Tag: Eddy Portnoy - The Seforim Blog

Jews, Baseball, and The Yiddish Press

By Eddy Portnoy

Dr. Eddy Portnoy is Senior Researcher and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is the author of the recently-published (and much acclaimed, and fun) book, Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford, 2017), available here.

This is his second contribution to the Seforim Blog. His previous essay, “The Yiddish Press as a Historical Source for the Overlooked and Forgotten in the Jewish Community,” was published here.

Jews love baseball! Well, maybe not all Jews. On the one hand, the editors of the Forverts, the largest and most successful Yiddish newspaper in history, enthusiastically commissioned an article at the end of August, 1909 explaining the fundamentals of the game to their audience of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. While they may not have expected their readers to run out and play ball, they did understand that it was of value culturally to understand how the game was played. In short, it was seen as part and parcel of the Americanization process.

And yet, on the other hand, a cartoon that appeared a few years later reveals somewhat of an antipathy to baseball from a different Yiddish precinct. Baseball appears to have been one of those rare matters upon which both Orthodox rabbis and secular Yiddish cartoonists could agree. It is thus with great sympathy that one of the cartoonists working for Der groyser kundes views the difficulty Orthodox rabbis in America had in trying to convince American Jewish boys to attend heder. Der kundes, a very popular and very secular satire publication oriented to Left Labor Zionism, lamented the disinterest the lunkheaded, foul-mouthed, baseball-obsessed Jewish youth. Not that they necessarily supported the acquisition of a traditional Jewish education (even though all their writers had one), but they didn’t like baseball either.

Not unlike Nusakh sfard, baseball won the battle and is now a pastime enjoyed by large numbers of American Jews. Many of them even went back to heder. Left Labor Zionists satire magazines, however, aren’t doing so well anymore.

Der groyser kundes, New York, May 29, 1914

The Forverts, New York, August 27, 1909

“The
Fundamentals of the Base-Ball ‘Game’ Described for Non-Sports
Fans,” The Forverts (27 August 1909): 4, 5, translated by Eddy
Portnoy.

Uptown, on 9th Avenue and 155th Street is the famous field known as the “Polo Grounds.” Every afternoon, 20 to 35 thousand people get together there. Entrance costs from 50 cents to a dollar and a half. Thousands of poor boys and older people go without some of their usual needs in order to pay for tickets. Professional teams play baseball there and the tens of thousands of fans who sit in row after row of seats all around the stadium, go nuts with enthusiasm. They jump, they scream, they simply go wild with enthusiasm when one of “their” players does well, or, they are pained or upset when they don’t succeed.

A similar scene takes place every day in another place – in the Washington Heights. And the exact same thing goes on in Brooklyn, in Philadelphia, in Pittsburgh, in Boston, in Baltimore, in St. Louis, in Chicago – in every city in the United States. And the newspapers print the results of these games and describe what happened and tens of millions of people run to read it with gusto. They talk about it and they debate the issues.

And here we’re only talking about the “professional games:” practically every boy, nearly every youth, and not a few middle-aged men play baseball themselves, belong to baseball clubs, and are huge fans. Every college, every school, every town, nearly every “society” and every factory has it’s own baseball “team.”

Millions are made from the professional games. Related to this, there is a special kind of “political” battle between different cities. A good professional player gets eight to ten thousand dollars for one season. Some of them are educated, college-educated people.

To us immigrants, this all seems crazy, however, it’s worthwhile to understand what kind of craziness it is. If an entire people is crazy over something, it’s not too much to ask to try and understand what it means.

We will therefore explain here what baseball is. But, we won’t do it using the professional terminology used by American newspapers use to talk about the sport; we must apologize, because we’re not even able to use this kind of language. We will explain it in plain, “unprofessional” and “unscientific” Yiddish.

So what are the fundamentals of the game?

Two parties participate in the game. Each party is comprised of nine people (such a party is called a “team”). One party takes the field, and the other plays the role of an enemy; the enemy tries to block the first one and the first one tries to defend itself against them; from now on we will call them, “the defense party” and the “enemy party.”

