We just put the money to the side,” says Moxson, who handles the finances. His idea is to use the cash as a parting gift to subscribers—at some point the magazine will stop asking for renewals and just publish new issues until the money runs out. “That’s my plan,” Moxson says. “But I haven’t told Shel yet.”

***

The evolutionary precursor to the Jewish Sports Review, long since out of print, is a surprisingly thick book called The Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports. Wallman keeps a fraying copy in his office; he grew friendly with the author, Bernard Postal, who published the encyclopedia in 1955. Wallman isn’t sure what method Postal used to identify athletes, but it was an imperfect one—many non-Jews mistakenly appear.

Wallman and Moxson aren’t willing to let that happen with the JSR. Though neither says it outright, they clearly see the magazine as the definitive record—the Library of Congress archives a copy of each issue—and they take that self-assigned responsibility seriously.

Every athlete who appears in the JSR must be confirmed as a Jew, no assumptions allowed. The current criteria: A player must have at least one Jewish parent and can’t practice another faith. (Practicing Judaism, however, is not required.) That rigor means Wallman and Moxson spend much of their time as religious detectives, scanning rosters for possible tribe members and tracking down the likeliest candidates.

“We’re the follow-uppers,” says Wallman, who handles the initial outreach. When the magazine launched in 1997, he would send postcards—each player got three before Wallman gave up. These days it’s all by email. He’ll go to the kid first if he can find the address online, to a school’s sports information director if he can’t. (Nearly all of the “maybes” are college students or high-schoolers—by the time a Jewish athlete makes the pros, he or she has been on the JSR’s radar for years.) If there’s no response, Wallman occasionally writes the school president. “Fifty percent of the time that gets some real activity going,” he says. If all else fails, Moxson follows up with a cold call.

But scanning names on rosters can only get you so far. “We’re not going to miss a Goldberg,” says Wallman. “But there’s no question that we miss a lot of people.”

To fill in the gaps, the JSR relies on tips from coaches, players, and readers. Often, an athlete’s family will get in touch directly. That’s how they found out Washington Nationals pitcher Jason Marquis: When he was in the minors, his mother called from Staten Island to ask why her boy wasn’t listed. Same story with former Duke point guard Jon Scheyer.

Still, every tip is a reminder of the work left to be done. “Who knows how many Youkilises and Marquises are out there?” Wallman asks.

That question doesn’t seem to annoy him at all.

Max Linsky is the co-founder and editor of Longform.org. He has written for Slate, Newsweek, and Fast Company.

Greenberg made his major league mark in the 1930s and ’40s, playing primarily for the Detroit Tigers. He was a first-baseman and a phenomenal batter. In 1938, in a single season, he hit 58 home runs. He made the All Star team five times, was twice named American League MVP, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, and still holds the American League record for runs batted in by a right-handed batter in a single season: 183 in 1937. Over this entire career, he had a whopping 1,276 RBIs.

Like Koufax, Greenberg sat out a game that fell on Yom Kippur; in Greenberg’s case it was during the 1934 pennant race. It sealed his fate as Jewish hero in an era that was virulently anti-Semitic at home and abroad. Greenberg accepted this role graciously but with some discomfort. Writer Mark Kurlansky has a new biography out about the star. It’s called Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One. Kurlansky speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Greenberg’s improbable status as a Jewish icon (he was far from observant), the challenges he faced as arguably the highest profile Jewish sportsman in the mid-1930s, and why he is not better remembered by baseball fans today. [Running time: 15:41.]

Kurlansky discusses Greenberg with host Sara Ivry Monday on the podcast.

I spotted Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in the crowded hall almost two hours before the first of two panels he was participating in was scheduled to begin. He had no apparent handlers, but the crowd at the fifth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference knew to make way for him and his shock of black hair. He is a few inches north of six feet, but what you most notice about his physical appearance are his biceps, which bulged from the sleeves of an inexpensive-looking gray T-shirt that bore the words, “Talk Nerdy To Me.”

