I am delighted to announce that the august New England Historical Genealogical Society (NEHGS), America’s founding genealogical society, established in 1845, recently honored me by commissioning me to author a book on the steps required to create a work of memoir or biographical cultural (oral) history. The book will use anecdotal material gleaned from the multiplicity of interviews and experiences I have had in writing my books on Brookline, baseball, and classical music, as well as from my two memoirs on my boyhood and adult years as reflected in experiences in and around long-gone Braves Field, and still-pulsating Fenway Park. I expect that the book will be completed within a year.

Good news! I am collaborating with audio/video producer Jillian Offerman and longtime radio personality Jordan Rich on a multimedia presentation adapted from American Jews and America’s Game. It's a half-hour montage of historical still and moving images, narrated by yours truly, and it should be ready in time for the 2019 baseball season. Synagogues and temples, Jewish Community Centers, and other organizations in the USA and abroad will find it suitable for all ages. The presentation illustrates American Jewish history as told through baseball, beginning in the nineteenth century when Lipman Pike appeared as the first Major League Jewish star and manager just after the Civil War, through the times of Barney Pelty, ‘The Yiddish Curver,’ Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, and continuing to the present day with Shawn Green and Alex Bregman.

I will be available for FaceTime or Skype Q & A sessions following each showing. For more information, please contact me at lawrut@msn.com.

Book Review

Schumann: The Faces and The Masks by Judith Chernaik

Book Review by Larry Ruttman

Publication Date: September 18, 2018. Publisher: Knopf

Can a book about famed 19th Century composer, Robert Schumann, enlighten the reader about the causes of the Holocaust which occurred almost one hundred years later, and lead some of them to conclude that man is capable of anything, that it could happen again and again, and that man, shackled by his nature, is fated to commit such acts forever. Not that the book is not enlightening about the music of this prolific, individual, and romantic composer and his virtuoso wife, pianist and composer, Clara Wieck Schumann, as discussed below. Strikingly, from original sources now available, Judith Chernaik demonstrates the exceedingly close and warm relationship musically and personally between almost exact contemporaries Robert Schumann and his idol, Felix Mendelssohn, who arrived at international stardom well prior to Schumann himself. Understanding this complex relationship is enlightening as to how the Holocaust could have come about in a personal and emotional way that the history books and documentaries cannot. While these two immortal composers collaborated, socialized, and wrote warmly and intimately to each other, dark and ominous secrets lay beneath. Felix came from a converted upper class German Jewish banking family of distinction. His grandfather was the famous Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. Felix looked at ordinary German society from a higher vantage point than Robert who sprung from that society which carried in it, almost as a birthright, its broad suspicion, envy, and even hatred of Jews and Jewish culture. This was evident in the secret diaries of Robert and Clara, unknown to Felix. But were Robert and Clara really anti-Semites, surrounded by, working and friends with a plethora of Jewish musicians like Mendelssohn himself, his composer and pianist sister, Fanny, famed violinist Joseph Joachim, and others like violinist Ferdinand David, pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles, conductor and composer Ferdinand Hiller, and poet, Heinrich Heine, whose poems inspired the poetry loving Schumann to musical composition?

Were Robert and Clara so indoctrinated with that belief that had they lived in the next century they would have joined Hitler's minions? Was Mendelssohn himself right or wrong as he approached death to bitterly disgorge himself of his friendship for Schumann without even telling him, believing him to have been the source of anti-Semitic comments about Felix published in the Leipzig newspapers? “Jews remain Jews,” as Robert Schumann wrote in his secret diary. Seen in this light it becomes clear that the Jews in Germany, converted or not, believing themselves to be German, never were Germans in the eyes of their countrymen, and that no matter how close their friendships with Germans became they were always secondary to anti-Jewish feelings if released.

We know that that release was provided by Adolf Hitler's rise to power and his forming a Reich which saw Robert Schumann as a musical hero and a dedicated anti-Semite, and Mendelssohn as a non-person. Nor did the manifold contributions by German Jews to German society in the arts and other fields alleviate anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it promoted deep envy. Do Jews in America labor under a similar cloud today? Might it be that had Robert and Clara been born later they might have joined Hitler as ‘willing executioners?’ Banish the thought! Could Robert Schumann, the creator of countless sublime compositions have taken such a role? Could Clara Schumann, a creator in her own right, and a superb pianist celebrated all over Europe for over fifty years, have acted similarly? How might we answer, reading what Robert confided to his diary?