The “defense party” also takes the field and plays. Two of the team players play constantly while the other seven stand on guard at seven different spots. What this guarding entails will be described later. Let us first consider the two active players.

One of them throws the ball to the other, who has to grab it. The first one is called the “pitcher” (thrower) and the second is called the “catcher” (grabber).

Each time, the “catcher” throws the ball back to the “pitcher.” The reader may therefore ask, if so, doesn’t it happen backwards each time – the catcher becomes a pitcher and the pitcher becomes a catcher? Why should each one be called with a specific name – one pitcher and one catcher?

We will soon see that the way in which the catcher throws the ball back is of no import. The main thing during a game is how the pitcher tries to throw the ball to the catcher.

The enemy party, however, seeks to thwart the pitcher.

This occurs in the following way:

One of the team’s nine members stands between the pitcher and the catcher (quite close to the catcher) with a thick stick (“bat”) and, as the ball flies from the pitcher’s hand, tries to hit it back with the stick before the catcher catches it.

This enemy player is called “batter.” The place where he stands is designated by a number of little stars (****).

(The other eight players on the enemy team, in the meantime, do not participate. They each wait to be “next.”)

Imagine now, that the “batter,” meaning the enemy player, finds the flying ball with his stick and flings it. If certain rules, which we will discuss later, aren’t broken, this is what can happen with the ball: if one of the “guards” catches the hit ball while it is still in the air, then the opposition of the “batter” is completely destroyed and the batter must leave his place; he is excluded (he is “out”). He puts down the “bat” and another member of his party takes his place.

The roles of the seven guards of the defense party are also specific: they must try and catch the hit ball in order to destroy the enemy’s attempt to hinder them and to get rid of the player doing the obstructing. They stand at various positions because one can never know in which direction the ball will fly. They watch the different trajectories in which the ball might fly, so a guard can be there, ready to catch it.

The readers can see the way the seven guards are distributed in our picture.

The entire official field on which the game is played is a four-sided, four-cornered one. This is in the center of our picture (The two round lines which go around it represent the tens of thousands of seats for the audience. That is how it usually is for the big professional games. It actually looks like a giant circus with a roof only for the audience. The field, with all the players, is under the open sky.).

As the readers see in the image, one corner is taken by the “catcher.” The other three corners of the four-cornered figure are stations. Each one is called a “base.” With the catcher facing the pitcher, the first “base” is outward from the direction of his right hand, just opposite him is the second base; and from his left hand is the third base.

A little bag of sand lay on every base. The guards, however, must not stand on the base, but next to it.

We previously mentioned three guards. They are called the first baseman, the second baseman and third baseman. A third guard stands between second and third base. He is called the “short stop;” when a ball is hit, it often goes in that direction and the “short stop” gets a chance to catch it in the air.

But if the ball flies way over the heads of these four “guards,” there are three other guards who stand on the outside field, or the “out field.” One of these is called the “right fielder,” the second, the “center fielder,” and the third, the “left fielder.”

Two of the four sides of the four-sided figure in our picture are marked with dots. When a hit ball flies over one of these two lines, it is called a false ball (foul ball). For it to be a proper ball (a fare ball), it must fly forward, or over the other two lines of the four-cornered figure.

When the batter doesn’t manage to hit the ball with his stick, it is called a “strike.” If he gets three “strikes,” he is “out,” or eliminated. Certain kinds of “foul balls” are considered “strikes,” however, we will not go into these details.

When the batter hits the ball and it is “proper,” and the guard doesn’t catch it, this means that the opposition, in this case, is successful. However, this success can either be greater or smaller. Depending on the level of this success, the following is done: as soon as the batter hits the ball, he throws his “bat” away and starts running; if nothing disturbs him, he runs to first base, from first to second, from second to third, and from third to the place where the catcher stands. This place is called “the home.” If he gets to the “home” spot, it means that the success of the opposition is complete.

