“Jewball” by Neal Pollack, Thomas & Mercer, 2012, $14.95
Author Neal Pollack has scored a slam dunk with his fast-paced novel “Jewball.”
Pollack has based the book on a real professional basketball team of the ’20s and ’30s, the Philadelphia Sphas (South Philadelphia Hebrew Association) who played in a barnstorming league. The author has written a whirlwind tale about a group of Jewish boys with talent who were threatened by the German-American Bund, and who outwitted these American Nazis both on the court and on their home turf.
The protagonist of the narrative is Inky Lautner, who in real life was, at 15, the youngest person ever to play professional basketball. In the novel, Inky is uneducated and poor and stupidly takes a side job as an enforcer for the Bund. It doesn’t take him long to realize his mistake and return to his fellow teammates. In the meantime, the team must deal with the fact that their manager Eddie Gottlieb has a gambling debt that was bought up by the Bund. To pay off the debt, the Sphas are expected to throw a game in Minneapolis to a German-American team who support Hitler’s theories of racial superiority.
On route to the novel’s final game, readers follow the team to Harlem, Brooklyn, Scranton, Pittsburgh and Chicago. They played for the most part in hotel ballrooms. After a game, they partied as hard and fast as they played. This road trip is filled with great basketball, profanity, sex, alcohol, and an occasional good night’s sleep. This page-turner keeps on scoring unbelievable shots until the last page.
Almost all of the characters in “Jewball” are based on historical figures. Everyone on the court, with one fictional exception, was actually on the Sphas. The members of the Bund were also historical figures. Even the Jewish gangster Pollack introduces was based on a real gangster. That’s part of the fun of “Jewball.” Although the author creates a situation that is fictional, it is easy to imagine that the entire story could have happened just as he wrote it. This is a book for anyone who likes basketball, for anyone who enjoys seeing the American Nazis brought down by a bunch of poor Jewish boys, for anyone with a connection to Philadelphia, and particularly for anyone who enjoys a fast-moving novel that’s dark, profane, and sometimes funny.
Andrea Kempf is a retired librarian who speaks throughout the community on various topics related to books and reading.