“Let us not neglect ourselves too much. Jews remain Jews; first they take a seat ten times for themselves, then come the Christians. The stones we have helped gather for their Temple of Glory they occasionally throw at us...We must always work for ourselves.”

Robert shared this with Clara who, the author tells us, responded in kind, saying, “Perhaps we should not be as friendly to Mendelssohn as before.”

Yet Schumann wrote many unbuttoned warm words before and after that to and about Mendelssohn like, “Love and veneration are the feelings he always inspires.” Ms. Chernaik quite fairly lays out all the evidence for and against the level of virulence of Schumann’s plainly spoken anti-Semitism, but essentially lets him off the hook, a conclusion with which one can disagree for reasons both factual (his statement to his diary above sounds like a Nazi manifesto, and did so to the Nazis), and philosophically, as stated below.

Whatever may be the truth about the relationship of Robert and Clara Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn, these details demonstrate indelibly yet again a long held truth about human nature as opposed to the nature of all other living creatures: that any man is capable of practically any act good or evil at any given time in his life. It teaches that the Holocaust was inescapable given a leader who could and did ignite the fire, a fire which could be ignited again anywhere anytime given the right circumstances.

Does anything in this retelling negate the importance and artistic relevance of these three lives, especially that of the supremely gifted Robert Schumann, as detailed by the author. In no way! All people are an admixture. The world accounts each of them as both good and profoundly productive people, unlike their contemporary, Richard Wagner, generally thought to be an admixture of a very bad man with a supremely original genius. So goes life in all its contradictions for mankind for ever and ever!

There can be no doubt about the intensity, sincerity, and uninterrupted quality of the passionately physical and intellectual love affair between Robert and Clara Schumann, starting when Robert was an adult living as a student in the Wieck house when Clara was a child, but not consummated until their marriage several years later against the long, unreasoning, and cruel opposition of Clara's father, Friedrich Wieck, an early teacher and advocate of Schumann, who bitterly turned against him when Robert and Clara planned marriage. Wieck went so far as to enlist the aid of more courts than one to attempt to block a union which ultimately produced eight children in little over a decade of married life. It was a love affair to remember, as movie makers on both sides of the Atlantic depicted several times. The author reprints many letters exchanged between the two, perhaps more of them than are required, to bring home to the reader the love of each for the other through the early years of their friendship, the years they lived together, the years of Schumann's institutionalization following his suicide attempt plunging himself into the Rhine after leaving his house in a February rain dressed only in his dressing gown and slippers, and the many years after his death when Clara guarded his papers, compositions, and legacy, claiming and reclaiming for him his position now as perhaps the foremost composer of the mid-nineteenth Century Romantic explosion in music, even including Mendelssohn.

Ms. Chernaik's skills at carefully reading and analyzing the medical records left behind at Endenich, the mental hospital where Schumann was confined after his suicide attempt and loss of sanity, allow the reader to see Schumann’s mind and body dissolving by quoting his letters to Clara, recounting the observations of his visiting friends, Johannes Brahms (the last of several great musicians he championed) and violinist, Joseph Joachim, while trying desperately to reclaim his previous life. The account clearly answers the old question of what the cause of his death was: tertiary syphilis, contracted in his early years by the incautious indulgence of his powerful sexual drive with ladies of the night.

In this book the richness of detail about Robert Schumann’s fascinating and interesting personal and musical life whets one’s appetite to hear more of his very original and individual music beyond the often heard symphonies, concertos, certain familiar orchestral and chamber works, songs, and dramatic works. And how rewarding this is! How well Schumann’s music reflects his life at any given moment. How truly his music deserves the description, Romantic. How easily his gift for melody and feeling reaches the heart. It will be rewarding for one to listen closely for the first time to certain of the composers' songs, oratorios, religious, and other works such as his arresting late violin concerto, dismissed shockingly for many years until the 20th Century as the product of a diseased mind, and his fourth symphony written in 1841, revised substantially by Schumann in 1851, played sparingly in either form until recently, both of which are uniformly arresting.

It may be that Ms. Chernaik’s musically knowing and illuminating remarks about technical details in many of Schumann's compositions will baffle non-musicians, although reading them through offers any reader here and there insights to help make the master's idiosyncratic music come alive. In short, this is a book for both musicians and lay people about a composer who is highly regarded for sure, but who may deserve and attain even greater recognition and status moving forward.

