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Available
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Publication
Drawn and Quarterly (2017), 112 pages
Description
James Sturm pens this richly evocative graphic novel set in the 1920s. The Stars of David, a barnstorming Jewish baseball team, travel from town to town earning a living by playing local squads. They all sport beards, a gimmick to attract patrons but when financial difficulties threaten to end their season they cast their lot with a Chicago promoter who has just seen the hugely successful German silent film Der Golem... With the golem, a baseball game is transformed into a mythical pageant. Fear and curiosity fills the stadium, but it also stokes the flames of anti-Semitism. Winning the game for the Stars of David becomes less important then surviving it. With a sepia-tinted cinematic style, this compelling book reminds us that making it home is at the heart of baseball.… (more)
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LibraryThing member stephmo
In this thin and sparsely drawn black and white graphic, it can be easy to question at first how so much praise as been heaped on what appears to simply be a nostalgic peek at traveling baseball teams of the 20s. With each frame, it simply becomes so much more. Religious philosophy, race relations,
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family, the love of baseball, politics and even the perils of bad marketing ideas are all covered with the deceptive ease of caching a pop-up fly. And with the same speed of the catch, the topic moves on - the only topic Sturm clearly ruminates on at length is the love of baseball. After all, none of these things would be worth enduring (the least of which are the long hours on the road) if those players didn't love playing the game during the summer of the Golem despite their hardships. Of course, how the Golem impacts even this is part of the story... Show Less
LibraryThing member bplteen
Review by: Ben
The Golem's Mighty Swing is an excellent book that tells the story of the Stars of David, a Jewish baseball team, during the great depression. An agent from an entertainment agency convinces the leader of the team to turn the team's powerful cleanup hitter into a mythical golem. The
The Golem's Mighty Swing is an excellent book that tells the story of the Stars of David, a Jewish baseball team, during the great depression. An agent from an entertainment agency convinces the leader of the team to turn the team's powerful cleanup hitter into a mythical golem. The
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visuals are great, as is the story. A great piece of historical fiction. (very succinct and stellar debriefing of the novel. Show Less
LibraryThing member MaowangVater
Narrated by Noah Strauss or as he calls himself “the Zion Lion,” manager and third baseman for the Stars of David minor league baseball club touring and playing other teams sometime in the early decades of the twentieth century. When the Stars of David, “The Bearded Wandering Wonders,” are
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hit with a perfect storm of economic woes, they turn to a promoter who proposes dressing their one African American player, Henry, or as he’s known on the field, “Hershl Bloom (member of the lost tribe),” into the costume of a golem to bring in the crowds and enrich the box office, and in turn the team. It’s a plan that has unanticipated results. Strum’s well-crafted and drawn story portrays American small town life with the unifying social mores of baseball and the divisive mores of antisemitism and racism. Show Less
LibraryThing member KurtWombat
THE GOLEM’S MIGHTY SWING snuck up on me. Despite being aware of some glowing reviews before my reading of the story, my expectations were subdued--I could not imagine that something so spare with its dialogue and relatively few frames for its hundred pages could wield such power. As I read though
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I began to feel the slights suffered by the almost all Jewish baseball team barnstorming 1920s America. Despite baseball’s laconic nature, the turns of fortune are usually sudden and thus hitting with all the more power. So it is for these characters. Race and religion should not impact the rules of baseball but they do. They should have no place on a ball field, but are carried onto it every time cleats cross the chalk lines. I felt the smooth wood of a bat and the rough hewn benches of the visitor’s dugout—Blacks and Jews are often still in the visitor’s dugout. Each character is indelible after just a few words so you have little choice but to feel what they feel. All of this sharpened the disappointment I felt at the conclusion. While I understood that realistically the final game couldn’t be completed, we are waiting for the finish of that game still, but ending the book so suddenly with an odd and detached “and many years later” little addendum left me flummoxed. I actually checked the binding of my copy to make sure there weren’t some pages missing. Aside from that unfortunate choice, still highly recommend this wonderful work. Show Less
LibraryThing member Smokler
Nice choice of setting and subject. Too much time on the minutaie of baseball. At 100 pages, feels a bit slight and incomplete.
ISBN
177046283X / 9781770462830