Last Days of Summer

A Novel

Steve Kluger

The plot of this charming coming-of-age story unfolds through letters, newspaper articles, postcards, and baseball scores. It will transport you to 1940s Brooklyn and into the heart of the unlikely friendship between a 12-year-old boy named Joey Margolis and Charlie Banks, a third baseman for the New York Giants. .hey

Joey is a born-and-bred Brooklynite with a lot of attitude. But you can’t really blame him. His no-good father left him and his mom. That’s not only uprooted his life, he might be in mortal danger.

After the divorce, my mother moved us from a largely Hasidic community in Williamsburg to an old brownstone at the corner of Bedford Avenue and Montgomery Street, where the mailboxes in the vestibule presaged the special fabric out of which my adolescence was to be woven. Corelli. Verrastro. Fiore… Di Cicco (chico)… Delvecchi. This told me all I needed to know… as the newly appointed resident Jew, I couldn’t be entirely certain what recreational activities the neighborhood was willing to offer, but I had a pretty decent hunch that bleeding was among them. Not that my mom or my Aunt Carrie did much to promote my cause: they openly lit Shabbos candles on San Gennaro Day… and helped feed the Italian-American War Widows with a tray of… potato knishes. The day we unpacked, I figured conservatively that I had a week left to live…

Our boy Joey has a lot on his mind. He regularly writes letters to President Roosevelt to share his concerns about the Germans occupying Denmark. He’s worried about the war between Japan and China. And his face has been beaten to a pulp by the Italian toughs on his block.

The one bright spot in his life is baseball. By all rights, he should root for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but they’re his rotten Dad’s favorite team. Therefore, Joey hates the Dodgers. He looks beyond Brooklyn for a hero and finds Charlie Banks. Banks is a 22-year-old hot third baseman, a monster slugger who’s just signed with the Giants after a bidding war.

He’s also a Wisconsin native with a smart mouth — almost as well known for landing a punch as he is for his home runs. In his defense, he says he only uses his fists ‘whenever anybody gives me lip or such other good reasons.’

Joey writes a letter to Charlie, thinking that if he can befriend the ball player, he can salvage his rep in the neighborhood. In his letter, he makes one big request: He asks Charlie to point to left field at his next at-bat, to say ‘This is for my friend Joey Margolis,’ and to hit a home run. That first letter he writes to Charlie sets off an ongoing pen pal situation that changes both of their lives.

This novel is adorable from the jump: Each written artifact has a distinct voice, with dozens of augh-out-loud funny passages. Then almost imperceptibly, the story begins to explore more of the emotional palette. The boys’ correspondence expands beyond baseball to life off the field and the changes wrought by the war in Europe; more characters are introduced. We meet Joey’s best friend — a sweet Japanese kid in a time when being Japanese in the United States was a tricky thing to be. We get to know Charlie’s best pal and the (sassy) girl who steals Charlie’s heart.

This is one of those novels that makes you yearn to read bits aloud to someone else, a story about families of origin and the families we choose, a celebration of baseball and all it represents.

By the time I turned twelve, the Dodgers made me vomit. There was a popular misconception floating about the borough that they were lovable losers; for my money, one might just as easily have dispensed with the adjective altogether and developed a much clearer rotogravure of the truth. They had neither brains nor breeding — forgivable shortcomings in and of themselves if perhaps they had owned even one shred of talent. But they didn’t have that either. What they had was a hartebeest at first named Dolph Camilli, a hop-o’-my-thumb at short they christened Pee Wee and thought it cunning, and something at third base called Cookie Lavagetto. Nobody had the balls to ask why. Then there was Craig Nakamura’s idol, Leo Durocher, who plainly belonged behind bars—at a precinct house or an animal sanctuary, the need to distinguish was purely moot and predicated solely upon space availability. All things considered — and given the way my luck was running — about the last thing I needed was a bedroom window that overlooked Ebbets Field. — Steve Kluger

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