The Sloan conference—its host is MIT’s Sloan School of Management—is the foremost gathering for sports professionals, journalists, and fans interested in the most cutting-edge ways of viewing and analyzing sports. Cuban, who made a fortune in the high-tech boom of the 1990s and then bought the majority share of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team in 2000 for nearly $300 million, is the poster boy for the sports-geek culture that found its nirvana on March 4 and 5 at the Boston Convention Center, a metallic, antiseptic hulk in an ugly, picked-over section of downtown Boston. New York Giants defensive lineman Justin Tuck and the Olympic gold medalist speed-skater Apolo Anton Ohno were there. Malcolm Gladwell, ESPN’s Bill Simmons, and basketball coach turned television commentator Jeff Van Gundy were all there. Indianapolis Colts coach Jim Caldwell—the guy who gets to tell Peyton Manning what to do—was there, as was Daryl Morey, the high-profile general manager of basketball’s Houston Rockets—in fact he was the co-chair of the conference.

But no one attracted more attention than Cuban, who gives the impression that he was motivated to buy a sports team by roughly the same sentiment that moved Charles Foster Kane to purchase the New York Inquirer: “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” After Cuban once remarked that the NBA’s head of officiating “wouldn’t be able to manage a Dairy Queen,” he later expressed regret for the damage his comment caused the ice-cream chain and volunteered to work at one for a day—the sort of gracious, clever stunt you could see yourself pulling if you, too, ruled the world.

To the fanboys who paid $400 (or maybe the $100 student rate) to attend the conference, Cuban is plausibly one of them.

To those who dream of future front-office success in sports, Cuban is the apotheosis: owner of a perennial contender. The Mavericks have won more than 50 games (of 82) in each of the 11 full seasons Cuban has been the team’s majority owner, and in each one of those seasons they’ve been one of the eight teams (of 15) to qualify for the playoffs in their conference. (It’s a streak only the San Antonio Spurs, the Mavs’ bitter rivals, can match.) This year, the Mavericks went 57-25, good for the Western Conference’s third seed, and are currently up three games to two in their first round playoff series, against the Portland Trail Blazers.

To undergraduate business majors and slightly older business students—in their gray suits and with their consultants’ vibe—Cuban is the guy who arrived in Dallas in the ’80s and saw that while the J.R. Ewings had cornered the oil market, there was money to be made in the burgeoning technology business. He proceeded to make this money and then buy the Mavs, a relatively young organization playing basketball in a football town, and remake them into the sixth most-valuable franchise in the NBA.

To the stat geeks—the conference’s original fan base, who these days toil less frequently in basements and more in professional front offices—Cuban is an acknowledged patron and a kindred spirit, someone who not only perceives their utility but would be one of them if he wasn’t instead spending his time making much more money than they do and appearing on Entourage. “Cuban’s special,” Aaron Schatz, arguably football’s top outside statistician and a difficult man to impress, said appreciatively. “I think most owners who meddle in their teams are very old-school. Cuban meddles in a teach-me-something-I-don’t-know way.” Nate Silver, a former baseball analyst, agreed: “There are owners who are still old-boys culture, but he’s not a part of that.”

And of course there were the Jews.

Everyone at the conference was Jewish—and by “everyone” I mean that while Jews comprise 2 percent of the American population roughly every third person at the conference was Jewish. I met some kids from the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, a group of terrifyingly bright 20-year-olds, and quickly learned, to my lack of shock, that most of them were Jews. The business majors and the MBAers were Jews; one conference organizer, a Sloan student with a distinctively Irish name told me how glad he was I was writing this story, because clearly everyone there, himself included, was Jewish. The journalists covering the conference were Jews. And Cuban—his family name was Chopininski—is Jewish, too. This matters.