This estimable book answers in detail questions about Schumann’s life and persona which before had only existed in outline for most music lovers: his many masks, created by him as doubles for himself, named for the impetuous Florestan and the sensitive Eusubius, and employed by him as the composers of his works or as the occasion required, behind which he hid his true self, as the author puts it, and which Schumann seemed to be able to put largely aside as his life went on, his fame spread, and his self-esteem grew; the many faces he presented to family, even Clara, friends, and acquaintances, shown most typically in selective and differing biographies he wrote from time to time, leaving his heartfelt music as the one close to accurate barometer of who Robert Schumann really was; his early love affairs; his contraction of syphilis; his deep sexuality, sprayed promiscuously in his youth, and shared lovingly with Clara as a loving husband; his fathering of an illegitimate child; his overuse of alcohol; his literary, critical, and writing interests and abilities; his founding of, editing, and writing for a musical journal widely read all over Europe; his liberal political views; his social clumsiness; his inability as a conductor; his struggles to get his music accepted; his legal struggles; his contacts and relationships with a dizzying array of great composers and instrumentalists such as Mendelssohn, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Joachim, Wagner, Clara herself, and many others; how Clara set aside her composing to advance Robert’s career as a composer; and the true facts of his descent into illness, institutionalization, and an early death. If the foregoing account sounds like a man you would want to know more about, then you should read this book!

Indeed, this fast moving and economically stated book is for music lovers and musicians both, balancing biography with musical analysis by the author, a musician herself, of many of Schumann’s works. It is recommended for its literary and musical qualities and its ability to open the mind to historical existential issues inherent in the study of the life of Robert Schumann.

My Fenway Park Memoir

I am delighted to announce that I have published a memoir, My Eighty-Two Year Love Affair with Fenway Park: From Teddy Ballgame to Mookie Betts. It will soon also be published in the baseball journal NINE, under the auspices of the University of Nebraska Press, part of the highly esteemed Project MUSE. Please visit my website to learn more and read the memoir free of charge.

I am grateful to Gordon Edes, team historian of the Boston Red Sox, for writing about it in Medium. In "A front-row seat on Sox history, from Ted to Mookie and everyone in between", he called it “an unmatched, and highly personal, view of what it meant to have a front-row seat on Fenway Park history.”

Update on "Jews on First"

Because of the untimely and regrettable passing of Boston philanthropist Teddy Cutler, plans for “Jews on First” have changed. It has been converted from a play to a documentary-style presentation combining montage with hundreds of fascinating images and music, narrative by myself, and audience participation led by the author through Skype-type technology, expressing American Jewish history back to the Depression era as told through baseball. In that form it will be disseminated to temples, Jewish Community Centers, Jewish organizations, and other entities around the country to elucidate that history for persons of all ages.

More Performances of "Jews on First"

Since its premiere in April 2016 at the American Jewish Historical Society, the musical Jews on First, adapted from my book, American Jews and America's Game, has been successfully presented at the New Surry Theatre in Blue Hill, Maine; Hebrew SeniorLife in Roslindale, Massachusetts; NewBridge on the Charles in Dedham, Massachusetts; Temple Shalom in Newton, Massachusetts; and at a gala party at the home of Boston philanthropist and arts patron, Teddy Cutler, supporter of arts at Emerson College, Boston. I'm happy to report that the play will be presented under Emerson's auspices in extended performance in the near future.

"Jews on First" World Premiere

An audience of two hundred cheered the world premiere of Jews on First, the musical based on my book, American Jews and America's Game, on April 11, 2016. The premiere took place at the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City. James Sullivan's article in the Boston Globe, "Unlikely Teammates in a Musical about Jewish Ballplayers," did a wonderful job of highlighting the collaboration between me, writers Larry Jay Tish and Lee Goodwin, and composer Erin Murray Quinlan that made the musical possible.

The Genre of Biographical Cultural History

People often describe my books as oral history. I did too until I became aware that what I was doing did not fall within that definition. I searched for a correct definition, and could not find one. After considerable thought, I decided to define my work as "biographical cultural history." You might ask, "What is the difference?" Oral history is generally presented dryly as only the verbatim answers of the interviewee to an invisible interviewer. Or, if visible, the interviewer is represented only by his question. In my books, I seek to transform the interview into a short biography related as a lively conversation between the subject and me. Thus, I'm not only visible, but shifting here and there, as required by the arc of the short biography I am writing, to the third person to interject comments or information to fill in the gaps, and thus project the interview not only as a lively conversation, but as the story, in essence, of a person's life, and with his or her observations and opinions, especially within the field of their interest. I believe this to be a new genre which I have sought to define below in a more academic manner:

