The Golem's Mighty Swing
**The Golem's Mighty Swing** is a graphic novel set in the early 1920s, focusing on the experiences of a Jewish barnstorming baseball team known as the Stars of David. The story is narrated by Noah Strauss, a former major league player whose struggles with identity and discrimination as a Jewish athlete reflect the broader societal prejudices of the era. The team travels extensively, playing around 160 games a year, while facing anti-Semitic hostility from fans and townspeople. Their journey takes a turn when they enlist the help of a promoter who suggests that their African American player, Henry Bell, dress as a golem—a creature from Jewish folklore—to attract larger crowds. This strategy leads to both excitement and backlash, culminating in a violent confrontation fueled by ethnic hatred.
Through its portrayal of the characters and their challenges, *The Golem's Mighty Swing* explores themes of Jewish identity, racism, and the impact of spectacle in sports. The artwork is characterized by its clean, black-and-white illustrations with sepia tones, complementing the narrative without overshadowing it. The novel not only honors the perseverance of marginalized groups in baseball history but also critiques the commercialization of sports and the societal issues intertwined with it. Overall, it serves as a poignant commentary on the complexities of identity and the enduring struggles against prejudice in American culture.
The Golem's Mighty Swing
AUTHOR: Sturm, James
ARTIST: James Sturm (illustrator)
PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly
FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2001
Publication History
The Golem’s Mighty Swing was first published in paperback and cloth in 2001 by Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal. It was reprinted in 2003. Four years later, Drawn and Quarterly republished it along with two other of James Sturm’s graphic novellas, The Revival, originally published in 1996, and Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight, originally published in 1998. These three novels were collected in a single volume entitled James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems. The Golem’s Mighty Swing has been translated into Spanish, French, and Polish editions.
Plot
The Golem’s Mighty Swing tells the story of a barnstorming Jewish baseball team, the Stars of David, that travels throughout the Midwest in the early 1920’s. The plot is told primarily, but not exclusively, through the narrative voice of Noah Strauss, a former outfielder for the Boston Red Sox who left the major leagues because he could not obtain a starting job and because of his weak knees. The Stars of David play approximately 160 baseball games a year, traveling 20,000 miles annually in their old, beat-up, and unreliable bus.
The members of the team are routinely subjected to anti-Semitic comments and discrimination from fans, townspeople (including children), and even umpires. When the team members eat in restaurants, they often must sit in the back of the establishment because they are Jewish. The only one who does not experience this discrimination is the team’s sole black player, Henry Bell, who, because of his celebrity status among black fans, eats free in their homes. The team wins a majority of its games but flounders financially because of low attendance and unfavorable business deals. Although they do not make much money, they get to play the game they love, and, as Strauss stresses, it is better to play baseball for a living than be a pushcart peddler or a sweatshop tailor like his father.
When the team’s bus breaks down in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Strauss realizes that he has difficulty affording the repairs, thus endangering the team’s ability to show up at future games (such as the upcoming games in Putnam and Rockford), he reluctantly resorts to enlisting the help of baseball promoter Victor L. Paige. After an earlier game, Paige had offered to promote the Stars of David baseball games in exchange for a cut and suggested that Bell dress as a golem (a huge, dangerous supernatural figure from Jewish mysticism) to draw bigger crowds. A large first baseman formerly of the Negro Leagues, Bell agrees to dress as a golem for higher pay.
The advertisements featuring a Jewish team with a golem player work both for and against the team: The stadium in Putnam is packed, but the advertisements also incite fear, ethnic hatred, and even hysteria in the townspeople. The Putnam Post Bugle claims that the Jews must be defeated for the good of the soul of the United States. Hoping to attract more fans to the Stars of David game, Paige publishes an article in the Putnam newspaper warning the male citizens to hide their women. Paige fails to realize or does not care that his article, coupled with rampant anti-Semitism, will lead to a riot. The mean-spirited fans attack the Jewish players, who are saved by Bell as the golem and then by a torrential downpour, which cancels the game and allows the team to escape to another town.
The story ends ten years after the Putnam game. Strauss mentions that the Stars of David played another four years before disbanding. Strauss has retired from baseball because his knees gave out, and his brother Mo has moved to Tarrytown and gotten married. While in Greenville, North Carolina, Strauss learns of a baseball game between professional athletes, called the Big Leagues, and amateurs, dressed in rural farmer costumes, who call themselves the Hay Seeds. Moonshine Mullins, the Hay Seeds’s alcoholic manager, entertains the fans by getting drunk and attacking umpires. During the game, a fan is brought onto the field to play. This is yet another spectacle put on by Paige. Strauss is disgusted by how Paige’s antics make a mockery of baseball, yet he finds himself attracted to the buffoonery.
Characters
•Noah Strauss, a.k.a. the Zion Lion, the main character and narrator, is the third baseman and manager for the Stars of David. A former member of the Boston Red Sox, he is emotionally strong and calm, but his knees hurt him so badly that he can barely run.
•Moishe Strauss, a.k.a. Mo, Strauss’s sixteen-year-old brother, is a talented second baseman but overly emotional. He wears shoe polish on his face to pretend he has a beard. Children attack him after the game in Forest Hills.
•Buttercup Lev, a slow-ball pitcher for the team, throws sidearm and relies on guile and location to compensate for his lack of a fastball. He is an alcoholic and gets beaten up by anti-Semites before a game against the Putnam All-Americans.
•Henry Bell, a.k.a. Hershl Bloom, is an African American pretending to be a Jew from the lost tribes of Israel to play with the Stars of David. He is a first baseman and pitcher. A favorite among the black fans, he played for twenty years in the Negro Leagues for the Chicago Unions. He plays the golem and saves the team during the Putnam game.