***

Mark Cuban.
Grazier Photography

Roughly a decade ago, the notion that there was a cutting-edge way to view and analyze sports materialized in the public consciousness when Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball sold half a gazillion copies and spawned even more conversations at bars, stadiums, gyms, classrooms, and every other place American men congregate. Moneyball described how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane used insights gleaned from sabermetrics—the advanced statistical study of baseball—to take the meagerly financed A’s to three consecutive postseasons. (But he never made it to the World Series: “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs,” Beane famously admitted, an instant entry into the quotes-we’d-need-to-invent-if-they-didn’t-exist Hall of Fame right beside “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”)

Advanced analytics has since made its way to the other professional sports, so that now even the casual fan is aware that an at-bat that results in a walk is nearly as valuable as an at-bat that results in a single and that a basketball player can be a major asset to his team even if his traditional numbers, such as scoring, are unimpressive. “For a long time, it was pretty niche,” Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski, perhaps the foremost practitioner of sabermetrics in journalism, told me. “But now, even people who would claim not to be interested in the numbers would use things like OPS”—that’s on-base percentage plus slugging percentage—“which may be basic in the advanced world but is much, much more sophisticated than batting average, RBIs, and home runs.”

The stats craze was in part an inevitable iteration of the Internet’s democratization of knowledge. “We live in an environment now where there’s a lot of open data, which makes people less tolerant of letting people be gatekeepers,” argues Silver, who at Baseball Prospectus was a top sabermetrician and has since abandoned baseball metrics in favor of predicting elections for the New York Times. “It’s not that radical, really, right? But in some ways it’s been very encouraging—if you believe in mass knowledge, you definitely have seen progress.”

More to the point, the democratization of knowledge has redefined both the professionals and the fans by bringing them closer together—and, in the person of Mark Cuban, arguably making them one and the same. “There’s a geekification going on of sports,” Malcolm Gladwell told me a couple of weeks before the conference, where he would moderate the opening panel discussion. “In the beginning, the fan was a relatively passive figure. You have all of these things that are turning the fan into an actor—fantasy sports, all this statistical stuff.” Being a sports fan today entails not only rooting for your team but affirmatively conceiving what your team could be doing better; using ESPN’s trade machine to make hypothetical trades allowed by each team’s salary cap situation and each player’s contract; and fundamentally understanding how the sport really operates in a way that even hardcore fans of a quarter-century ago could not have imagined.

Continue reading: the world’s biggest Mavs fan, Football Outsiders, and “additional ways to analyze things.” Or view as a single page.

• First off, if you haven’t yet, do consider reading two excellent book reviews we ran this week in the midst of the High Holiday hubbub: Columnist Lee Smith on a revelatory new memoir about Israeli prime ministers; and Itamar Rabinovitch on the Balfour Declaration.

• The West Bank is closed til Saturday night. [JTA]

• Martin Peretz apologies. [The Spine]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Nathan Thrall reports on U.S. efforts to buttress Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s security services. [NYRB]

• After having his mom tell him to do what’s right, rookie New York Mets first baseman Ike Davis has decided to play tonight against the Atlanta Braves. [ESPN]

• Leslie Gelb points out that the “nothing bad can come from talking” trope actually isn’t true: Frequently, failed Mideast negotiations have been followed by increased bloodshed. [Daily Beast]

• Somebody wrote a poem about Hank Greenberg playing and then not playing in 1934. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Michael Weiss says U.S. envoy George Mitchell’s preferred comparison of Hamas to the Irish Republican Army is facile. [Slate]

• J.J. Goldberg praises strange bedfellows. [Forward]

• And if you haven’t read enough about Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals, here’s yet another take. [n1br]

The basement-dwelling 2010 Washington Nationals are no 1965 Dodgers, and Nats pitcher Jason Marquis, who is Jewish, is certainly no Koufax. But Marquis is slated to start Friday night—Kol Nidre—at the Philadelphia Phillies, and (via Kaplan’s Korner) he plans on doing so (in fact, he has in past years, too). “Your team expects you to do your job and not let your teammates down, and that’s the approach I take,” he said.

