BOOK REVIEW: How Donating a Kidney Fixed my Jump Shot
by Jim Sollisch

 
You know Jim Sollisch. Or somebody like him. He’s that “gray-haired, middle-aged man in jeans and tennis shoes” (his words), hanging around Cleveland Heights. “If you ran into me on the street,” he noted, “you might guess that I was father or a husband. You might think I was Democrat or the owner of a foreign car.”

Sollisch, 67, has just published a collection of his personal essays, How Donating a Kidney Fixed my Jump Shot. How’s that for a catchy title? Sollisch is a copywriter at the Marcus Thomas ad agency and has written two Super Bowl commercials. Who else in Cleveland can say that? His side hustle is publishing op-eds in newspapers like the Plain Dealer, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He has had hundreds of essays published the past several decades. He had an op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about colonoscopies. [Link at end of this post.] For a while, in the 1990s, he read his essays aloud on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”

Sollisch is well-rounded. He is feminine, marvelous and tough (to steal a phrase from poet Ted Berrigan).

Jim Sollisch

The feminine Sollisch . . . In high school, he badgered the administration at Cleveland Heights High into letting him take home economics instead of shop (1972). He likes to cook. He writes that he goes to various grocery stores up to four times a day to shop for fresh food. “And I was the only guy in my dorm [at Kent State] of 400 guys who ever used the kitchen. I became as powerful as the inmate with cigarettes.”

At 13 he wrote such poignant bar mitzvah thank-you notes that his recipients wrote Sollisch back, thanking him for his thank-you notes. His mother saved the notes. Nice.

The marvelous Sollisch. He donated a kidney to a co-worker. Who does that? A co-worker, not a relative. After giving up the kidney, the doctor told Sollisch he couldn’t take ibuprofen ever again, which he had regularly used to mask a sore hip. The hip — now unmedicated — started hurting so badly he got a new hip, and that improved his jump shot.

The tough Sollisch. He was scheduled to start at quarterback at Heights High his senior year, but at the last minute decided against it because he was only 5-8 and might get squashed. He stuck with basketball. He played basketball into his 60s.

The most interesting part, though, is Sollisch is a major-league kvetcher. He writes: “I hate bike riding . . ,  I hate summer camp . . . I hate fall, and there’s a fall phrase I detest: sweater weather.” Also, he doesn’t like bucket lists: “It’s not that I don’t like new experiences, I just like routine more. I like knowing where I’m going to have my coffee in the morning. I like not letting the grass grow too long.”

There you have it; Sollisch enjoys cutting his grass. He is the opposite of a down-and-out bohemian. Sollisch writes, “I was born here in Cleveland and grew up here, because that’s where my family lives. I own a home, I have a good job, plenty of friends [including me, writing this], and every Thanksgiving I play in the annual Turkey Bowl game on the football field I played on in junior high.” (One of Sollisch’s Turkey Bowl teammates was Steve Presser of Big Fun fame. Small world — the Heights.)

Sollisch’s essays have appeared in publications from Anchorage, Alaska, to Japan, and yet he’s Full Cleveland. He sticks to the unglamorous, to the quotidian. He writes, “I don’t live large. I get most of my clothes at thrift stores. My cat is 9 years old. I don’t dine at pricey restaurants. But I’ll tell you one extravagance I’m not willing to give up: yawning. I like to get up in the morning and yawn, really stretch my arms.”

Sollisch doesn’t write much about his advertising job, but I bet he could make that interesting. Maybe he’s waiting until he retires. Sollisch ponders what might have happened if he hadn’t gone into the ad biz. “I wonder what I might have written, what ideas I might not have censored, what risky paths I might have taken.” In other words, what if Sollisch had gone full-bore literary? Would he have deserted us for  a cabin in Maine? Doubt it. He would have been an adjunct prof at John Carroll, I think.

Sollisch’s book is a 166-page collection of concise, well-written essays about a Heights man who likes to cook and hang out with his wife, children and grandchildren, and who hates certain things. He’s writing about life. Make that “life in the Heights” — although there is one essay about North Carolina, which he didn’t like.

If you want to know what your neighbor is up to, read this book.

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Here’s a link (no paywall) to Sollisch’s op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

On Sunday, June 22, Sollisch gives a reading at Township Hall, 83 Main Street, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, 3-5 pm. Sponsored by Fireside Books.

How Donating a Kidney Fixed my Jump Shot is available at Cleveland-area bookstores and online at Amazon.

This review appeared, slightly abbreviated, in the June 2025 Heights Observer.

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Yiddishe Cup plays a free concert on Father’s Day at Cain Park, Cleveland Heights, 7 pm Sun. June 15. Alma Theater.