Big League Dreams (Small Worlds)
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 kind--but 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 thing--including a showdown with Ty Cobb at home plate--Matti 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 America--where 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 tragedy--provide 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.