Now, look. That is not an invalid response. And for every Koufax, there is also slugger Hank Greenberg, who in 1934 played on Rosh Hashanah while his Detroit Tigers were in a tight pennant race, only to sit out Yom Kippur once a World Series spot was all but secured. Moreover, I don’t think the importance (or lack of importance) of a big game should make a difference: If you feel you shouldn’t play on Yom Kippur, then that should include the World Series; if you feel you should, that should include a meaningless September regular season outing. And Marquis didn’t ask to be made a role model (which, given his 6.60 ERA this season, is maybe a good thing!).

But: Dude. Ask your manager to move your start. C’mon. How are Jewish 8-year-old Nats fans—poor schmucks—going to learn to observe the Highest of the Holidays?

Meanwhile, check Kaplan’s Korner for updates on Kevin Youkilis, Ryan Braun, and the rest.

Marquis Plans To Make Start on Kol Nidre [Miami Herald]
Earlier: Huge Yankees-Sox Game Set for Kol Nidre

10. Kerri Strug
9. Al Rosen
8. Sarah Hughes
7. Barney Ross
6. Benny Leonard
5. Dolph Schayes
4. Sid Luckman
3. Mark Spitz
2. Hank Greenberg
1. Sandy Koufax

Bases Loaded, with Jewish Ballplayers! [Boston Globe]
A Grand Slam Decade for Jewish Majorleaguers [Jewish Ledger]

“My whole m.o. is making films about under-known Jewish heroes,” Kempner said in an interview with Tablet. “In Partisans of Vilna, it’s about the Jews who fought back against the Nazis. In Hank Greenberg, it’s sort of the counterexample to the nebbishy Jewish hero.”

Berg is certainly little-known to all but the oldest generation of today’s television viewers, thanks to her absence from the airwaves since the early 1960s. But Kempner also makes a convincing argument that Berg was a kind of hero—a hilarious, empathic writer, actress, and businesswoman who elevated the already-maligned figure of the Jewish mother to the bustling, beaming center of her own world.

Tilly Edelstein, the future Gertrude Berg, was born in 1898 on New York City’s Lower East Side. In the summers, the Edelsteins ran Fleischmann’s, a Catskills resort , where young Tilly’s tasks included putting on plays with the guests on rainy days. She married at 18 and moved for a time to Louisiana, where her engineer husband was helping to invent instant coffee, but by 1929 she had launched her own career with The Rise of the Goldbergs, a series she penned for New York radio about a Jewish family not unlike her own. In a mildly Oedipal gesture, the father character shared a name with Berg’s own father, Jacob, while Berg voiced Molly, the family matriarch.

The Goldbergs (“The Rise of” was quickly dropped) became the No. 2 show on radio after Amos ‘n’ Andy—but while the latter is famous for its wild caricatures of blacks, who were voiced on the show by white actors, the former realistically portrayed urban Jewish life. Every morning, Kempner says, Berg went down to the Lower East Side with a notepad to gather material. In 1933, she conducted an entire seder on the air.

In 1949, Berg adapted her show for television, creating the sitcom that brought her to the peak of her fame. Despite the show’s obscurity today, the image of aproned Molly Goldberg kibitzing in the window—and, often as not, trying to sell the television audience vitamins or knives—has become iconic.

“The apartment with people constantly coming in and out, the product placement, are industry standards now,” Kempner said. She pointed to Seinfeld and Friends as shows that employ the former; as for the latter, Berg wasn’t just marketing instant coffee, but also her own lines of dresses, toys, comic books, and cookbooks.

“She had a media empire,” screenwriter Margaret Nagle says in the film. “She was the Oprah of her day.”

