‘The Ball Dreams of the Sky’

Even a non-sports person like me understands that there’s something different about baseball. To get all pompous for a second, something that reflects the human condition.

It’s not huge men in helmets banging into each other. (That’s football.) It’s not human bird-giraffes floating above the court in little clusters as droplets of sweat spin out from them. (That’s basketball.) It’s not men with big sticks and no teeth. (That’s hockey.)

Instead, it’s men you often see in close-up, because the game moves so slowly, their jaws forever moving. You see their emotions as they strike out. You see the tension in their bodies.

You learn about tribal identity and grudges and schisms. If your father was from Brooklyn, you grew up knowing that the Yankees were soulless mercenaries, but as much as you hated them, you hated the Dodgers more, because they were traitors. The Mets were your bumbling, adorable heroes. (And you knew this, deep in your soul, even if, like me, you didn’t care about baseball. This was beyond baseball.)

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You hear their names; they’re not as extraordinary now as they once were, but Marvelous Marv Throneberry? Really! And Kranepool and Koosman and Agee and Swoboda and Dykstra and Mookie Wilson? Pure poetry.

So if you get a pitch for a book of poetry, called “The Ball Dreams of the Sky,” and if the author, Henry Schipper, tells you that he’s Jewish, and that his father once (yes, for a short time, but still…) taught at Rutgers, well — here we are.

“The Ball Dreams of the Sky” is a kind of memoir; it records, or at least alludes to, Mr. Schipper’s life, in roughly chronological order. It’s deeply about baseball, but you needn’t know anything about baseball to read it. And parts of it are very funny.

We’ll get to them soon.

At the beginning, you learn that his parents, Rose and Lewis, both survived the Holocaust; no one else in their families did, except an uncle who’d escaped to Palestine. The first section of his book, “Early Innings,” is haunted by their ghosts, as well as by the excitement of the game, particularly in springtime. The two feelings play off each other.

Every survivor’s story is amazing; Rose’s and Lewis’s both are jaw-dropping. She was from Vienna, he was from Przemysl, near Lviv, in Poland now. They both made it out of eastern Europe, separately, and eventually got to Palestine, where eventually they met. “My mom had some very harrowing stories from before she got there,” Mr. Schipper said. “Everything was arranged for her to cross the border, and then she was betrayed, and arrested.” Which border? It’s hard to know. There were so many borders.

“They left Palestine in 1944,” he said. “They decided to go on foot. They were very upset by being so helpless in the midst of the war. So they decided to sign up for the nearest army.

“After a few days, maybe a week, they got arrested. I think it was in Syria. My dad was released in a matter of days, but my mom was held for a longer time.

Henry Schipper is on a baseball field in Los Angeles, where he lives. (All photos courtesy Henry Schipper)

“She was in a women’s prison, and she bonded with the people she met.” She was a writer; she wrote a novel about her experiences. It hasn’t been published yet, but Mr. Schipper and his sister, Jenny, plan to work on changing that.

What language was it in? “They spoke many languages,” Mr. Schipper said; German and Polish and Russian and English. “They were both full of languages.” The novel would have been written in one of them — he’s not sure which — and then later his mother translated it into English.

“My mom ended up being a professor of French and German literature,” he said. But that comes later. Much later.

Once Rose got out of prison in Syria, she and Lewis found their way back to Austria. The plan was for Rose to finish school and get her degree, but the community she’d so loved — “the socialists and social democrats and left-wingers had all folded during the war. Capitulated. And of course her entire family was gone. Everyone was dead.”

So the young couple went to Berlin, “and they were very caught up in my mom as a writer, but eventually they decided that it wasn’t really the future that they wanted.” So they came to America. How? “They managed to get here,” Mr. Schipper said. He wasn’t being evasive. He doesn’t know exactly how they managed it. “They were very poor,” he said. His sister was a baby when they got here, and his mother was pregnant with him.