•Victor Paige, an unscrupulous promoter, works for the Big Inning Promotional Agency, a sports-marketing company based in Chicago. He compliments Strauss for having a talented team yet knows little about baseball. His agency procured the golem costume worn in the 1915 German silent film Der Golem (the golem), and he persuades Strauss to dress Henry Bell as a golem to attract more fans.
Artistic Style
The artwork in The Golem’s Mighty Swing is simple, clean, and sparse, but not necessarily minimalist. The focus of Sturm’s graphic novel is squarely on the prose, with artwork supporting but not detracting from the text. Sturm’s drawings primarily use black and white, with a sepia-tinted color for background. This use of color helps create the environment or set the mood, which constitutes a significant part of the baseball game and eliminates the need for shading.
As would be expected, many panels are devoted to the baseball games, particularly the relationship between the batter and the pitcher. The drawings of the baseballs differ markedly in size, showing the distance the ball has been hit, its trajectory, and the perspective of the character viewing the ball. This is especially true when Bell bats. Sturm devotes ten panels to a Bell home run to show different perspectives, including the reactions of the fans, Strauss, Paige, and Bell himself. From the home-plate perspective, the ball realistically appears large when it leaves the bat (in fact, it is above the clouds in one panel) but seems far smaller when it drops over the fence. When Strauss hits the ball against Putnam pitcher Mickey McFadden, Sturm places the baseball inside the “O” in “WHOP,” cleverly indicating the strength with which Strauss hit it and giving the panel a cartoonish feel. Sturm also shows how slowly Lev pitches by drawing a large baseball with clearly delineated seams, indicating that the ball seems large to the batter because of its lack of velocity.
When an anti-Semite in Putnam rails against the Jews playing, Sturm draws him as a caricature, with his large mouth wide open in every panel, showing only four teeth. His hair stands up, and his ears are large. Sturm draws the character as almost half man, half gorilla; through this caricature, Sturm demonstrates that anti-Semitism is a subhuman characteristic.
Themes
A tribute to the dedicated but largely unrewarded barnstorming teams of the 1920’s and the talented Negro League teams that persevered through great hardships, The Golem’s Mighty Swing is notable for its treatment of racism and prejudice against both Jews and African Americans and for its consideration of spectacle in sports.
The Golem’s Mighty Swing is also concerned with Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. Strauss, an ethnic and cultural Jew, struggles with his identity as a Jewish baseball player. He loves the game and expresses happiness that he is not a sweatshop tailor like his father, yet he believes that he has betrayed his Jewish faith by playing baseball, particularly on the Sabbath. Similarly, the Jewish players wear beards to look like religious Jews; even the youngest, Mo, must wear a beard, but because he is only sixteen, his beard consists of shoe polish. The beards are a gimmick, as is Paige’s idea of Bell masquerading as a golem. This ploy can work because, according to the story, many of the fans in the Midwest had not seen a Jew before; for instance, Forest Grove resident Hetty Douglas does not care about baseball but attends the game so that she can see what Jews look like. Boys in Forest Grove throw rocks at Mo to knock off his cap so they can see the horns they believe grow on the heads of Jews. Through these characters and their actions, Sturm illustrates the anti-Semitic prejudice that was rampant in the Midwest at this time.
Because the Stars of David are a barnstorming team, all their games are away games; they are never the home team. This may be an allusion to the “wandering Jew,” a nomadic person who is never at home or at peace, or a reference to Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973), in which a Jewish baseball team spends all its time on the road.
Sturm also addresses the issue of spectacle. Although the act of the team members wearing beards seems fine on the surface, Sturm shows how spectacle can go too far, with the concept of the golem. Sturm employs this religious mysticism effectively when the concept of the golem incites the anti-Semitism in Putnam. A game that would ordinarily contain mean-spirited racial and ethnic epithets transforms, because of the spectacle, into a riot that might have caused someone to be killed if not for divine intervention (the torrential downpour). Sturm concludes with his objection to spectacle in the third and last section, in which Paige has successfully turned a pure sport into an unworthy sideshow, thereby debasing the game.
Impact
The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2001) brought a focus on baseball, Jewish culture, and historical fiction to the graphic novel. Artist Rich Tommaso claims that this novel influenced him a great deal when he prepared to collaborate with Sturm on their graphic novel about Satchel Paige, a record-setting African American pitcher who played for the Negro Leagues.
As the last part of a trilogy, The Golem’s Mighty Swing reflects elements of Sturm’s two preceding graphic novellas. All three works are about desperate times in American history, from 1801 (in The Revival) to 1886 (in Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight) to the 1920’s. The themes of the American pioneer spirit, thirst for money, racism, and dreams of success permeate all three works by Sturm, which were gathered into the 2007 collection James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems.
Further Reading
Gotto, Ray. Cotton Woods: The Comic Strip Adventures of a Baseball Natural (1991).
Stamaty, Mark Alan. Too Many Time Machines: Or, the Incredible Story of How I Went Back in Time, Met Babe Ruth, and Discovered the Secret of Home Run Hitting (1999).
Sturm, James. James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems (2007).
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (2007).
Bibliography
Arnold, Andrew D. “Out of the Ballpark.” Review of The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm. Time, August 17, 2001. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,171550,00.html
Badman, Derik A. “The Golem’s Mighty Swing.” Review of The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm. MadInkBeard, March 3, 2008. http://madinkbeard.com/archives/the-golems-mighty-swing
Goodman, George. “The Golem’s Mighty Swing.” Review of The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm. NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 13, no. 1 (Fall, 2004): 149-151.
Harde, Roxanne. “‘Give ‘Em Another Circumcision’: Jewish Masculinities in The Golem’s Mighty Swing.” In The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, edited by Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008.