The show lasted until 1955, when, according to Kempner, two things did it in: suburbanization, and the blacklist. The show’s final season took place in the suburbs—the Goldbergs had risen indeed, but in the process, lost the trappings of tenement life that made the show what it was. More tragically, Philip Loeb, who played Jacob Goldberg, was blacklisted. Berg fought back, but ultimately the show was dropped by its sponsor and forced to switch networks; it never recovered from the loss of both Loeb and its prime slot. Loeb committed suicide; Berg continued feverishly working the spotlight until her death in 1966, but her career never completely recovered.

The main reason The Goldbergs isn’t on the air today, though, is frustratingly banal: like other very early TV shows, Kempner said, it was never syndicated.

“A couple years back I was at a party, and there was ‘The Nanny’!” Kempner recalled. “I told her I was making a documentary about Gertrude Berg. And she says to me, ‘Who’s that?’”

But long before Fran Drescher, there was the unsinkable Molly Goldberg, hollering sweetly out her tenement window to the neighbors.

Did you enjoy your early years as a jock?

David Shields

My cultural style, my psyche, my sense of humor, everything about me did not fit in with my jock friends. Other friends of mine—my Jewish friends, who were the math geeks—were jealous that I was a good student and this successful jock. But my supposed jock friends would trip me, they would throw eggs at my house on Halloween, they would make prank calls to my house at three in the morning. They pretended to get along with me because I was a good athlete, and I loved sports, but increasingly there was an odd not-so-subtle tension between them and me. My parents went to antiwar marches, I read different books than they did, I said “black” rather than “Negro.” They were just very different kids.

In Body Politic, the key figure in your transformation from athlete to writer is Howard Cosell: your obsession with Monday Night Football, your impersonation of Cosell in a high-school public speaking class, and how it changed your life.

I’m not sure if I should say this, but to a certain degree that chapter is a fiction. I’m not sure how crucial Cosell was to me in high school, but once you start to write, you convince yourself that certain things were dramatic. When I was in this public speaking class, I did indeed do this impersonation of Howard Cosell, which was a big hit, and I certainly followed him. But what happens once you start to write is the composition process itself takes over and you create the most dramatic story that you can, which is that Howard Cosell saved my life. You know, it just isn’t true. It’s sort of a drama I’m creating in which Howard Cosell is mediating all these issues—sports, Jewishness, language, stuttering, woundedness—and I’m just pushing it to make it interesting. I guess that’s a given.

It’s not a given for many writers.

I feel like before I was an autobiographical fiction writer, and now I’m a fictional autobiographer. To me, there’s almost no difference. What happens when you write what gets framed as nonfiction, it allows you to focus more on the ideas and the issues and the themes than the story per se, and that’s what I find liberating.

I’m aware that Vivian Gornick got into trouble for saying this about a book she wrote. Obviously, if Gary Payton says something, I didn’t make it up, or if the Sonics lost on February 12, I didn’t say they won. But all the private stuff, maybe I tweaked it or collapsed a bit. I tighten things up to make them more dramatic, I exaggerate to the point of inventing. So a lot of the private scenes are at the very least, I would say, poeticized. I guess I think of memory as a dream machine. Like the Howard Cosell stuff. I mean, I’m remembering stuff from high school from 30 years ago. How is that not fiction?

Then why is Howard Cosell such a pivotal figure for you?

The plot of essay is the author’s ambivalence toward something. If I just felt a one-to-one correspondence with Cosell, that would descend into hagiography, or if I was still a real jock, I wouldn’t be writing this book, probably. Instead, Cosell represents a mixed blessing for me. On the one hand, he is the quintessential Other of American culture—at one point I call him “a very verbose and Jewish elephant.” If you were growing up in, say, Queens, Cosell wouldn’t seem quite so Other, but even though I grew up in a Jewish family, I grew up in a suburb of San Francisco, and Cosell just seemed amazingly like some uncle of mine coming through the airwaves.

