Yes, there was some flooding, Max. \u00a0 I remember a canoe on my street.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/max-2-69.jpg\" "\\"max")
Max Burstyn, 1969<\/p><\/div>\n
Max lived in the Jewish highlands on the other side of the public\u00a0 park.\u00a0 No flooding in the highlands there, and 99-percent yidlach<\/em>. Max was equal to I played<\/strong><\/span> tennis with Max in the park.\u00a0 That\u2019s where we met.<\/p>\n Max still rants about the gully.\u00a0 He says, \u201cYou lived with the goys — like Stropki.\u00a0 I played Pony League with him.\u00a0 There were about eight Stropkis.\u00a0 \u00a0What about Bobrowski?\u00a0 He was a Catholic too.\u00a0 Went to St. Joe\u2019s.\u00a0 He played third-string for the Browns.\u00a0 He was from your street.\u00a0 There was Mastrobuono.\u00a0 He had a funny walk.\u201d<\/p>\n True, I lived with Catholics, but I heard Jewish mothers shry gevalt<\/em> (scream bloody murder) at their kids from across the park.\u00a0 <\/em> Those Jewish moms had powerful lungs.<\/p>\n \u201cMax, what<\/strong><\/span> about Willie Hendricks?\u201d I said.\u00a0 \u201cWhy was he in your neighborhood?\u201d<\/p>\n “Hendrick\u2019s mother was Jewish,\u201d Max said.\u00a0 \u201cHe could pitch.\u201d\u00a0 Hendricks was about 6-4.\u00a0 He was drafted by the majors but never played pro ball.<\/p>\n Max was a self-described mischling ersten grades<\/em>.\u00a0 (First-degree mixed race.) That\u2019s a Nazi term, but Max used it — at least around me.\u00a0 Max\u2019s mother was a German gentile and his dad was a Polish Jew.\u00a0 They met in Germany after the war.\u00a0 Max was halachically converted as a baby.<\/p>\n Max, 2012<\/p><\/div>\n Max comes<\/strong><\/span> to my house for shabbes<\/em>.\u00a0 I like his Yiddish.\u00a0 He knows words that nobody else knows.\u00a0\u00a0 He talks about a kudraychik<\/em> — a swindler.\u00a0 I can\u2019t find that in the dictionary.\u00a0 It\u2019s probably Slavic, not Yiddish.\u00a0 For example, Max says, \u201cThere was a kudraychik<\/em>, a Jewish barber, in the occupied zone after the Max books rooms for a hotel chain.\u00a0 He works out of his house.\u00a0 He occasionally talks German to Europeans who want to book rooms in Florida and play golf.\u00a0 Max also gets calls from drunken Englishmen who call him \u201cyour majesty.\u201d\u00a0 He has to work 92 percent of the time during business hours. \u00a0\u00a0He can watch baseball and football games on mute. \u201cIt\u2019s not a bad job,\u201d Max said.\u00a0 The occasional call from Germany, no boss and no commute.\u00a0 Not bad.<\/p>\n Max beat me at tennis.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t lost to him in a while. Did I sully the honor of the gully?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so.\u00a0 I\u2019m not Catholic and I’m not gully-proud.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The tennis<\/strong><\/span> instructors at Bexley Park were mostly college kids who didn\u2019t care about the job.\u00a0 One year it was Stovsky; the next year, Nagy, the state champ.\u00a0 These \u201cpros\u201d rarely showed us anything.\u00a0 Maybe they showed us\u00a0 grips: the Western, the Eastern, the Continental.<\/p>\n The courts were asphalt with cracks and weeds.\u00a0 At least the nets were real, not chain-link.<\/p>\n My dad got me about 10 private lessons at the Cleveland Skating Club in Shaker Heights.\u00a0 The pro there called me Tiger.\u00a0 I think he called most non-members Tiger.\u00a0 He was\u00a0 John Hendrix.\u00a0 He went on to coach at Ohio State.<\/p>\n Shelly Gordon, 1969<\/p><\/div>\n Some of my Bexley Park tennis friends became jealous of me because of my private lessons.\u00a0 I got better than most of the Bexley players.\u00a0 One player, Shelly Gordon, still harps about my private lessons, like I violated the South Euclid Tennis Court Oath: Don\u2019t Be a Tennis Snob.\u00a0 Shelly played at Ohio State and became a teaching pro in Israel.\u00a0 He\u2019s self-taught.\u00a0 His strokes are horrible, but he\u2019s good.<\/p>\n A seeming<\/strong><\/span> midget, Denny A., ruled Bexley Park, along with a gambler, Twitch, and a tomboy named Annie G.\u00a0 They bet on everything, like who could hit the most first serves in, who could bounce a ball the longest on his racquet.\u00a0 Bexley Park was not a genteel place.\u00a0 Some guys didn\u2019t wear shirts.\u00a0 Billings \u2013- the court gentile — played so much shirtless tennis he wound up with skin cancer.<\/p>\n Krinsky was the best hitter.\u00a0 He could have been a regional player, but he preferred baseball, softball and chasing girls.\u00a0 He was voted the \u201cbest dancer\u201d in the senior class.<\/p>\n Max was third singles.\u00a0 Not that good, not that bad.<\/p>\n Shelly, 2012<\/p><\/div>\n Some of<\/strong><\/span> the best public court players were from neighboring Cleveland Heights.\u00a0 A couple Cleveland Heights boys took several private lessons at the Jewish country club, Oakwood.\u00a0 Garry Levy and Rich Greenberg became the number-one doubles team in Northeast Ohio.<\/p>\n The great public courts players of my day were:<\/p>\n Chuck McKinley, St. Louis Shelly is remembered by all<\/span> some in Cleveland, even though he moved to Israel years ago.<\/p>\n —<\/span> I grew up in a gully, according to my friend Max Burstyn.\u00a0 Max said, \u201cYou lived on one of those dead-end streets that had flooding.\u00a0 You lived in a gully.\u201d Yes, there was some flooding, Max. \u00a0 I remember a canoe on my street. Max lived in the Jewish highlands on the other side of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age","category-sports-pages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9771"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10449,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9771\/revisions\/10449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n1 \u00bd Jews.\u00a0 He spoke Yiddish and German.\u00a0 His dad was a Galitzianer<\/em> from Krakow.\u00a0 Max was born in Munich and came to America as a baby in the 1950s.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/max-burstyn-march-2012-144x300.jpg\" "\\"max")
\nwar . . .\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/shelly-69-159x300.jpg\" "\\"shelly")
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/shelly-gordon-march-2012-122x300.jpg\" "\\"shelly")
\nBillie Jean King, Long Beach, California
\nPancho Gonzales, Los Angeles
\nShelly Gordon, Cleveland<\/p>\n
\nYiddishe Cup plays 7:30 p.m. Thurs. (July 5)\u00a0on the lawn at Wiley Middle School, 2181 Miramar Blvd., University Heights, Ohio.\u00a0 (Indoors if raining.) Free.\u00a0 It\u2019s \u201cFamily Fun Night\u201d with games and free ice cream one-half hour before the show.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"