Growing up in suburban New York City in a conservative Jewish environment, my personal sports hero was three-time Cy Young winner Sandy Koufax, the Jewish southpaw for the L.A. Dodgers. I had forgiven my favorite baseball team from stealing away from Brooklyn, and as a teenager had stuffed several spiral scrapbooks with hundreds of newspaper headlines and magazine clippings of this strike-out king as he pitched his team to world championships in the 1960s. Aviva Kempner, an award-winning documentary filmmaker born in Berlin and raised in Detroit, but now based out of a modest townhouse in Northwest Washington, DC (her film’s one-sheet gloriously tacked to the front door greets visitors), has that same lifelong infatuation for Bronx-born slugger Hank Greenberg, the powerhouse cornerstone of Michigan’s Tigers for more than a decade starting back in 1933. But instead of rubber glue and newsprint, Kempner has used film cement, interviews, stock footage clips, and snippets of novelty music to fashion a marvelous pastiche of a legendary sports hero, a compelling and fascinating tribute to one of baseball’s great figures, in size (six feet four) and accomplishment. A pretty much homemade project that took thirteen years to assemble, the film’s bar mitzvah is a posthumous gift to the filmmaker’s late father, a Tigers fan and avid follower of Greenberg’s exploits, not the least of which was hitting fifty-eight home runs in 1938, a scant three away from breaking Babe Ruth’s then immortal record.
Kempner’s affection-filled effort to document the future Hall of Famer’s growing popularity amidst a solid Midwestern anti-Semitic ethic (in part due to the insidious likes of Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin) highlights the slugger’s hard-nosed efforts to rise above the small minds that sat in the stands and the dugouts, often shouting bigoted invectives against baseball’s first Jewish sports legend. Read More