One thing that Cosell does really beautifully is that he would position himself not as part of the game but as adjacent to the game and in a way above the game. And I think when you’re a writer, I think you can’t yield so much to the material. You’ve got to stand astride the material and in a sense dominate it, or you just become a kind of bland journalist. What was so exciting about Cosell is the moment he started to talk he would transform the event. That’s such a writerly thing that he does.

Part of me was an athlete, the kind of athlete Cosell talked about, and part of me was Cosell, and it’s that very split that runs though all of Body Politic. I feel some wannabe kind of identification with these great athletes I wish that I’d become, such as Ichiro or Charles Barkley, and part of me feels almost like I’m a scientist studying them as specimens.

Growing up, did you have a special reverence for Jewish athletes?

I certainly heard about Hank Greenberg from my dad. My father was born in Brooklyn, so I was just an unbelievably insanely devoted Dodgers fan, so of course Sandy Koufax was a major god to me. But when I think of my heroes, they were Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers, Maury Wills of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I was not obsessed with Jewish athletes. I think that athletics was a refuge from working through those issues for me, it was kind of an escape into all-Americanness. Whereas as I’ve become a writer, I’ve become more and more involved in questions of Jewishness. This is a little too easy, a little too Lenny Bruce—but there’s a sense in which my sports phase was my goyish phase, and my writerly phase of the last 25 years is my Jewish phase.

Jewishness is a thread running through your work, but it’s not something you foreground as much as your stutter or, in Black Planet, your skin color.

It’s never anything I ever avoid, I bring it up as it feels part of my life. I don’t practice religion, I was raised a secular Jew, and my wife’s not Jewish, and yet if I were to think of five things that define me, I would definitely think of Jewishness as one of them. There’s a wonderful essay I remember by Leonard Michaels about Franz Kafka, and I recall the last line being something like, the less Kafka talks about himself as a Jew, the more profoundly Jewish Kafka was. The mere mention of Jewishness to me seems almost redundant, it’s so obvious to me how deeply immersed I am in Jewish literary tradition.

Beyond Kafka and Leonard Michaels, what do you mean by the Jewish literary tradition?

One thing I mean is the Jewish passion to remake the world. The family that I grew up in was obsessed with moral, social justice, political passion. That’s something nearly all my books wrestle with. Second, I think, an obsession with language, a kind of Talmudic interest in the exegetical gesture of endlessly scrutinizing language, an almost religious belief in close reading. Again, this is not some exclusively Jewish activity, but part of it is growing up as a stutterer, growing up in a highly verbal Jewish family, constantly being surrounded by reading and writing and textual analysis. Our entire family discussion was basically deconstructing texts before there was such a word as deconstruction, At breakfast, we would look at the cornflakes box and we would analyze what social messages were getting conveyed, how this is a bad use of a word, a bad comma.

I think of myself as—I hope—a comic writer, and I feel deeply influenced by Jewish standup comedy, from Kafka to Sandra Bernhard.

What is it about Sandra Bernhard?

I’m very interested in her willingness to say virtually anything. Her interest in breaking taboos, in being nasty, in being risk-taking, in being willing to position herself as the bad girl in the culture, in being willing to say unsettling things about herself, using herself as a symbolic representative of the worst of the culture, being drawn to the culture but being repelled by it—those are all strategies that interest me quite a lot and speak very strongly to my literary strategies. I’m very influenced by a whole series of performance artists like Rick Reynolds, Sandra Bernhard, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, Woody Allen, Denis Leary.

There’s a wonderful line by Theodor Adorno that I quote in my previous book, Enough About You, in the chapter on bad reviews. He says a successful work is “one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.” I try to embody the contradiction. The person on the page, that’s definitely a crafted persona. It’s me, but it’s a highly stylized version of myself in which I’m trying to embody the cultural confusion about memoir or race or celebrity.

That’s the way Jews function in the culture in many ways: We hate you and we love you, because you tell us what’s really going on. That’s the classic Jewish prophetic tradition, and without being too grandiose about it, that’s the role.

You often make a point of mentioning that you come from a Jewish leftwing family. Why?

