A Handful of Interesting, Timely Topics, and: The Polo Grounds is my Field of Dreams

A Handful of Interesting, Timely Topics
Jews and Baseball— New York Humbug— Dempsey as an Actor— and Other Things
max d. danish

Originally appeared in the Yiddish Forward, August 3, 1924.¹

I sat at the ball-game the other day, at the big Stadium.

My forty-thousand sweltering neighbors were roaring their approval of the pretty, sustained “work” of the visiting team, tempering their enthusiasm by sipping pop and munching the irresistible “franks”. Immediately back of me sat a particularly uproarious gang of men, none of them below thirty-five, typical indefinable New Yorkers—heavy-set, round-faced, and speaking that metropolitan jargon in which an Irish brogue is welded with a lower East Side shading and a dash of Yorkville “Dutch”.

The man at the bat struck out a fine single, a play that could not fail to warm the heart cockles of the most hardened fan.

“Oh, baby, what a momser,”² one of the group in front of me yelled out hoarsely. I picked up my years [sic]. In the course of the next few minutes he volunteered the account of how some seven years ago the great Finney of the Pirates had made exactly such an epoch-making “fly” and how he had subsequently been sold to the Indians, and so on. Page after page of base-ball history was rolling itself from the lips of this enthusiastic raconteur. I looked closer at him and his fellow-fans, and then way beyond him at the great mass of packed humanity as far as my eye could reach. Rows upon rows, they sat there and it took no ethnic specialist to tell that at least half of them were Jews—men, and a goodly sprinkling of girls, too.

What, indeed, are our strictly Anglo-Saxon coming to!

Boxing has not only been invaded but pretty nearly conquered by the Jewish and Italian boys—save for a few of the heavier classes. And now baseball, America’s most typical, most popular game, is being supported in the principal centres by the immigrants and their children. They are not yet the players, they are not yet big and robust enough for the game—but give them another generation, one in the knowing said to me the other day, and they’ll capture everything worthwhile getting away with in [sic] it.

Do the immigrants “assimilate?” Ask the baseball fan—he knows!

The Polo Grounds is my Field of Dreams
keith danish

By the time the accompanying article about Jews and Baseball, written by Max Danish, appeared on an English-language features page of the Yiddish Forward (“Forverts”) in the summer of 1924, my father had been in America almost twenty-five years. Having come to New York City from Belarus, he arrived as the new century was dawning. Sitting “at the big Stadium” (probably the one-year old Yankee Stadium), he deduced that many of the fans were Jewish and noted that active Jewish participation in the game was growing among the children of immigrants. “Do the immigrants ‘assimilate?’” he asks. “Ask the baseball fan—he knows!” Ironically, in the year Max’s article was published, Congress implemented severe “national origins” quota restrictions on immigration.

Dad was a NY Giants fan, going back to the glory days of Matty and McGraw, perhaps because he often lived in “Jewish Harlem” near the Polo Grounds. Baseball was helping to Americanize him while he strove, as a democratic Socialist, to make America a more fair and decent place for workers, first by publicizing the great garment worker strikes around 1910. By the time of the 1924 article in the Forward, he was editor of Justice, the newspaper of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the union’s publicity director, and would serve his union until retiring in 1951 (the year of “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World”).

Now, how can I be alive to speak about a father who was born in 1881 and came to America in 1900? Because I was born...