By Alex Rosenblum / BJV Bronfin Correspondent
I am thrilled. NBC Sports - The 2024 Summer Olympics. An alternative to CNN and Fox News! Embedded deep in my lounge chair, I am spending countless hours gazing at gymnasts, runners, jumpers, swimmers, shooters, and others engaging in activities unknown to me and my forefathers. With yet another glass of single malt in hand, my mind begins to wander. Am I an athlete? With a bit of training and determination, could I have become an Olympian?
I’m 74 years old, which in my mind means I’m good for pickleball and golf. I have owned a golf set for about 40 years, but after some occasional frustrating ventures onto golf courses over the decades, I use my driver and putter as potential defensive weapons deposited under my bed in Richmond. (Ah Mr. Twain; you are so correct: “Golf is a good walk, spoiled”.) Even my nephew Nick, a golf pro at a fancy-shmancy retirement community with its own golf course down in Boca Raton, can’t get me out onto the links.
I was never particularly strong or agile, but I always loved active sports. As kid, a child of Holocaust survivors growing up in Montreal, I was more excited to play street hockey than to conjugate verbs in Yiddish or interpreting into Yiddish Hebrew passages in the Tanakh. But in Montreal, even our Yiddish-oriented day school had a hockey team that competed outdoors against other Jewish schools in the dead of winter in hastily-assembled ice rinks in our parks.
I still tell stories to my family and friends about our hockey team with its four-game schedule against the three other Jewish days school in my part of Montreal. I was the Y. L. Peretz Shule’s scoring leader, having scored one goal against the more religious Montreal Talmud Torah. If pressed for more information, I had to concede that even those guys with the peyes beat my Yiddishist team. I did invite my father, Yidl Moishe, to the hockey games, but my father – who was preoccupied with earning a living, securing monthly rent, and paying tuition for his three sons – declined. Hockey, he said, “s’iz nisht for Yidn!” (it’s not for Jews!).
My father made the same proclamation when we took him to watch my brother play Little League baseball and later football. And when one of my brothers let slip that the two of them had gone skydiving somewhere in upstate New York, my father could only add to his standard declaration, “bist meshugeh!” (you’re crazy!)
Having decided that voluntarily throwing oneself out of an airplane at several thousand feet was, in fact, not a Jewish thing – such activity having never been addressed in the Tanakh or Talmud, or discussed in Mishneh and by the rabbis – I agreed with my father, and smirked at my brothers when my father covered his eyes and shook his head.
On the other hand, I received the full “bist meshugeh, s’iz nisht for Yidn” declaration from my father when my wife told him that she had bought me flying lessons for my 50th birthday, and that I was regularly learning to fly out of the Pittsfield airport. My only rather weak response was whispering to my wife that her status as occasional favorite daughter-in-law had been severely damaged no matter how much my father loved her cholent. One brother pointed out that at least, in the event of any emergency, they had experience is exiting an airplane at high altitude.
When we took up skiing at Bousquet Mountain, my father added in his broken English to his worn but expected declaration of “bist meshugeh, s’iz nisht far Yidn”: “What’s the khokhmeh (wisdom) in throwing yourself down a mountain with wood tied to your feet?” Frankly, by this time Dad had given up on us, and his concern lay for the grandchildren.
My brothers and I always nodded gravely and respectfully at his admonitions, but laughed outside his presence. As teenagers we had heard stories about him from his few friends from his hometown in Poland who had also survived the Holocaust. Before the invasion of Nazi Germany into western Poland, before the ghetto, before the death of his little son from typhus in the ghetto, before the death of his first wife in Treblinka, before surviving Auschwitz and a forced march into Germany, before remarriage and three sons and coming to America, my father, Yidl Moishe Rosenblum, had been a minor celebrity in his town in Poland. As a teenager, my father was a leader in Beitar, a right-wing Zionist organization. He was a proficient soccer player AND he was the town champion boxer in the flyweight division. When angry, we were told, Jews and Gentiles stayed clear of him. My brothers and I kibitzed that perhaps we should give up hockey, and football and baseball, and take up boxing, because surely boxing and punching each other in the face was okay for Jews.
As for my hockey, I did barely make the hockey team at City College of New York. However, I had an understanding with my hockey coach (who once informed me that I had deceptive speed – I was slower than I looked) that I would be given a shift on the ice when CCNY was either ahead or behind by five goals in the third period. I almost shamefully admit that I often looked forward to a lopsided score against my own team so I could skate for a few moments during a game.
After college, I played in a senior hockey league for five years until a heart attack forced me to hang up my skates at the age of 42. My tennis game changed from singles to doubles. And I gave up my flying just before soloing, because some Federal Aeronautics Administration bureaucrat actually looked at my application, which included my medical records. It seems that he had noticed that, besides my previously having had a heart attack, I had “color discernation deficiency.” Simply put, I could have trouble discerning whether landing lights are on or off, not an issue at the small airport where I was learning, but quite dangerous at many airports.
A few years ago, I had some additional medical heart issues, and my cardiologist suggested I give up tennis altogether, and also sell my skis. I was left only with my collection of single malt scotches, a passion counterproductive to exercise and one that – until the recent explosion of “kiddush clubs” in synagogues – would have fallen into my father’s category of “s’iz nisht far Yidn.”
Then, last summer, at the hoped-for tail end of the Covid epidemic, I was standing on the back of the semi-enclosed rear deck of the Lenox Community Center, where the town of Lenox graciously allowed Chabad of the Berkshires to daven on Saturday in the summer. Rather than putting on my frayed N95 face mask, I edged my way to the sparsely-attended rear of the deck. Suddenly, I heard a clicking sounds not dissimilar from the smacking of paddles on ping pong balls. Down the hill and partially blocked by a line of trees was a small crowd of people on smaller versions of tennis courts. I had seen those courts the previous winter in Florida, but still smarting from my cardiologist’s veto of any involvement with tennis, I had refused to partake in this new upstart sport. But seeing and hearing the cheers and laughter of the crowd, I quietly made my way over to the courts. A female instructor was holding a plastic paddle similar to an oversized ping-pong paddle and hitting a yellowish wiffle ball over a net to the learners, a majority of whom no doubt qualified for AARP membership. The atmosphere was loose and relaxed, even with the more experienced group already playing competitively on the last court. “I could do that!”, I said to myself and vowed to return to the next scheduled public lesson.
I did and I was hooked! I bought a pickleball paddle and joined the other senior citizens in Lenox and in Florida in the winter who fought ageing by taking up this new sport.
And now as I wait for my new left hip to heal and watch the closing of the Olympics in Paris, I have made yet another life-changing decision. I will not sell my pickleball paddles on ebay. I will take my golf club from under my bed, replace it with a whistle and a can of mace, and finally take that long walk to the first tee on a golf course.
I sipped my glass of scotch and rejoiced in the camaraderie among the athletes of the world, including Jewish athletes from America, Australia, AND Israel. I paused and, finishing my drink, I wondered if I could have been an Olympian if only I were a half-foot taller, more muscular, and more disciplined and dedicated.
Who knows? Anyways, Winter Olympics in two years, including hockey and skiing. Two of my favorite sports, if only…
Alex Ziske Rosenblum is an attorney and the Berkshire Jewish Voice’s bronfin (whisky) correspondent, whose last article for this paper was about his father and a little piece of bread. The photo shows Alex, in his hockey playing youth, skating toward the bench.