My father changed his name from Schildkraut to Shields in the mid-forties, and that was the name I was born with. Most people that I meet named Shields tend to be Irish Catholic. My name, David Shields, is just not Jewish, and it’s one of the sadnesses of my life. When I was writing my second novel—Dead Languages, a semi-autobiographical novel about a boy growing up with a stuttering problem—for some reason I was thinking of changing my name back to David Schildkraut.

Would it be different writing about race, sports, and celebrity in America as David Schildkraut?

I’ve never really thought of it like that. It would position myself overtly, I think, as a German Jewish writer in some sense, and so it would bring those issues to the fore. I don’t know.

One essay in Body Politic takes on sports films, and how many of them are basically Christian allegories, and yet you find yourself drawn to them, moved by them.

The resurrection-sports movie is your chance to be a covert Christian in the same way I think being a Yankee fan functions that way for many Jewish New Yorkers. I get in serious debates with friends who live in New York who are Jewish and who are Yankee fans, which is, like, it’s so disgusting to me. I yield to no one in my hatred of the Yankees. And it’s just so weird to me how these otherwise rational Jewish men just want to be Mickey Mantle, they want to be Derek Jeter. I certainly have my own version of it, but the Yankees have always functioned that way for Jewish New Yorkers.

I’m doing this thing with Jonathan Lethem at this bookstore in SoHo on why sports are a force that gives us meaning, and I feel like Jonathan and I became friends when he told me that he was a Mets fan. Not that I really care, I don’t really follow baseball anymore, but to me, you’ve got to root for the underdog, and the idea of rooting for the Yankees seems to me so bizarre. You don’t want to root for the majority culture, it seems to me not a tradition out of which I come.

These are not casual choices, and so whether it’s the Yankees or the Mets or the Dodgers or the X or the Y. Friends who have been friends a long time, I mean, we literally have stopped talking because we can’t talk rationally about, say, the Yankees. It’s just so weird that people really do work through their own personalities through the symbolic narrative of sports loyalty, in a really strange and complicated way.

Has sports loyalty taken the place of religion?

Obviously for some people it hasn’t, but people want to belong to some kind of oceanic force. You want to belong to a tribe in some way, you want to feel some transcendent crowd. For people who do not have a religious or political or military loyalty, sports is a very strange way to express passion, but I think it’s clearly pulling on the same drive.

What makes sports so interesting for me is that it is completely trivial, it has absolutely no purpose in the world, but people pour enormous human drive onto sports. When you look at sports carefully, you can see so much about the human animal. Because people think it’s a trivial world, but it’s almost like watching a teenager stare at themselves in the mirror. On the one hand what they’re doing is completely trivial, but if you know what to look at you can see how much they’re telling you about their psyche.

So who’s going to win the NBA Championship?

You know, I have not watched a single second of the NBA playoffs. Ever since writing Black Planet, I don’t think I’ve watched a single basketball game. This always either disappoints or amazes people.

Did you overdose on basketball?

That’s my basic explanation. This sounds kind of boring, but I just feel like I’m really busy. I write full-time, I teach full-time, I have a wife and daughter, and we try and urge Natalie not to watch very much television and I feel like I definitely don’t want to be sitting there with my Doritos and my beer and be watching basketball games. Part of it is boring commercial television—I just have trouble watching it. And part of it is the Sonics are really bad. When local teams are good, it’s hard not to get caught up in them a bit. I’m fascinated by sports as a cultural drama, but God, I definitely have other things on my mind.

What’s your next project?

I just finished a new manuscript called Positions: The Arc of a Body. It’s a meditation on the human body, but instead of being in the public realm of the sports arena it’s in the private realm of the evolution and decomposition of the human body as lived at ground level. It basically takes a body—my body, but other people’s bodies as well—from childhood to adolescence to middle age to old age to death. And next I’m going to write a novel.

Are you looking forward to returning to fiction?

I feel like I never really left.