A baseball floats in an otherwise empty panel, its stitches clear as day. Bare and static, the image ought to be dull, unremarkable. Yet not so — for in its context, this baseball hurtles toward the eye, looming. What's more, that greater context turns this repeated image into a motif, a coded and meaningful sign. In a series of cool, suspended moments — a succession of quiet panels — this greater story enacts two games of baseball, especially the inside game between pitcher's mound and home plate. Signals are exchanged, pitches thrown, balls fly. It's tense and beautiful stuff.

The book in question is James Sturm's comics novella, The Golem's Mighty Swing, the third leg of a loose trilogy of historically-themed American fables. Said trilogy began in 1996 with Sturm's self-published comic book story The Revival — a masterful, almost Hawthorne-like tale about faith and zealotry on the Kentucky frontier. Sturm had already probed issues of faith, unexpectedly, in The Cereal Killings, an early-nineties comic book series that departed from its gimmicky premise (cartoon cereal mascots killed one by one) to end on a gravely metaphysical note. With The Revival, though, Sturm trumped all he had done before. He then announced that The Revival would the first in a trilogy (something to impose shape on a tentative career, one supposes), and set nose to grindstone to produce Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight (1998), a chronicle of a violence-wracked mining town. The labored Daylight had more scope but unfortunately less focus and less oomph than its predecessor. Batting third, The Golem's Mighty Swing (2001, republished in revised form in 2003) is the heftiest and most meticulously constructed of Sturm's fables — and in itself a fine, thought-provoking book.

Never mind the familiar notion of the trilogy; Golem is utterly distinct from its forerunners. Sturm just happens to be a cartoonist who enjoys hunkering down in the more obscure byways of American history (obscured, perhaps, by our willed forgetfulness). In comparison to Sturm's earlier efforts, Golem is larger in scale, subtler in tone, yet more ambitious in its targets: racism, religion, mythmaking, and the fashioning of American identity from older materials. Oh, and baseball.


Golem's historical setting is the early 1920s, well into the history of the national pastime — indeed a wildly romantic period for baseball, during which various oddly-appointed specialty teams crisscrossed the country, spicing up the game with theatrical costuming and shtick. These were to baseball what the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball (or, if you prefer, what Paul Revere and the Raiders are to rock'n'roll). Sturm gives some likely examples: the Hoboes, the Top Hats. But the focus of Golem is one particular ball club, the Stars of David, a barnstorming Jewish team on a starvation budget. The tale's narrator, Noah Strauss, is the Stars' manager and third baseman, a former Red Sock with gimpy knees and a brisk, laconic way of speaking.

Beggared by bad luck, the Stars are maneuvered into a bizarre scheme dreamed up by an unctuous publicity agent. The idea is that one of their number — ironically, a former Negro League player, now passed off as a "member of the lost tribe" — will further disguise himself as the Golem, "the Jewish mediaeval monster" of legend, to exploit the popularity of the so-named film. Here Sturm here dovetails two historical oddments: Der Golem, Paul Wegener's internationally popular film of 1920; and the practice of hiring black ballplayers to Jewish or "Israelite" clubs, most famously carried off by Satchel Paige, who donned a false beard to play with the House of David (actually a Christian Israelite team).


Thus Noah and the Stars of David hope to recover their losses, by playing up to the curious side of racism: the anxious fascination stoked by middle-American ignorance of Jewishness. And the idea works, for a while. How and why it finally falls apart is Golem's real subject.

As in the Prague legend, Sturm's "Golem" is essentially a creature brought to life by words — in this case a hail of publicity seeded by Victor Paige, the PR agent. Paige believes that everything about the Stars, including their Jewishness, is simply a "conceit" to draw in the rubes. So why not sweeten the package with more theatrics? As is, the Stars are no strangers to fakery: Mo Strauss, the manager's teenage brother, wears shoe polish to create the requisite beard (i.e., sign of Jewishness), and Negro veteran Henry Bell obligingly goes by "Hershl Bloom." Baseball, it seems, doesn't simply erase differences between Americans (though sometimes it can: at one point Mo talks baseball to win over a potentially violent crowd). Rather it provides a theater of difference, in which racial, regional and class antagonisms are heightened but also ritualized and mythologized. Those differences become intriguing to the same extent that they are threatening.

We see this process at work right away. In the book's opening scene, just before a game, a group of children peek over a fence and one asks eagerly, "Jews here yet?" Racist epithets are hurled as soon as the Stars arrive, but the crowd is clearly fascinated by the idea of Jews in their midst. Publicity-savvy Victor Paige works to stoke this fascination, thus to turn baseball into a spectacular ritual conflict between middle America and the (feared yet fascinating) Jew of legend.

As said, the idea works for a while — until it becomes a flashpoint for anti-Semitic violence. During a game against the Putnam All-Americans (of course), the Stars are viciously heckled and even attacked by the crowd, which has been whipped to a froth by racist rhetoric (both Paige's PR and an incendiary editorial in the town paper). A misaimed pitch from the Golem beans the town's ace hitter and hell breaks loose; the crowd floods the field and the game becomes a matter of life and death.

At one point the Putnam crowd chants Jews-go-home — but what, if not baseball or America, is the Stars' home? This is the book's nub: the complexity of American-ness, especially for those who must bear a hyphenated-American (i.e., ethnic) identity. Narrator Noah Strauss shoulders this theme: though he wears his Jewishness like a uniform, Noah rejects the claims that tradition makes on him, and rejects too his old-world father, who, Noah says, "will always be a greenhorn." In contrast, Noah is determined to be American, "and baseball is America." Yet his team succeeds only by virtue of being outsiders. Tellingly, it is his brother Mo's desperate prayer that signals the book's climax, recalling the two brothers to a common ancestry.

Sturm does not presume to resolve the questions the book raises about the mythology of race and the strain of assimilation. As ever, what he excels at is narrative ellipsis, insinuation, and the parsing of action into key moments. Favoring gridlike page layouts and spare, uncluttered drawings, he keeps things tight, economical and suggestive. Noah's narration is that way too: tough and terse. ("He's got some swift but no hop. Won't last three innings.") Best of all are the ball games, which claim over a third of the book's hundred pages and are broken down and drafted with particular care. Some of Sturm's best drawing is in these games: freeze-frames of energy, grace and violence.


As a novella The Golem's Mighty Swing is short but impacted — there's a lot trying to happen within it. Sturm works mightily to meld his historical and thematic interests into a hard nugget of story, and there are moments when readers may find themselves wishing for more unpacking of characters and context. At times Sturm-the-historian is hobbled by Sturm-the-fabulist, so that concision overrules depth. But the book, with its exacting rhythms and its grace notes of observation, works a wonder: in spite of some ugly truths, the world it conjures is deeply beguiling. When the Stars of David take the field, and when the Golem springs to life, the book shoots off sparks.