In December 1921, the Polish Football Federation arranged its first-ever international match, away to Hungary. Hungary, which had separated from Austria at the end of the First World War, may no longer have been a great power in Europe, but it was an emerging force in the European game. For Poland, which had itself recently thrown off the yoke not just of Austria but (albeit not for long) of Russia and Germany, this was a significant occasion: a symbol of its arrival as an independent, self-determined nation.
Of the 22 players who took to the pitch in Budapest for the Hungarians’ narrow victory over the Poles, seven – almost one in three – were Jews. As David Bolchover observes in the introduction to his new book, you might readily have a pub debate about the best-ever English or Brazilian footballer. But identifying the best Jewish player will send “even a group of the most historically literate Jewish football nerds into a prolonged silence”. There might be rueful smiles at the idea of Jews being good enough at football for the question to matter.
Bolchover is the author of The Greatest Comeback, a biography of Béla Guttmann: a giant among football managers, a serial collector of national titles, a winner of successive European Cups at Benfica, and a survivor of the Holocaust. Why is Guttmann’s place in football history assured? Because this former player, a league champion in both his native Hungary and in Austria – he moved to Vienna to escape rampant Hungarian antisemitism, which amounted to jumping out of the fire and into the frying pan – was among the very few European Jewish footballers who lived to forge a career after the Second World War. Bolchover has now turned his attention to those who did not, and who have been forgotten. Partly because forgetting is convenient for a continent, and for a sport, which did nothing to help the men both had fêted as heroes, and a great deal to doom them. But chiefly because everyone who would have been most eager to remember them perished alongside them.
Hence the title, a grimly repurposed commentary cliché: Digging Deep. Bolchover’s task has been that of an investigator sifting through a metaphorical – but only just metaphorical – heap of ashes to learn what he can about his selection of “eleven murdered Jewish footballing greats”. (No manager, he adds, has ever felt worse about those he was obliged to leave out of his side.) His team is, in footballing terms, not the best balanced. It was not only in politics and letters that European Jewry produced an abundance of quick, skilful left-wingers. We recall many of the thinkers because either they or, more likely, their work survived; although we can only wonder with what dismay they would now regard the state of the left to which they once cleaved. But – it bears repeating – the footballers belonged to folk memory, and their folk were murdered with them.
Thus Bolchover’s book is at once a celebration, a lament, and an indictment. His footballers leap off the page as if springing for a header, varied in their talents, their personalities, their backgrounds. They represent the wide diversity of European Jewry before the Holocaust united it in monolithic horror. Affluent Western cosmopolitans or working-class Eastern traditionalists; the conciliatory Bundists proven so terribly wrong, or the defiant Zionists proven so terribly right; Bolchover follows his subjects from France to Ukraine, from Italy to Scandinavia, and all points in between, but invariably to the same destination: murder for being a Jew. This may sound repetitive. That is the point. The Holocaust was repetitive, and it was thorough, to a unique degree that defies comprehension by the human mind. At each narrative whistle-stop, a footnote details the fate of the Jews who lived there. And it is only the details that differ. Shot on the spot, transported and gassed, beaten to death, slaved to death, starved and frozen to death. Once Jewish life was a commonplace in these towns and villages. Now it is vanished.
If Bolchover is sometimes bitterly sardonic, he has much to be bitterly sardonic about. He argues convincingly that the Holocaust was no aberration, no fit of temporary madness, but the logical conclusion of a timeless illogic. He describes how Jewish former servicemen – a cohort that includes a number of his team – sought to confront the nations that so eagerly turned upon them with the evidence of their patriotism and loyalty: “They were talking to themselves.” He relates how MTK Budapest, a team founded by Jews, run by Jews, and featuring several outstanding Jewish players, did to Barcelona in the early 1920s what Barcelona themselves would nine decades later do to any side they came up against: gave them the runaround, with definitively artful football. MTK provided the platform by which Jimmy Hogan became the godfather of the modern pass-and-move game, a coach whose unsurpassed influence runs in a direct line to Pep Guardiola.
Bolchover later notes the typical selective empathy displayed by the likes of Guardiola over the war Hamas began with Israel, as Europe once again looks to shun and exclude Jews from its cultural and sporting life – a prelude, in the era about which Bolchover writes, to excluding them from life altogether.
Digging Deep, by David Bolchover, is published by Biteback Publishing
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.