Rubama: Dan Grunfeld’s family has a fascinating story of overcoming the Holocaust, adversity through basketball
Dan Grunfeld’s book, “By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream,” is a story about overcoming adversity, dealing with challenges and finding meaning in life.
The book, which came out last November, is about Grunfeld’s family, including his famous father, Ernie, a former NBA player and executive. But the real hero of the book is his grandmother, Lily, who survived the Holocaust.
“I grew up kind of understanding the profound impact that basketball had on my family,” Grunfeld told me last week. “My dad was well-known as a player and executive, but no one knew he was born under communism in Romania and that he was a Holocaust survivor.
“My grandmother is 97. She’s the star of the book, and she’s the star of our family. I always knew that basketball meant so much to us and the journey that my family had taken, all the way from surviving the Holocaust to on top of the Olympic podium. It became my dream to tell that story.”
Grunfeld will discuss his book Wednesday as part of the Jewish Book Council Network Conference. The talk is free and will be held at the Sandler Family Campus of the Tidewater Jewish Community.
Hunter Thomas, director of Arts & Ideas at the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater, was part of a committee that discussed authors to bring to the conference.
“It can be very challenging to narrow down to 20 or so authors from that pool,” Thomas said. “For some, you just know right away.”
That was the case with Grunfeld.
The book took five years for Grunfeld to write. Before he got started, he knew he needed his grandmother’s blessings. She would be the one who could give him the background he needed.
“I knew that she had been through something traumatic and something dangerous,” he said. “She lost five of her siblings, and both of her parents were killed. My grandfather lost his sister and his parents.
“We talked about everything,” he added. “Some of those conversations were really hard, but I’m happy that we had them, because you need to know your history, particularly when this is world history. This is something that the world will never forget. The more I learned, the more details that I got, it just went deeper and deeper. And I think the book is very rich with detail. I think the big part of it is because my grandmother was so open and so honest in sharing what happened throughout her life.”
Grunfeld, 38, was concerned that his grandmother would leave some details out because of the pain it would bring. But she didn’t.
“Some people either don’t want to talk about it, or they feel obligated to,” he said. “And my grandmother was in the latter camp. She always — even when I was growing up — talked about what happened. She wanted us to remember her loved ones who were killed.
“There were a few details where she would say, ‘I don’t want to tell you because it’s so upsetting,’ because she’s seen things and knows things that you can’t imagine human beings doing to one another. But I told her we needed to talk about it, and she did, she shared everything with me.”
Her story alone was worthy of a book.
But so is his father’s.
Ernie Grunfeld immigrated with his parents to the United States when he was 8. He was often teased and bullied because he didn’t speak English. He escaped to the basketball court, where he taught himself how to play the game.
“He learned the game from New York City, and he learned how to work from my grandparents,” Grunfeld said about his father. “My dad was just competitive, determined and just outworked people. The lesson that he learned from his parents was that fighting spirit. I don’t think he would have gone so far, so fast, if he had not moved away from all that tragedy,”
After stardom in high school, Ernie Grunfeld set a school record as Tennessee’s all-time leading scorer. He also played with Team USA at the 1975 Pan American Games and the 1976 Summer Olympics. He played nine years in the NBA before becoming a general manager and later a president of basketball operations for the Washington Wizards from 2003 to 2019.
“Dan’s incredible message and story was one that we felt we absolutely needed to bring to our community,” Thomas said. “Jews have made a major impact on sports around the world, but Ernie Grunfeld’s rise to the NBA from the streets of Hungary, after his parents survived the Holocaust, is, as Dan included in his title, an ‘unprecedented American dream.’ We simply felt the Tidewater community needed to hear this story.”
Dan Grunfeld also was a star basketball player. He was an all-state player in high school in Wisconsin and went on to play for Stanford, where he earned first-team All-Pac-10 honors in 2005 and was an Academic All-American. In 2009, he led the United States to the gold medal at the Maccabiah Games, and he played nine seasons professionally overseas.
Various publications and television stations have also told his family’s story.
“We all loved the game because the game is fun,” he said. “But for our family, it always was a little something special because I knew what it had done for us. No one could have ever predicted it, but what it did for my dad and my family, it changed everything.”
Larry Rubama, 757-575-6449, larry.rubama@pilotonline.com. Twitter: @LHRubama
Dan Grunfeld talk
What: Jewish Book Festival
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Sandler Family Campus of the Tidewater Jewish Community, Virginia Beach
Admission: Free and open to the community
