Wednesday night, Oct. 6, I interview Jesse Katz, author of the 2009 memoir The Opposite Field.
Luke: “So, Jesse, when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
Jesse: “A shortstop.”
“The Dodgers would’ve been my first choice even though I was in Portland, Oregon. We were hundreds of miles from a major league franchise. Being the child of Brooklynites, the Dodgers were our team.”
Luke: “You meantion early on in your book that part of your parents’ motivation to leave New York was to get away from the rhythms of Jewish life. What did you mean?”
Jesse: “More my dad than my mom. My mom grew up in a family of [secular] intellectuals. My father grew up in a more devout family, a kosher home where there were more rules…
“Living in New York, this great megalopolis of Jewish culture, there were a lot of people there like them with similar life stories and backgrounds and I think they wanted to see who they were outside of that. What they could invent on their own without living up to the expectations of family, culture, the environment.”