"Biographical cultural history" appears to be a new book genre, applicable to a multiplicity of topics. In-depth personal and topical interviews of a group of individuals chosen for their prominence in a certain cultural historical field are fashioned by the author into short biographies to reveal the essence of their lives per se and their pertinence to the topic. All are then organized and integrated to create the penultimate "biographical cultural history." In each biography the author interweaves his questions and relevant verbatim extracts of the interviewee's words into a living first person present tense conversation, with the author's third person opening and closing commentary, interstitial observations and remarks, relevant biographical, historical, cultural information, and informative illustrations. An eminent historian, cultural expert, and/or the author then may write an interpretative essay for inclusion in the book to assess the social and cultural impact of the information developed in the biographies on the present and future.

Red Sox Poet Laureate Reading

I had a great evening with George Mitrovich, founder of the Great Fenway Park Writers Series; Harry Sherr, local sports contract advisor; and Boston Red Sox entertainment and PR guru Charles Steinberg at a Writers Series event on July 15, 2015. Red Sox Poet Laureate, Dick Flavin, colorfully read from his new book, Red Sox Rhymes: Verses and Curses at the recently dedicated Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston.

"American Jews and America's Game" to Become a Play with Music

Good news! A play tentatively titled Swing! Shmendrik! Swing! is being adapted from American Jews and America’s Game for a first reading in the fall of 2015, most likely at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, under the auspices of the American Jewish Historical Society. Well-known playwrights Larry Jay Tish (famous for his Black-Jew Dialogues) and Lee Goodwin are writing the play with music by Erin Murray Quinlan, who recently wrote the musical play Hemingway's Wife, presented in a successful run in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Tish, Goodwin, and I are producing the play which, at least at first, will be accommodated in small theaters, temples, Limmuds, and Jewish community centers across the United States, and beyond.

Archives Preserve Materials from "American Jews and America's Game"

I am pleased that seven national, local, baseball, and Jewish historical institutions have chosen to include material from American Jews and America”s Game in their archives, including the sixty-three hours of interviews recorded in Israel and across America over a more than three year period; transcripts drawn from those interviews; and the close to eighty illustrations included in the book, with all captions and credits. These institutions are:

• Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
• Internet Archive, San Francisco, California
• Digital Public Library of America, Boston, Massachusetts
• Digital Commonwealth, Newton, Massachusetts
• National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, New York
• American Jewish Historical Society, New York, New York
• American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio

Baseball Fans Hit It Out Of The Shul

Sunday morning, 350 guests attended Skirball’s baseball round-up tying Jewish American legacies to our national sport. Larry Ruttman moderated a lively conversation between baseball fans and ex-players including Ira Berkow, Alan Dershowitz, Donald Fehr and Art Shamsky. Hearing insider stories for the first time made the event a home run.

Bud Selig’s "Hope and Faith" in His Last Great Goal Rewarded on Jupiter's Field of Dreams

Published in NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, Volume 22, Number 1, Fall 2013. Copyright © 2014 by the University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.

What do the following seemingly disparate folks have in common: Major League Baseball commissioner Allan “Bud” Selig from Milwaukee, Wisconsin; 1909 Nobel Peace Prize winner Paul-Henri-Benjamin Baluet d’Estournelles baron de Constant de Rebecque (November 22, 1852&endash;May 15, 1924) of France; SoHo wine bar manager Shlomo Lipetz of New York by way of Tel Aviv, Israel; Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame manager and player Yoshio Yoshida; Team Spain’s 2013 World Baseball Classic (WBC) manager Mauro Mazzotti from Italy; Nate Freiman, Team Israel’s 2013 WBC home run slugger from Phoenix, Arizona, by way of Wellesley, Massachusetts; native black Sotho tribe member and minor-league South African shortstop Gift Ngoepe; and secretary general of the French Federation of Baseball and Softball Jean-Christophe Tiné?

They love baseball, whether it is played on fields in America, France, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Israel, Japan, the Dominican, Cuba, or anywhere else on earth.

The field of dreams for the WBC qualifying round among France, South Africa, Spain, and Israel was comely Roger Dean Stadium in luxurious Jupiter, Florida, where green abounds, not only in the pockets of its well-known residents, but on the many golf courses rolling across the landscape. So when players from nine countries took the diamond on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, hopes were high in and behind the dugouts.

