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Silver, and Silver?
    This is not to say that
The Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports
is entirely without merit. The three-page ice hockey section pleased me enormously if only because it included my favourite Jewish defenceman, one-time National League player, the astuteLarry Zeidel. An issue of
Jewish Press,
a New York publication, once carried the following Canadian report: “ONLY JEW IN PRO HOCKEY PLAYS A ROUGH GAME.” “Larry Zeidal,” the story began, “owns a scar for every one of the 20 years he marauded through organized hockey. ‘When you’re the only Jew in this bloody game,’ he said, ‘you have to prove you can take the rough stuff more than the average player.’” The story went on to say that Zeidal, in contrast to his teammates, read
Barron’s Business Weekly
between periods, perhaps taking “Lip” Pike as his inspiration. Pike, the encyclopedia notes, played baseball at a time when other players were usually gamblers and drunkards. “However, Pike was an exception. Throughout his career contemporary journals commented on his sobriety, intelligence, wit, and industry.”
    Finally, if the encyclopedia fails, on balance, to rectify the oldest myth about the Jew—that he is “a stranger to athletics”—it must be allowed that this is a pioneering work and a step in the right direction. Let us hope that Messrs. Postal, Silver, and Silver, thus encouraged, will now take on other foul anti-Semitic myths, for instance, that Jews don’t drink or practice homosexuality widely enough. I, for one, look forward to an encyclopedia (for delinquent bar mitzvah boys, perhaps) on Jewish Drunks, High School Dropouts, and Thugs from Noah to Today. I would also like to see a compilation of Famous Jewish Homosexuals, Professional and Amateur, Throughout History.
II. K OUFAX THE I NCOMPARABLE
    Within many a once-promising, now suddenly command-generation Jewish writer, there is a major league ball player waiting to leap out; and come Sunday mornings in summer, from the playing fields of East Hampton to the Bois de Boulogne to Hyde Park, you can see them, heedless of tender discs and protruding bellies, out in the fresh air together, playing ball. We were all raised on baseball. While today there do not seem to be that many Jewish major league stars about, when I was a kid there were plenty we could identify with: Sid Gordon and Al Rosen and of course Hank Greenberg. Even in Montreal we had, for a time, one of our own in the outfield, Kermit Kitman. Kitman, alas, was all field and no hit and never graduated from the Royals to the parent Dodgers, but it was once our schoolboy delight to lie in wait for him over the clubhouse at Saturday afternoon games and shout, “Hey, Kermit, you
pipickhead,
you think it’s right for you to strike out on
Shabbes?”
    Baseball was never a bowl of cherries for the Jewish player.
The Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports
observes that while the initial ball player to accept money for playing was a Jew, Lipman E. Pike, there were few known Jewish players.
The Sporting News,
in 1902, wrote of one player, “His name was Cohen and he assumed the name of Kane when he became a semi-professional, because he fancied that there was a popular and professional prejudice against Hebrews as ball players.” Other major leaguers were more militantly Jewish. Barney Pelty, for instance,who pitched for the St. Louis Browns from 1903 to 1912, seemingly did not object to being known as “The Yiddish Curver.” Still, the number of our players in any era has been small, possibly because, as Norm Sherry, once a catcher with the Dodgers, has said, “Many boys find opposition at home when they want to go out for a ball-playing career.” Despite opposition at home or in the game, the Jew, as the
Encyclopedia
happily notes, has won virtually every honour in baseball. If there remains a Jewish Problem in the game today, it hinges on the Rosh Hashanah–Yom Kippur syndrome, for the truth we all have to live with is