When you’re one of the world’s leading authorities on religious magic and mysticism, you get some odd requests. After the release of The Exorcist in 1973, reporters looking for a local expert deluged Rabbi Byron Sherwin with calls for interviews. Being a teacher as well as a scholar, he granted them. Soon after his name began appearing in the papers, Sherwin got a phone call from a distraught man who was convinced his ex-girlfriend had put a curse on him.
“It’s getting worse all the time.”
At the hour of their appointment, a man with forearms like Popeye’s entered his office. Sherwin declined an invitation to examine the problem area and offered a remedy.
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The man called back a couple years later to say he had a new girlfriend and a good life. That was the last Sherwin heard from him. But he still gets requests to remove curses, perform exorcisms, or clear out poltergeists. In just the past few months he’s been asked to do all three. He gives the inquirers advice, but that’s all he’ll admit to. “I don’t discuss whether I do stuff like that myself,” he says. “If I did I’d have a line of delusional maniacs at my door.” He’s an academic, he insists, not an exorcist. “I’ve studied philosophy, I studied literature, I studied law. Don’t try to make me Merlin.”
“She had to take me, it was like her synagogue,” he says. “I said, ‘What is this? This is minor league baseball? It’s so small.’” Sherwin waited in vain for a vendor to come around with kosher hot dogs and sauerkraut. “She said, ‘You’re not in New York anymore. We don’t eat hot dogs with sauerkraut.’ And then I noticed that this team never seems to win. I couldn’t figure it out. So I stopped going. My wife, however, is still not cured. She is really a fanatic.”
The protagonist, Jay Loeb, named after Judah Loew of Prague, the legendary creator of the golem, looks into the events surrounding the 1945 curse of the billy goat and becomes convinced it’s not the cause of the Cubs’ problems. “A curse that works is usually a curse that seeks to redress some violation of moral rules,” Sherwin says. Because it’s reasonable for a team to bar a goat from a stadium–“any team would”–the billy goat curse doesn’t fit that criterion, nor does it explain why the Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908. There had to be some other type of mojo at work.
Every fan knows the story of Fred Merkle, a 19-year-old rookie brought into a crucial game by the New York Giants during the 1908 pennant race when their regular first baseman, Fred Tenney, was unable to play due to an attack of lumbago. With two outs and the score tied 1-1 in the bottom of the ninth, Merkle on first base and Moose McCormick on third, Al Bridwell singled to center. As McCormick crossed home and Giants fans rushed the field, Merkle turned off the base path and jogged toward the Giants clubhouse. Seeing this, Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers produced a ball, touched second base and claimed Merkle out on a force play and the inning over, the game still tied. Umpire Hank O’Day, who hadn’t seen the play, agreed. With all the fans celebrating on the field, the game couldn’t go on. It was ruled a tie, and a replay was scheduled.