“I was born in Virginia,” he continued. “Six months later we were in Detroit. My dad was looking for work, and he got a job working in a car factory. That was the best job available. They both worked full time, and they redid their educations from scratch, and they both got their Ph.D.s. By 1960, my dad was a professor of economics.”

That’s both very impressive and hard to live up to, Mr. Schipper said.

They didn’t talk much about the Holocaust, or their families, or Europe. “They didn’t really suppress it,” he said. “They just both made the decision to live forward as best they could, and not live in the excuse of what happened to them. They did that, I think, to protect my sister and me.

“But my mom would talk. She would have weekly salons of free spirits, and they would have riotous conversations. My mom was spellbinding with her stories. I found it hard to participate, though, and I pretty much avoided it.

“As a result I just carried it and had to figure out how it was going to work itself through my boyhood, because there was no getting around it. There was no pretending that I didn’t know that insane things had happened, and I had no idea how to deal with it.”

The family lived in northwest Detroit. “It was a pretty cool Jewish community,” Mr. Schipper said. “The school was about 70 percent Jewish. I loved it. But we weren’t part of the Jewish community in any formal way.”

His father’s father was a rabbi, and very poor, Mr. Schipper said. “They were the poorest people in town.” And that was very poor, because it was a poor town. “I went there once, in 1994, and there were still chickens walking everywhere in the street. “My father adored his father, but when he was 13, he was pulled into a socialist way of thinking, which was very common. He found it much more appealing. So although his love for his family was profound, he wasn’t going to practice religion. The more centered in his new perspective he was, the more complicated his sense of Jewishness became.”

Lewis and Rose Schipper in Europe, after the war.

Of course, no matter how complicated that sense of Jewishness was, he also went to Palestine, so there’s that.

For Henry, back in Detroit, there might have been religion — but there was baseball. “I didn’t have much Jewish education,” he said. “I did go to afterschool Hebrew school, but baseball was such a more powerful pull that almost every time I’d skip Hebrew school to play.

“One day, I didn’t go to Hebrew school, but I went to buy a bagel.” He was on his way to play ball. My father” — despite his reservations about Jewish practice “was teaching Hebrew at the Hebrew school — it’s just so complicated — and he was at the store. So we just looked at each other, and I thought that I was going to faint. But he burst out laughing, and he gave me a hug.” That was that for Hebrew school. “It probably wasn’t the best thing for me,” Mr. Schipper said. “I regret it. But it’s complicated.”

Mr. Schipper’s parents separated. Lewis moved to Pittsburgh, and Rose and the kids went to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where she taught.

He did have a bar mitzvah. “We brought in a rabbi from Minneapolis, who gave me a record and led me through it. I had a month to prepare. I did great. But it was like I never thought about doing anything about being Jewish, and then I had to have a bar mitzvah, and then I never had to think about it again.

“But I always was aware of being Jewish, partly because of the family history, partly because of the bigger history, but even more because of both of my parents’ intense sense of Jewishness. It was an intense pride, which I absorbed from birth and which is unshakable.”

Mr. Schipper moved to Eau Claire in 1965, when he was 12. He played softball and baseball throughout his time there, and he was good, as his poems, “which exaggerate it a little but only a little,” make clear.

In “Eleven,” one of his few prose poems, he writes about pitching in the all-star game that would have gotten them to the regionals; he pitched a no-hitter until the last inning, when he failed, the team lost, and he rode his bike home. “At home I said nothing; no one knew what an all-star game was,” he wrote.

Because it’s American to know about baseball. It’s European not to know or to care about it.

In Eau Claire, “my fence separated my backyard from a Little League baseball diamond,” he said. “When I climbed the fence, I was in. I was so close that the cherry tree that I referenced in a couple of poems and climbed so avidly during the spring and summer hovered over the fence. It was like I was part of both worlds.”

He played Little League in Detroit, and then Babe Ruth League in Eau Clair, and then high school ball. He was a pitcher, and he was good. “I pitched two consecutive no-hitters, and I struck out either 17 or 18 batters,” he said, with pride, all these years later.