…

MLB Commissioner Bud Selig was onto something a decade or so ago when he decided to put the strength of his office behind the WBC and the internationalization of baseball. Always a proponent of “hope and faith,” Selig hoped that the teams from many lands would put on a good show, get along, and grow the game he loves, and he had the faith to commit to that idea. If this week of WBC qualifiers has evidentiary value, Selig’s faith was rewarded.

[As the games unfolded, the author interviewed players, managers, and coaches from all four teams from France, Spain, South Africa, and Israel, whose words are recounted in this article.]

[The general manager of the French entry, former player Jean-Christophe Tiné, supplied fascinating information about the long history of baseball in France, including the effective coaching of French teams by former Japanese star Yoshio Yoshida, who came for a holiday, and stayed for years; a French Nobel Peace Prize winner who found in baseball a source for world peace; and the status of the game’s development in France and Europe today.]

[Mauro Mazzotti, the weathered and charismatic winning manager from Team Spain, and a former Seattle Mariners scout, told of his early days in the high quality Italian baseball leagues, and why most national teams pull out all the stops to win in the World Baseball Classic, taking advantage of the loose eligibility rules.]

[Interviewing official Mike Randall, black shortstop Gift Ngoepe, and white pitcher Dylan Unsworth, all from Team South Africa, afforded valuable insights into the state of baseball and race relations in that still troubled country.]

[Newly appointed Detroit Tigers manager, Brad Ausmus, managed Team Israel in these games. Ausmus was interviewed along with Peter Kurz, their general manager, who emigrated from New York to Israel some years ago; pitcher and native Israeli Shlomo Lipetz; trainer and New Yorker Dan Rootenberg; 1969 Miracle Mets star Art Shamsky; and Adam Greenberg, famous for being beaned on the first MLB pitch he saw, and years later striking out on his only other big league at-bat.]

That Sunday night [after the exciting deciding game], there was happiness in Team Spain’s clubhouse, sadness and disappointment in Israel’s [despite the heroic slugging of giant Nate Freiman, then a minor leaguer, now a mainstay in an Oakland Athletics uniform]. But the tensions of the five-day competition did not spark any ill feeling. The spirit of goodwill and fellowship that marked the week held. Maybe everyone didn’t go home as happy as they might have been, but everyone from South Africa, France, Spain, Israel, and wherever else, went home feeling something good had transpired.

Bud Selig’s “hope and faith” that baseball would continue its peaceful march around the globe was rewarded yet again.

"American Jews and America's Game" Chosen for Library of Congress Talking Book Program

I am proud to report that American Jews and America’s Game has been selected for the Library of Congress Talking Book Program. The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) is producing an audio version in the Library of Congress talking book format, which can be played on the special player loaned by talking book libraries around the country to registered patrons.

"American Jews and America's Game" Named Book of the Year Finalist

Today, American Jews and America’s Game was named a finalist in the sports category of the ForeWord Review’s 2013 Book of the Year Awards. Take a look at the list of all 2013 sports finalists, and you'll see that my book is in excellent company!

Craig Breslow Honored

Today, Craig Breslow, one of the athletes featured in American Jews and America’s Game, received the Distinguished Service Award from the Brotherhood of Congregation Mishkan Tefila in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. I was pleased to be quoted in “Sox Pitcher Breslow Is Living His Dream,” an article in the January 17, 2014 issue of The Jewish Advocate, which also featured quotations from the book.

"American Jews and America's Game" Named #1 Baseball Book of 2013!

What an honor! Sports Collectors Digest has named American Jews and America’s Game the Number One Baseball Book of 2013! Read the full article by Dan Schlossberg.

Success for Brad Ausmus

Today was our 50th wedding anniversary, and my wife Lois and I were made even happier when our friend and Cape Cod neighbor, Brad Ausmus, was named the new manager of the Detroit Tigers. CBS Detroit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Jewish Daily Forward all excerpted sections of my story on Brad, an eighteen year star MLB player, from American Jews and America’s Game.

Selig Meeting with Ruttman at World Series

Photo courtesy of Major League Baseball.

On October 24, 2013, Larry Ruttman presented the ‘first copy’ of American Jews and America’s Game to the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Allan H. “Bud” Selig, at Fenway Park just prior to the second game of the 2013 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals. Selig wrote the Foreword for the book.

"American Jews and America's Game" Audiobook Released

Today, October 8, 2013, Audible released an unabridged audio edition of American Jews and America's Game. Actor and frequent audiobook performer Richard M. Davidson is the narrator. “There aren’t many 24-hour audios of 550-page nonfiction books made with star narrators!” Order the audio edition from Amazon.com.