19102 Review: 'Jewball'
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
In the 1920s and '30s, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association (better known as the SPHA) was one of the best basketball teams in the world.
Jewball
Neal Pollack
(Thomas & Mercer, 2011, 212 pp.)
In the 1920s and ’30s, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association (better known as the SPHA) was one of the best basketball teams in the world, playing to packed arenas around the country in a time when hatred of Jews ran rampant. In Jewball, writer Neal Pollack gives their story a unique fictitious spin: What if the SPHAs not only fought the rise of Nazism symbolically, but on the court as well?
Jewball follows hard-headed point guard Inky Lautman, who occasionally works as a bruiser for the German American Bund, a large pro-Nazi organization. After Eddie Gottlieb, the coach of the SPHAs, racks up a serious gambling debt with the Bund, the team is offered two options: take a dive in a game against a Nazi team or be killed.
After racial threats are made in his South Philly neighborhood and his trip to a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden (which, horrifyingly, did happen — search “Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, NYC, 1938”), Lautman’s apathy turns to intense hatred for the Bund. The team decides there’s no way they can throw the game, even if the punishment is death.
Almost all of the characters in the book, the SPHAs and the fascists, were actual people. The real-life Lautman still holds the record for being the youngest pro basketball player in the U.S., at 15. Gottlieb was a Naismith Hall of Famer and an NBA Rookie of the Year, whose cigar-chomping hard-ass character in Jewball has some of its best lines.
Save for an anemic love story between Lautman and a teammate’s sister, and its predictable outcome, Jewball is a quick, fun read. And although the SPHAs didn’t really battle Nazis, as is often the case in alternate histories, their actual story is more interesting.
