Breaking Ground: How Jackie Robinson Changed Brooklyn by Alan Lelchuk (review)

Alan Lelchuk’s Breaking New Ground is a hybrid book—a nostalgic memoir of his Brooklyn boyhood and a meditation on the significance of Jackie Robinson to 1950s Brooklynites. Lelchuk is a well-respected novelist, and he indulges in lyrical prose that celebrates ways in which Robinson became a touchstone for Lelchuk’s younger self. In his introduction, Lelchuk casts the story of his childhood encounter with Robinson as a modern version of the opening scene of Great Expectations, with a young Alan as Pip and Jackie as Magwitch. This literary allusion sets the tone for the book.

Lelchuk divides the book into separate segments. The first and longer section, titled “The Brooklyn Project,” recounts Lelchuk’s childhood: his experiences at Ebbets Field, his delight in and admiration of Robinson’s playing style and public nobility in the face of racist attacks, and his own strained relationship with his father. In this narrative, Branch Rickey looms large as a benevolent puppet master and benefactor, who, with Rachel Robinson, would “keep [Jackie’s] fire contained.” Under Rickey’s tutelage, Lelchuk contends that Robinson used the “strains of volatile DNA running through [his] blood” to fuel his on-the-field play while maintaining a façade of “cool” (44). Meanwhile, Lelchuk committed to his fandom of baseball and Robinson as a way to define himself in contrast to his leftist, immigrant father, who initially rejected baseball as an American frivolity. In the second portion of the book, “Jackie’s Voice,” Lelchuk interrogates the legacy of Robinson while also continuing to interweave his continued unease with his father, who by then had embraced the baseball player in an attempt to find common ground with him.

Readers expecting to find a detailed historical treatment of Robinson’s impact on Brooklyn will find numerous gaps. Historians may flinch at the ways in which Lelchuk’s retelling of Robinson’s journey elides the significant role of the Pittsburgh Courier’s Wendell Smith (as well as the missing “h” in Pittsburgh) and the mentions of William E. B. DuBois and William DuBois (rather than the traditional W. E. B. Du Bois). Yet, they are clearly not Lelchuk’s intended audience. Lelchuk is channeling “the voice . . . of a boy . . . partly by design, and partly by the power of that boy’s feelings still beating strongly in the adult.” In doing so, he attempts to transmit his “true felt experience” into a coming-of-age narrative in which baseball and Robinson play a singular role (17; emphasis Lelchuk).

The trouble with Lelchuk’s book may come down, in large part, to his title. This memoir does not explore the ways in which “Jackie Robinson changed Brooklyn” as much as it delves into Robinson’s complicated life as a symbol for a young man struggling to define his own Jewish-American identity in working-class Brooklyn. This slim memoir transports the reader into the mind and heart of a young Alan Lelchuk, who finds his definition of American heroism in the tenacious Jackie Robinson.