JEWISH TIGER
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANK GREENBERG
Written and Directed by Aviva Kempner
With Hank Greenberg
Jean Cocteau NR 95 min.
You don't have to be a baseball fan to love Aviva Kempner's documentary about legendary Detroit Tiger slugger Hank Greenberg, though it probably helps.
Greenberg wasn't the first Jewish player to reach the majors, but he was the first to achieve stardom without downplaying his religion, and it made him the idol of American Jews in the decade when Hitler was stoking his cauldron of hate in Germany, and anti-Semitism was conspicuously alive and well in this country too. Greenberg played in Detroit, home of such major league bigots as Henry Ford and the infamous Father Coughlin. He filled the star void left by the departure of all-time Tiger great and world-class sonofabitch Ty Cobb.
Greenberg was 6'4", with muscles like Paul Bunyan, and he muted the jeers of "kike" and "sheeny" with an awesome barrage of homers and RBIs. His average never fell below .300 till his last year with the Tigers, after he'd returned from four years in WWII. He was twice the American League's most valuable player, and that didn't include the year ('37) when he drove in 183 runs, one shy of Gehrig's record, or the year ('38) when he electrified baseball with his 58 homers, two short of the immortal Bambino's mark. He was baseball's first $100,000 man.
"He may have been the single most important Jew to live in the 1930s," says Alan Dershowitz. "I thought he'd be the first Jewish president."
Greenberg wasn't an observant Jew, but he was a proud one. In his second year with the Tigers he agonized over whether to play on Rosh Hashanah. A Detroit rabbi sent him a Talmudic passage that okayed it, and Hankus Spankus walloped two homers to win a 2-0 game (the rabbi, a baseball fan, later admitted he'd fudged his interpretation.) When he declined to play on Yom Kippur, the poet Edgar Guest saluted him in the Detroit paper:
"We shall miss him in the infield, we shall miss him at the bat,
"He is true to his religion, and I honor him for that."
Aviva Kempner's labor of love took her 14 years, beginning with interviews with the great man shortly before his death in '86. She talked to teammates, opponents, sportswriters, and fans, and dug out vintage baseball film and Mandy Patinkin's Yiddish "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" for the soundtrack. She clutters things a bit with extraneous footage from Hollywood baseball movies, and sometimes her narrative drive slumps. It's not great filmmaking, but it's an impassioned treatment of a great subject.
Poetically, Hank Greenberg ended his career with the Pirates in '47, bringing him to the National League the year Jackie Robinson broke in. "I didn't know what having it bad was till I saw what happened to Robinson," he said.
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