When I was a boy growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the early 1960s, I wanted more than anything to be Luis Aparicio, the slick-fielding, jack-rabbit fast Venezuelan shortstop for Bill Veeck’s go-go White Sox. I wore my hat like his. I tried to pick up grounders with his smooth motion. And it goes without saying that I wore No. 11, Luis’ number, when I trotted out onto the field to play–what else?–shortstop.
Adoration of sports heroes dates to the ancient Greeks, but in “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg,” a new documentary about the powerful Detroit Tigers slugger of the 1930s and 1940s, the assorted senators, lawyers, actors and even sportswriters who speak of “Hammerin’ Hank” with childlike awe are referring to a lot more than just his powerful swing and keen ability with a glove. Equally important is the fact that by being the first Jewish star in professional baseball, Greenberg brought down all sorts of barriers for immigrant Jews that had nothing to do with sports.
“The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg,” which opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre and the Wilmette Theatre the following week, is written, directed and produced by Aviva Kempner, a straight-talking, no-nonsense documentarian who spent 13 years getting this project completed, which qualifies it, under anyone’s definition, as a bona fide labor of love.
But her story is even more remarkable when you consider she made a movie about a man she was too young to have ever seen play.
“I am a Jewish immigrant,” said Kempner, who recently was in Chicago to preview her documentary at a local synagogue, where she hoped to raise enough money to pay off some lingering debts from the film. “I came here from Germany when I was 4. My mother was a Polish camp survivor who passed as a non-Jew, a Catholic. She was liberated and brought to Berlin, where my father was part of the military government. That’s where they met.
“Once we arrived in this country, we moved to Detroit, where my father became a great lover of baseball. Like a lot of immigrants, it was one way he became an American. He would take us to games in the 1960s, where we soon learned that part of being Jewish in Detroit was to recall the career of Hank Greenberg. My father would talk about him with a lot of pride, especially when recalling the famous story of how Greenberg refused to play on Yom Kippur.”
When Kempner became a filmmaker, she made “Partisans of Vilna,” about the Jewish resistance against the Nazis.
“While making that film, I kept running into the question of why American Jews during the 1930s and 1940s weren’t doing more for their European brethren. Then someone said to me, `Well, you know, they faced a lot of domestic antisemitism themselves.’
The kind of antisemitism, I soon discovered, that Hank Greenberg faced every time he walked out onto the field.” The film is thick with ugly incidents of name-calling, including some particularly vicious hate-spewing in Wrigley Field during the World Series.
“Once `Partisans of Vilna’ was finished,” Kempner said, “I was getting dressed to go to a benefit when I heard that Hank Greenberg had died, and I just knew that this had to be my next film.
“What I didn’t know was that it would take me 13 years. It would have taken only three if I’d had all the money I needed. But I had to stop and start 100 times.”
Greenberg’s career was the stuff of legend. He played almost his entire career for the Tigers, where he amassed a .313 lifetime batting average, 331 home runs and 1,276 RBIs. (He would have had more but missed the seasons between 1941 and 1944 because of service in the Army, the first major star to enlist.) He was a two-time MVP, falling just one RBI short of Lou Gehrig’s record of 184 in 1937 and two homers short of Babe Ruth’s record in 1938. He was a World Series hero and a Hall of Fame inductee who finished his baseball career as general manager of the Cleveland Indians from 1948 through 1957 and vice president of the ChicagoWhite Sox from 1959 to 1963.
One of the most jarring things about this documentary is discovering that there was very little negative to say about this soft-spoken, old-fashioned hero, who died of cancer in 1986.
“Frankly, I think the use of the phrase `the life and times of . . .’ is overused, but it fit here, because Hank’s story was so much about what was happening at the time,” Kempner said. “I think the reason he deserves to be called a hero is that at the time of the greatest domestic antisemitism, coinciding with the rise of Hitler in Germany, he faced hatred every day.
“People say to me, `What did you learn about him?’ I learned a lot, I tell them, but most of all, I learned that he led a clean life. Ultimately, he wound up to be a real mensch.”
