Mark Helprin on God, life and the Yankees

“What is that?” Roger asked, pointing up.

“On the radio?”

Roger nodded.

“That? That’s the best part. You could listen all day. I do.”

“But what is it?”

“It’s baseball,” said Schnaiper, “from the House That Ruth Built.”

“From the House of Ruth?” Roger asked, stunned.

“Live,” Schnaiper said.

“Where is it?”

“The Bronx.”

Evidently, rabbis kept certain things from their students. Wonderful things. Exciting things. If Schnaiper could be believed—and never had he overweighed a chicken—there was a place in the Bronx that—symbolically? actually? miraculously?—was a direct link to the Israelites. Roger knew that such places could be found in Eretz Yisroel, but never had he heard that they existed in the Bronx. Immediately he wanted to go there, to see. The problem was that he did not understand its language, which seemed as dense and impenetrable as his studies in the Talmud, which, after all, had not come on the instant.

Read the whole story in Commentary.

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