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April 11, 2003
Travelling baseball team
Golem is a cautionary tale about greed and ambition.
KATHARINE HAMER SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
The Golem's Mighty Swing
By James Sturm
Drawn and Quarterly, Montreal, 2001. 120 pages. $25.95
I would like to reveal to readers from the outset exactly what I
know about baseball: Nothing. Oh, except that the players have big
wooden sticks and they spit on the ground a lot. Who better, therefore,
at the start of baseball season, to cast a detached eye across a
graphic novel about a Prohibition-era travelling Jewish baseball
team called the Stars of David?
The Golem's Mighty Swing was named best graphic novel of
2001 by Time magazine. Published by Montreal outfit Drawn
and Quarterly, the book is part of a growing list of new graphic
novels – a genre first made popular some 20-odd years ago by
New Yorker Art Spiegelman, creator of RAW magazine and Maus,
an autobiographical graphic novel about the Holocaust. Among Drawn
and Quarterly's current titles are a number of Canadian entries,
including David Collier's social survey of Steeltown, The Hamilton
Sketchbook, and Michel Rebagliati's Charlie Brown-style chronicle
of a misfit Montreal youth, Paul has a Summer Job.
The Golem's Mighty Swing features a team of bearded amateur
sportsmen who travel from town to town in 1920s America, led by
manager and third baseman Noah Strauss, aka the Zion Lion, a former
Red Sox rookie whose visage bears an uncanny resemblance to that
of Ben Reveen. The book's sepia-toned strips also introduce us to
Noah's brother, a 16-year-old second baseman called Moishe; a pitcher
called Buttercup Lev and the observant Fishkin, "jack of all
positions, master of none."
The Golem's Mighty Swing is set against a backdrop of small
town prejudice, in which the townsfolk turn out for games not only
to watch the action, but to see for themselves just what a Jew looks
like. The players are subject to the blind animosity even of small
children, who hurl stones at them as they walk the streets at night.
Worse than anti-Semitism at the time was racial prejudice against
blacks. All the more reason for the Stars of David to have an Afro-American
– disguised as a Jew – as their best batter. "As
a Star of David," notes Noah, "he is Hershl Bloom, member
of the lost tribe. As a player for over 20 years in the Negro Leagues
he is Henry Bell."
When an oleaginous promoter suggests the team dress up Henry/Hershl
as a golem to increase revenues, Noah has trepidations, but with
money tight and the team van in need of fixing, he decides to take
a chance on the team having a curious mascot.
Half the team doesn't even know what a golem is, and have to get
Fishkin to explain the concept of a manmade servant which, Frankenstein-like,
loses control unless kept under tight rein. The promotional poster
for the team's next game blares out its message in capital letters:
"GOLEM. The Jewish medieval monster! See him with your own
eyes!" It's a ploy that works, but with disastrous consequences.
As far as golem fables go, Isaac Bashevis Singer this isn't. For
those unfamiliar with the legend, the story isn't explained in detail.
The plot's denouement is also somewhat rushed. Nonetheless, The
Golem's Mighty Swing serves as a cautionary tale of greed and
thwarted ambition, with appealing artwork and a number of heavily
stereotyped but still comic one-liners.
"The Jews are crafty players," observes the manager of
a home team "Patient. They've been waiting for their Messiah
a thousand years – so they know how to wait on a curve ball."
Katharine Hamer is a Vancouver writer.
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