This means that he made a whole “run:” and, based on these “runs,” the results of the game are figured out. The party which makes more runs is the winner.

But to make a full run at one time doesn’t happen all the time. In order to do so, the zetz that the batter gives the ball must be especially successful. It happens more often that he makes a quarter run, or a two quarter, or three quarter.

The rule is this: the running batter has no right to go to first base if the guard (the first baseman) holds, at that very moment, the ball in his hand. If the hit ball falls on the ground and one of the guards picks it up, the running batter is not yet eliminated. He runs. But imagine that some guard throws the ball to the first baseman and that this first baseman catches the ball before the running batter physically arrives at first base: then this runner is eliminated. But if he catches the ball when the runner is already on the base, the runner is “saved” (safe).

If the runner keeps running to second base, the rule is a bit different: the second baseman can eliminate him only if he touches him with the ball; and the same rule works for the third baseman, he has to touch him with the ball in order to get him out. The catcher or pitcher can also get a runner out with a “touch” if he finds himself near the base or the “home” to which he ran.

Each player is the embodiment of agility, with strong, swift muscles and sharp, fast eyes. And the whole game is full of “excitement” for those who are interested in it.

The Yiddish Press as a Historical Source for the Overlooked and Forgotten in the Jewish Community

by Eddy Portnoy

Eddy Portnoy is Senior Researcher and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is the author of the recently-published (and much acclaimed, and fun) book, Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford, 2017), available here (https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Rabbi-Strange-Stories-Stanford/dp/150360411X).

This is his first contribution to the Seforim Blog.

Sanhedrin 25 has this pretty well-known, somewhat rambling bit about what sorts of people are trustworthy enough to serve as witnesses in court. It’s pretty standard stuff. However, as part of this discussion, we get to learn about some early gambling practices among the Jews. While this topic is invoked mainly to denote the fact that gamblers may not be the most trustworthy folk, some of the details include a bit of haggling over whether people who who send their trained pigeons to steal other people’s pigeons can be considered as shysty as those who simply race pigeons for cash rewards. After a bit of back and forth, it is concluded that everyone involved in pigeon shenanigans are just as sleazy as dice players, who are banned by halakhah from serving as witnesses. The long and the short of it is that the Rabonim simply do not like the gambling.

When I first read Sanhedrin 25, I thought it was terrifically interesting, not because I had some investment in knowing whose testimony is considered worthy, nor because I’d just renovated the pigeon coop on top of my tenement. I was fascinated because it was an instance of the amoraim interfacing with the amkho. I have an abiding interest in the the amkho, those average, everyday Jews that make up the bulk of this freaky nation. These are the people you find on the margins of rabbinic discourse, those upon whom the rabbis meted out their rulings and punishments. Truth be told, I find these people much more interesting than either the rabbis or their fiddling with halakhah. Amazingly, in this discussion, the rabbis throw out some neat details about how pigeon racers would hit trees to make their pigeons go faster and how some people played a dice-like game with something called pispasin, a hardcore Jewish gambling habit that seems to gone the way of the dodo.

Unfortunately, Jewish traditional texts aren’t very amkho-friendly. The average Yosls and Yentas who smuggle their way into works produced by rabbinic elites generally appear because they somehow screwed up, did something the rabbis didn’t approve of and thus wound up being officially approbated, a fact they also often ignored. That fact notwithstanding, the amkho still appears to have retained a high regard for their rabbinic elites, in spite of the fact that they frequently disregarded rulings that interfered with anything they considered even remotely fun.

Take, for example, the body of rabbinic admonitions that trip their way from the gemara through 19th century responsa insisting that Jews refrain from attending theater and circus performances. Did any self-respecting Jew with tickets to whatever the 6th century version of Hamilton was ever say, “um, this isn’t permitted…we’d better not go.” This type of thing goes on for centuries. Sure, there’s a broad core of laws that most Jews stuck to, but, when it comes to matters of amusement or desire, the edges can get pretty fuzzy.

