The death of Brooklyn Dodger great Carl Erskine closes a chapter in Jewish history

• Published date: 18 April 2024
• Author: ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL/JTA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Before the first pitch, the Mets had a moment of silence for the pitcher Carl Erskine, who died that day at age 97. Erskine was a star of the storied Brooklyn Dodgers teams of the late 1940s and '50s, when they won the National League pennant five times and the 1955 World Series

Erskine was also the last surviving Dodger to have been profiled in Roger Kahn's classic 1972 book "The Boys of Summer," a celebration of a team that included Jackie Robinson — the first player to break the major leagues' shameful color line — and future Hall of Famers Roy Campanella, Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese. (Sandy Koufax was a rookie on the 1955 team, but only came into his own after the team moved to Los Angeles in 1957.)

Erskine's death seemed to close a storied chapter in New York and, dare I say it, Jewish history. The Dodgers ruled the National League when the Jews ruled — or at least left an indelible cultural stamp on — Brooklyn. In 1950, one out of four Brooklynites — 561,000 — was Jewish. And often the fate of the team — scrappy strivers who rose from adversity — seemed to mirror the fate of the Jews themselves.

"Arguably, no baseball team ever forged a closer relationship with Jewish fans than did the Dodgers during their Brooklyn years," Bill Simon, co-editor of "The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture," wrote in 2022. "In other New York City boroughs, the Yankees and Giants had their Jewish adherents, as did Major League Baseball teams in other cities, but in Brooklyn the Dodgers drilled deep into the social fabric."

Kahn captures that connection in his book, which includes his own memories of growing up Jewish in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza section, the son of two teachers. Even mediocre Dodgers teams provided a distraction from conversations about "the Nazi-Soviet treaty, nervousness about the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and horror at Hitler's pogroms."

Philip Roth celebrated the team in "Portnoy's Complaint," when his Jewish protagonist fantasizes about playing center field for the Dodgers, "standing without a care in the world in the sunshine, like my king of kings, the Lord my God, The Duke Himself (Snider, Doctor, the name may come up again), standing there as loose and as easy, as happy as I will ever be, just waiting by myself under a high fly ball…"

Kahn describes an era in Brooklyn that began after World War II, when what had been a "heterogenous, dominantly middle-class community, with remarkable schools, good libraries...