Big League Dreams (Small Worlds)

by Allen Hoffman

Overview

Big League Dreams finds the Krimsk Rebbe and many of his flock in Saint Louis on a Saturday, the Sabbath, in the summer of 1920.

In Saint Louis, it is the summer of 1920 and the day is the Sabbath, but there is little rest for the Jews from Krimsk and less reverence for the wondrous Krimsker Rebbe, who led them to the New World seventeen years before. The rebbe's former hasidim have embraced America to discover that the vision of "gold in the streets" evokes larceny in the heart. Matti Sternweiss, the ungainly, studious child wonder in Krimsk, now the cerebral catcher for the St. Louis Browns, is scheming to fix Saturday's game against the pennant-contending Detroit Tigers.

It is an American Sabbath: Prohibition, bookies, the criminal syndicate, the Hiberian fellowship of the police brass, hometown blondes, a bootlegging rabbi, and big league baseball. It is also Krimsk in America: Boruch Levi, the successful junkman, confiscates his zany, crippled brother-in-law Barasch's sizable bets; Barasch's lusty wife, Malka, has her own connubial reasons for wanting to stop the gambling; the chief of police fatefully inspires his loyal disciple, Boruch Levi, to bring Matti before the Krimsker Rebbe on the Sabbath in order to preserve the purity of the national pastime.

Recluse and wonder-worker, messianist and pragmatist, the Krimsker Rebbe navigates the muddy Mississippi River, haunted by a recurring prophetic vision of Pharaoh's blood-red Nile. In the final, decisive innings, with Matti crouched behind home plate, it will come down to Ty Cobb versus the kabbalah.

Richly imagined, populated with robust, complex characters, Big League Dreams is a profoundly original, inspiring, and comic creation. It is the second volume in the series Small Worlds, which follows the people of Krimsk and their descendants in America, Russia, Poland, and Israel. In each volume Allen Hoffman draws on his deep knowledge of Jewish religion and history to evoke the finite yet infinite "small worlds" his characters inhabit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780789260055
Publisher:	Abbeville Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/21/2011
Series:	Small Worlds , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Allen Hoffman, award-winning author of the novel Small Worlds and of a novella and short stories, was born in Saint Louis and received his B.A. in American history from Harvard University. He studied the Talmud in yeshivas in New York and Jerusalem, and has taught in New York City schools. He and his wife and four children live in Jerusalem. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Bar-Ilan University.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The white-bearded old man opened the Ford's back door and with surprising ease hoisted a large trunk into the automobile. Remarkably erect and robust for his seventy years, he was not even sweating in the warm morning sunlight. As a concession to the St. Louis climate and this morning's physical task, he had removed his suit jacket but not his hat. He would like to have taken that off, too, but he was slightly embarrassed to appear on a public street in a skullcap. The tree-shaded suburban neighborhood knew him as the Krimsker Rebbe's sexton, and it wouldn't have mattered to the Germans, Irish, and Italians, who inhabited the numerous duplexes and occasional apartment house and were really very fine neighbors, friendly, polite, and respectful. It mattered to Reb Zelig, however, because this was America, and whenever he could avoid calling attention to the difference, he preferred to do so. He had shortened his side curls and had tucked them behind his ears; he wore a modern short suit jacket and broad-brimmed felt hat. Outside the neighborhood they often mistook him for an old-fashioned farmer. That is, when he was alone. The Krimsker Rebbe himself wasn't embarrassed to go anywhere in a skullcap--he didn't tuck his long side curls behind any ear either--and his long frock coat trailed ostentatiously behind him like a Civil War relic.

When they had suddenly left Krimsk in 1903, Reb Zelig never had expected to understand the Krimsker Rebbe, and the rebbe did not disappoint him. But Reb Zelig had been puzzled more than usual recently when the rebbe insisted that he, Reb Zelig, must say the mourner's kaddish for the deposed and executed Tsar Nicholas II. Reb Zeligmentioned to the rebbe that they were no longer in Russia, and Nicholas had been deposed before his death. The rebbe flicked his wrist impatiently and said, "Nu, you can ask a better question. Ask why a goy like you should say kaddish for a Jew. Ask me, and I'll tell you the answer. You killed him, and there's no one else to say kaddish for him, so you might as well do it."

In Krimsk, Reb Zelig would have assumed that the rebbe was referring to great kabbalistic secrets and mysteries. But such esoteric lore, essential as it was in the Russian village of Krimsk, seemed so very alien in St. Louis. Reb Zelig even wondered if the rebbe knew what he was talking about. Still, Reb Zelig had dutifully begun to say the memorial prayer, informing inquisitive congregants that the rebbe had told him to do so for the victims of the Bolshevik Revolution, who had no one left to say it in their memory, a story that was petty much true as far as it went. Occasionally Reb Zelig wondered what the rebbe had really meant, but even in America he wasn't about to take that much liberty with his rebbe as to ask him directly.

