Big League Dreams

The captivating new novel by the author of Small Worlds chronicles the loves and unbounded dreams of the villagers from Krimsk, now thriving in America.

In St. Louis, it is the summer of 1920 and the day is the Sabbath, but there is little rest for the Jews from Krimsk and less reverence for the wondrous Krimsker Rebbe, who led them to the New World seventeen years before. The rebbe's former hasidim have embraced America to discover that the vision of "gold in the streets" evokes larceny in the heart. Matti Sternweiss, the ungainly, studious child wonder in Krimsk, now the cerebral catcher for the St. Louis Browns, is scheming to fix Saturday's game against the pennant-contending Detroit Tigers.

It is an American Sabbath: Prohibition, bookies, the criminal syndicate, the Hiberian fellowship of the police brass, hometown blondes, a bootlegging rabbi, and big league baseball. It is also Krimsk in America: Boruch Levi, the successful junkman, confiscates his zany, crippled brother-in-law Barasch's sizable bets. Barasch's lusty wife, Malka, has her own connubial reasons for wanting to stop the gambling. To preserve the purity of the national pastime, the chief of police fatefully inspires his loyal disciple, Boruch Levi, to bring Matti before the Krimsker Rebbe on the Sabbath.

Recluse and wonder-worker, messianist and pragmatist, the Krimsker Rebbe navigates the muddy Mississippi River, haunted by a recurring prophetic vision of Pharaoh's blood red Nile. In the final, decisive innings with Matti crouched behind home plate, it will come down to Ty Cobb versus the kabbalah.

Richly imagined, populated with robust, complex characters, Big League Dreams is a profoundlyoriginal, inspiring, and comic creation. It is the second volume in the series Small Worlds, which follows the people of Krimsk and their descendants in America, Russia, Poland, and Israel. In each volume Allen Hoffman draws on his deep knowledge of Jewish religion and history to evoke the finite yet infinite "small worlds" his characters inhabit.

Other Details: 296 pages 5 1/4 x 5 1/4" Published 1997

put on his jacket and tell the rebbe that they could get started. They had a long journey and wanted to arrive well before sunset, when the Sabbath would begin.

"First-rate fiction: reminiscent . . . of such precursors as Sholem Aleichem, but possessed of distinctive individual strengths and firmly rooted in its characters' strange new land and even stranger adventures." --Kirkus Reviews

"Hoffman fashions a haunting, bittersweet story of exile, dislocation and redemption in the Promised Land...Robust humor, insight into human nature and an absence of sentimentality augment Hoffman's storytelling skills." --Publishers Weekly starred review

Author Biography: Allen Hoffman, award-winning author of the novel Small Worlds and of a novella and short stories, was born in St. Louis and received his B.A. in American history from Harvard University. He studied the Talmud in yeshivas in New York and Jerusalem, and has taught in New York City schools. He and his wife and four children live in Jerusalem. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Bar-Ilan University.