If you jump from the Talmudic period to the early 20th century (yes, I know this is ridiculous), one finds that the dynamic doesn’t change very much. The only real difference is that the rabbinic elite has lost much of its power and influence. Amkho still respects them, but they also still do what they want. One interesting factor is that there is now a forum where news of both the rabbis and the amkho begins to appear on a regular basis. This would be the Yiddish press, the first form of mass media in a Jewish language, a place where international and national news collided with Yiddish literature and criticism, where great essayists railed both in favor and against tradition, where pulp fiction sits alongside great literature, and where, among myriad other things, you can find a near endless supply of data on millions of tog-teglekhe yidn, everyday Jews who populated the urban ghettos of cities like New York and Warsaw. In a nutshell, the Yiddish press is a roiling and angry sea of words filled with astounding stories of all kinds of Jews, religious, secular and many who vacillate perilously between the two, aloft somewhere between modernity and tradition, taking bits of both, throwing it all in a pot and cooking it until it’s well done.

It is not at all uninteresting.

As a kind of wildly disjointed chronicle of Jewish life, Yiddish newspapers are an unparalleled resource on the pitshevkes, the tiny, yet fascinating details of Jewish urban immigrant life. Where else could one find out that Hasidim were a significant component of the Jewish audience at professional wrestling matches in Poland during the 1920s? Or that 50,000 Jewish mothers rioted against the public schools on the Lower East Side in 1906? Where could one discover that petty theft in Warsaw spiked annually just before Passover, when Jews were known to buy new clothes and linens? Is there a place you know of where one could find out that Jewish atheists antagonized religious Jews on Yom Kippur by walking around eating and smoking? Or that gangs of ultra-Orthodox Jews stalked the streets on Shabbos demanding people shut down their businesses? If you want to experience the knot of fury into which Jewish life was bound up, look no further than the Yiddish press.

Yiddish newspaper editors always knew where to find the juiciest stories and, for example, frequently sent journalists to cover goings-on in the Warsaw beyz-din. And it wasn’t because there were important cases being seen there, but because there was always some wild scandal blowing up in front of the rabbis that often ended up with litigants heaving chairs at one another. Whether it was some guy who thought it would be okay to marry two women and shuttle between them, or a woman who knocked out her fiancée’s front teeth after he refused to acknowledge that he had knocked her up. Like a Yiddish language Jerry Springer Show, brawls broke out in the rabbinate on a near daily basis during the 1920s and 1930s. The rabbis, of course, were mortified. But they kept at it. And the journalists of the Yiddish press were there to record.

Captions (top, middle, bottom):

“Gas masks as a security measure in the Rabbinate.”

“A woman poured vitriol on her husband in a divorce case” (from the Rabbinate Chronicle)

“Thus can we now begin the case. Call in the two sides.”

It may be that you don’t want to know that there were Jewish criminals, drunks, prostitutes, imbeciles, and myriad other types that comprise the lowest echelons of society. But these small, often inconsequential matters that litter the pre-WWII Yiddish press comprise the details of a culture that has largely disappeared. Moreover, one can find a wealth of information on the amkho, who they were, how they lived, how they thought and spoke. This of course, begs the question: what do we want out of history? Do we only want to know about the rabonim, the manhigim, the writers, the artists, and the businesspeople? Or do we also want to peek into the lives of the average, the boring, the unsuccessful, the dumb, and the mean? Do we want a full picture of the Jewish world that was, or do we only want the success stories?

For my money, I want to know as much as I can about how Jews lived before World War II. Not everyone’s great grandfathers were kley-koydesh. In fact, most weren’t and it’s sheer fantasy to think that most Jews had extensive yeshiva educations. Most Yiddish-speaking Jews were poor, uneducated, and sometimes illiterate. Many of them did dumb things, made bad decisions, and wound up in big trouble. Clearly a shonde, they may not have the yikhes we want, but, also, we don’t get to choose. They may not be the best role models, but they are nonetheless integral to the Jewish story.