Nine Great Jewish Baseball Books for Kids (And Only One is About Sandy Koufax!)
Every day this week—Major League Baseball’s opening stretch—we will feature one story on The Scroll about baseball. Today we offer a roundup of nine terrific baseball books for all kinds of young readers. They’re in no particular order, so you could argue that they’re all worthy of batting clean-up.
1) Four years after I first reviewed it, I continue to love The Brooklyn Nine: A Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gratz, a collection of linked short stories about the history of baseball in America (or maybe it’s the history of America, via baseball). It’s a tale of change and continuity, told through multiple generations of one Brooklyn family. We first meet Felix Schneider, a 10-year-old German immigrant who roots for the New York Knickerbockers. Then we get to know his descendants, including Walter Snider, batboy for the New York Superbas who tries to combat Major League racism in 1908; Frankie Snider, a gal math whiz who in 1926 teams up with a fellow Brooklyn Robins fan to con a con artist; Kat Flint, star of the All-American Girls Baseball League in 1945; and Jimmy Flint, who’s trying to cope with Cold War anxiety and with the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn in 1957. Every chapter could be a whole novel, but the book never feels overstuffed. (Get it for kids in Grades 5-9.)