Most of the time the rebbe seemed aware of his surroundings--even when he went around the Osage Indian reservation with his phylacteries on his head and arm as if he were in the beis midrash back in Krimsk. Once Reb Zelig had asked the rebbe why he found the Indians so fascinating.

"Here," the rebbe said, pointing to the Osage encampment, "and only here lies the secret to America. Here and nowhere else." It all seemed a little strange to Reb Zelig, but he was only a sexton, not given to unraveling great secrets. Not given to killing people either, much less former tsars. Some day maybe the rebbe would explain that to him, too.

But tomorrow morning it would be the Osage Indians who were perplexed; tomorrow would be the Sabbath, and no Jew wore his phylacteries on the Sabbath. The Indians had never seen the rebbe on a Sabbath. In fact, Reb Zelig himself was slightly perplexed that they were about to drive down to the reservation. The rebbe had always insisted on returning home to St. Louis for the Sabbath, no matter how far or how fast Reb Zelig had to drive. Perhaps there was a very special ceremony that the rebbe wanted to observe. Reb Zelig would find out soon enough, but now that he had the automobile loaded, he had better put on his jacket and tell the rebbe that they could get started. They had a long journey and wanted to arrive well before sunset, when the Sabbath would begin.

Table of Contents

Contents


Recollections


Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six


The Letter
About the Author

Editorial Reviews

In this second volume (after Small Worlds) about a group of Hasidic Jewish immigrants from the Polish village of Krimsk and their lives in St. Louis in the 1920s, Hoffman fashions a haunting, bittersweet story of exile, dislocation and redemption in the Promised Land. Mystical, enigmatic Rebbe Yaakov Moise Finebaum again strives to save the souls of his widely straying flock, even as he seeks to reconcile the disparities between the values of the Old World and the lures of commerce and assimilation to which many of his former parishioners have succumbed. Perhaps the most well known of these is Matti Sternweiss, starting catcher for the St. Louis Browns on a Saturday (Jewish Sabbath) in 1920. (Baseball, of course, is the metaphor for America, its "sacred" game.) Matti is clever, philosophic and kindbut he is betrayed by his desire to marry a shiksa into contemplating throwing a game against the Detroit Tigers. Ironically, after he defies temptation and does the right thingincluding a showdown with Ty Cobb at home plateMatti pays the price for his fall from grace. Robust humor, insight into human nature and an absence of sentimentality augment Hoffman's storytelling skills, as he deftly intertwines several subplots (one of them nothing short of hilarious) and portrays a dozen or so characters with understanding and compassion for their foibles. The contrasts between shtetl life in Krimsk and the strange new culture of Americawhere a renegade rabbi defies Prohibition by making wine in the synagogue basement, and an avuncular chief of police and his lieutenant break the law and unleash tragedyprovide the narrative with and irony and tension. And the prophetic Rebbe's effort to reconcile Biblical injunctions with the manifold mysteries of American society provides a trenchant commentary on both religious and secular worlds. Author tour. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Like its predecessor, Small Worlds (1996), Hoffman's second in a series limns an affectionate and affecting portrayal of Polish Jews resettled in 20th-century America.

The year is 1920, and the settling St. Louis—specifically, "the world of Prohibition and syndicated crime and fixed ball games." Inhabitants of the village of Krimsk, on the Russian border, once again dominant, include the "Krimsker Rebbe" Yaakov Moshe Finebaum, whose assimilation into his new homeland takes surpassingly strange forms (the sight of "blood-red" Mississippi waters evokes memories of the biblical Israelites in Egypt, and the Rebbe's appointment to the Governor's Council on Indian Affairs has him wondering if these American natives are in fact descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes), and "puritanical" junk-dealer Boruch Levi Rudman, determined to bully his family and neighbors into upholding their culture's dignity. Hoffman paces his amusing narrative beautifully, introducing (that is, re-introducing) "new" characters at strategically spaced intervals. The story's main events occur on a busy Sabbath day, during which the unregenerate Matti Sternweiss, a professional athlete whose canny intelligence has elevated him to the position of starting catcher for the hometown St. Louis Browns, must decide whether to go through with his scheme to "throw" a crucial game to the visiting Detroit Tigers—and must, at the crucial moment, face the malignant specter of the great Ty Cobb, spikes flashing, speeding toward him at home plate. Several subplots are neatly worked in (including a beauty that involves Boruch Levi's lustful sister Malka and her submissive captive husband), as are two haunting images from the Krimskers' European past: a dream of burning cats, and the vision of a mail plane crashing to earth. A wistful last scene, set in 1936 after the resolution of these crises (and the demise of Prohibition), clearly points toward a continuation of their story.

First-rate fiction: reminiscent as noted of such precursors as Sholom Aleichem, but possessed of distinctive individual strengths and firmly rooted in its characters' strange new land and even stranger adventures.

Kirkus Reviews