With Max Baer and the Star of David, Jay Neugeboren creates a pair of distinctive fictional characters and deposits them into the life of the legendary Depression-era boxer. The writing is strong and the characters memorable…. Despite the title, Baer is only a side character in the story. The book includes the key milestones in his boxing career—the fight that killed Baer’s opponent Frankie Campbell, the clash with German fighter Max Schmeling from which the book gets its title, the surprise loss to James Braddock…. But Baer’s life is mostly used to provide an outline for the story of Neugeboren’s fictional narrator, Horace Littlejohn…The real story…is Horace’s. He confronts family patterns and fights some important battles outside the ring. The author tells this story well.”—JEFF FLEISCHER, Foreword Reviews
“Max Baer and the Star of David is a novel, nominally about its titular character, a boxer who wore a Star of David on his shorts and gave fatal blows to two fighters….The true hero of the book is imagination, which allows all characters escape from their lives. The facts behind the plot of the novel are true…Seeing all the real drama in this character’s life, it is hard to imagine what more a fiction writer could add. Jay Neugeboren, however, delivers expanded blows in prose….The book is much more than sports writing. Commentary on the Song of Songs is woven into its pages, as is discussion of love – both of the heterosexual and homosexual variety, sometimes by the same character, as well as interracial relationships. A blind character is in there too, as well as incest and disguised identities, which appear as themes….Even readers who don’t think themselves interested in sports will enjoy the descriptions and plot developments… For any reader who cares about good writing and imagination, lover of boxing or not, Max Baer and the Star of David is required reading."—BETH KISSILEFF, The Jerusalem Post
"Author Jay Neugeboren is as unsettling as he is prolific. His latest novel, Max Baer and the Star of David, intertwines the historical with the fabricated. It tells the story of Max Baer, who became heavyweight champion of the world in 1934, and the fictional Horace Littlejohn, an early sparring partner of Baer’s and lifelong confidant…. Horace, the novel’s narrator, takes readers through the ins-and-outs of many Baer fights… Baer stood as a powerful American Jewish symbol of the growing war that would pit freedom against fascism. Small wonder that Jews identified with, and took pleasure in, Baer and his victory (although he had only one Jewish grandfather). At the same time, Neugeboren’s novel is fiction. The Littlejohns’ dialogue is lyrical and sophisticated, their speech intertwined with phrases from the Song of Songs. Baer, on the other hand, is a diamond-in-the-rough who sounds like Jake LaMotta in the film Raging Bull. Max Baer & The Star of David is counterintuitive in the way that Horace tells the tale of his sister and his best friend. Readers expecting a traditional account of the boxer’s life will be disappointed. But those who let their imaginations open up to this often-strange tale will find it both exciting and illuminating."—Sanford Pinsker, Hadassah Magazine.
“Neugeboren has never been better than in this lush, joyful novel—as erotic and mysterious as The Song of Songs, and as clear as a heavyweight champion's punch in the gut. I loved it.”—ROBERT LIPSYTE, author of An Accidental Sportswriter
“Max Baer and the Star of David is a strange and strangely beautiful tale that conjures up a golden era of boxing in the way A. J. Liebling did in The Sweet Science. I was enchanted from start to finish, and when I closed the book I thought ‘Damn, this dude can write!’" —GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Little Failure: A Memoir
“This lively, high-spirited novel is an irresistible tribute to the sweet science, and a thrillingly jaunty evocation of an almost forgotten era. Neugeboren has, as always, the gift of creating vivid characters and the imagination to put them through delicious travails.”—PHILLIP LOPATE, author of Portrait Inside My Head
“One of the most accomplished and original writers of our time, Jay Neugeboren has now outdone even himself. With its larger-than-life characters who are all too human, Max Baer and the Star of David is a powerful and starkly gritty literary page-turner. Sorry, but I can't resist—this novel is a total knockout.”—BINNIE KIRSCHENBAUM, Hester Among the Ruins
“Max Baer and The Star of David reside at the rough, mysterious edge between history and myth. The book will bewitch readers with its own powerful song and haunting love story, filled with regret and a deep rage against America's racial sins, past and present.”—JEROME CHARYN, author of I Am Abraham
''Neugeboren's latest novel will captivate readers through its language and the characters' complicated relationships.''—Edyt Dickstein, Jewish Book Council
“Max Baer and the Star of David is a novel first, a boxing novel second. And that’s how it should be for a novel whose title character may have been more famous for his out-of-ring escapades than his pugilistic career. The real fighters in this novel are the people that surround Max, Horace and Joleen and a woman Horace falls for as a middle-aged man….Novelists fill in the senses; they make the unreal real. Jay Neugeboren takes old fight-film footage, removes the graininess, introduces color, helps us hear and see the men and women behind the man, as well as the man himself, Max Baer, whose life was as colorful as the deep blue star emblazoned on his trunks.”—Adam Berlin in Boxing.com author of the boxing novel, Both Members of the Club (Winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize)
The writing of successful historical fiction is the sweet science of turning real-world figures into believable, fascinating characters and of molding the known events of their lives into dramatic stories. Max Baer and the Star of David…is an exciting blend of fact and fiction… with its fancy footwork: a cast of characters that combat my blood-sport stereotypes and a plot that blocks, ducks, and jabs at just the right times. Is it a knockout of a novel? Not quite, but it wins on points….(and while) I still need some convincing that boxing is truly a “sweet science,” Max Baer and the Star of David is definitely an example of the sweet science of plotting and writing excellent fiction. That Neugeboren is a master practitioner of this science, there is no doubt.—Jason Hess, NewPages.com
Neugeboren has created fictional characters that interact with boxing champion Max Baer. At the center of the novel are two mysterious and memorable fictional creations, Horace and Joleen Littlejohn, who were constantly with Baer and who presented themselves to the world as husband and wife, when, in fact, they were brother and sister. They become best friends and sometime lovers to Max in this dazzling story about the world of boxing, and about Max’s life in and out of the ring. Horace is the narrator of the story and he takes us into an interracial love triangle that is set in a world where love and violence are part of the way things happen. So we not only learn about the golden age of boxing but also about breaking a taboo. The characters are epic and the story is fascinating, one that you will want to read over and over again.—Amos Lassen, Judaica