After high school he went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, moved to Chicago, earned a master’s degree in English at the University of Chicago, dropped out of the Ph.D. program, and financed himself in part by working at Wrigley Field. “It was my childhood dream job,” he said. “I sold beer. I made a point to be done with the beer selling by the seventh inning, took a beer for myself, and found a spot directly behind home plate.”

Then he went to Boston, wrote for an independent newspaper, the Real Paper, which “morphed into the Phoenix,” then went to Los Angeles, where he’s had an impressive career as a filmmaker and documentarian. He continued to play softball for many years.

Why do Jews love baseball so much?

“There’s the obvious thing, that it’s the ticket to assimilation,” Mr. Schipper said. “I have to say that it really was how I experienced it. I thought that if I’m good at this, no one would say boo to me.” He was good at it. “It just gave me a confidence, a feeling that I really was of this place. But there always was a part of me that wasn’t, because my family wasn’t.

“They spoke with accents. They spoke magnificently. They mastered English. They were incredibly eloquent. But they had accents.”

“Children are vulnerable. So baseball was a way to get through it and feel that I was okay.”

Why do writers love baseball so much?

“It’s novelistic,” Mr. Schipper said. “Every game is at least a short story. Every single event changes the plot. There’s no other sport that has that. It’s not a nonstop sport, so that gives you time to marinate in the changing plot. And if you’re playing it, you’re creating the plot.”

Baseball, with its emphasis on analysis and statistics and history, with the constant debates over decisions and actions and trades and off-the-field drama and on-the-field drama and their intersections, with the “mental complexity of the game, for Jews who are raised parsing sentences and situations, baseball is the game.”

It is in fact, talmudic, isn’t it, Mr. Schipper? “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.”

That brings us to his poetry.

This is Mr. Schipper’s first book of poetry. “My project had been to use the vocabulary of baseball to express ordinary life,” he said. “I’d been thinking about it for a long time, and I got so much delight from exploring it.

“I’d played around with the thought of it for years, written little bits here and there, and then out of the blue, I suddenly, shockingly, had open-heart double-bypass surgery. I didn’t know if I would survive, and I didn’t know what I’d be like if I did survive. And one of the things that I really lamented when I was in the hospital before the surgery was that I’d never written the damn baseball book.

“I really wanted to do it, because my childhood connection to baseball is so deep.

“So it took me about six months to stabilize after surgery, and I started to work on the book. I made a commitment to it. I decided that I was going to do it, and to do it all the way through to the end, the best that I can.”

It was hard, he said, until he realized that he could experiment with form. Some of his poems are dialogues. Some are pure wordplay. Some are about relationships, with the bat, the glove, and the ball doing a lot of work. Some, particularly in the beginning, with the Holocaust hovering, and in the end, with aging becoming less avoidable, are more melancholy, although the last poem is not.

His original title for the book was “There’s No Holocaust in Baseball,” but he was dissuaded from that. For one thing, it’s not particularly marketable. For another, who would want to pick it up? For a third, it’s not representative.

What am I talking about? What are these poems like?

Try a few lines from “Criminal Tendencies”:

He rifled a shot down the line
but was robbed.

…

He stole and stole and never
got caught, except once
when they nailed him
at home with a dart…

Or from “Ball to bat”:

Can you ever
really know me,
do you want to,
will you try?

Or from “There’s no holocaust in baseball,” subtitled “May their memory be a blessing”:

Late inning, big game
in the dugout scrambling
to the rail, watching intently,
the family he never knew.

He thought they were rooting
against him. He misunderstood.
He thought they said suffer for us.
They said offer for us. He thought
they said, feel like crap
so that we’re not alone.
They said, feel the sun
whenever you feel alone.
The sun inside, the eternal sun.

And then there’s “Body and soul.” Here’s how it ends:

Both bat and glove dream of the ball;
the ball dreams of the sky.