As a star high school then NCAA basketball player who went on to a successful overseas professional career, you could argue Dan Grunfeld went into the family business.
His father Ernie Grunfeld was an Olympian and NBA player too - starring for the New York Knicks - and spending decades since in the league’s front offices
This family legacy, however, is anything but typical or straight-forward.
And now in his book “By the Grace of the Game” Grunfeld is sharing the amazing multi-generational story about his Jewish family – how basketball became the happy ending to the family’s plight for survival, about their perseverance during the Holocaust to a present-day existence founded and sustained on hope.
To anyone reading Grunfeld’s stories of his family’s unimaginable reality, this book could sound like a well-researched fictional novel – of horror and desperation ultimately met with courage and triumph.
This is real. And powerful.
“It’s a relatable human story, overcoming adversity and banding together with your loved ones,’’ Dan Grunfeld told OSDB recently. “It’s always a story I wanted to tell but everything had to kind of happen at the right time, so as I got older and started to understand it more and had a little space from my basketball career, I finally had the time in my life where I had the space to write it and tell it.
“It took me five-plus years to do, but I’m definitely proud to share it with the world.’’
After graduating from Stanford University, where he had a solid basketball tenure, Dan Grunfeld went on to play professionally overseas in Germany, Spain, Romania and in Israel. After retiring from the game, he got his MBA at Stanford and now works in the high-tech world in Silicon Valley.
Throughout all of that, Grunfeld said he had always had a love of writing, even contributing to websites while he was playing basketball. With the book and his determination to tell the story of his Jewish family’s gripping Holocaust experience, Grunfeld decided to dedicate much more time, thought and emotion in telling this fascinating story.
“I did research for a year and a half,’’ Grunfeld recalled. “I scheduled time with my dad and my grandma every single day after class and I would record the conversations and transcribe them; just try to understand this really complicated history.
“Then I set my alarm for 6:02 am for eight months and got up and wrote for two hours. That’s how I got my first draft done. It’s not only the writing aspect but the personal aspect of understanding their history, that’s really deep and emotional. It’s been a journey in every sense of the word.’’
“When I was done with my first draft, my wife told me how proud of me she was,’’ Grunfeld continued. “And I told her - and I really meant it – all the discipline to get out of bed every single morning and write, I got from basketball. From the time the alarm clock went off, I just got up and wrote and if you do that every day for eight months, something will come of it.”
In this case, something so compelling, you hear the emotion in Grunfeld’s voice as he talks about the project.
It was at times an emotional, tortuous process - so difficult to hear about his father’s parents’ plight in World War II Europe. His grandmother Livia was visiting a relative in Romania when the Nazis invaded her Hungarian hometown. She received a letter from her parents telling her not to return home and it was the last communication she had with them. She lost both her parents and five siblings -- all killed in Auschwitz.
Grunfeld’s grandfather, Alex, also lost his parents to the Nazis and served time in a forced labor camp before being liberated.
And then, after finally making their way to America, their oldest son passed away from leukemia shortly after they arrived in New York.
And yet after enduring all this tragedy and dealing with such heavy sorrow, the Grunfeld family seized upon their new opportunities in America and have carved out a legacy that lifts hearts and inspires minds. It certainly had that effect on Dan Grunfeld. Learning about his family’s survival – even as an adult – has been hugely impactful.
“How often do you get to sit with your dad and ask him questions about what life was like when he was in high school,’’ Dan Grunfeld said. “It’s not something you do often, and my dad had lived more of a public life, particularly when he got into college and became a basketball star.
“But even knowing all that history, you don’t know all the things going on behind the scenes. For me to ask him questions about his bar mitzvah and his friends. About coming to America as an 8-year old immigrant. What was that like? How did people treat you? What was it like going to school in a foreign country.
“All these little areas you’d never think to ask your parents just because they’re your parents. It was nice to learn that history.’’
And to be able to share it with others.
It was not only a story of survival but an interesting dive into the history of a celebrated professional basketball player who came from a background unlike any other.
“His parents had to work seven days a week to make a living and he’d lost a brother so he did what all the local kids in the neighborhood did, he went to the local park and for him it was a good way to learn English and what do you do at the park? You just play basketball,’’ Grunfeld said of his father Ernie.
“So, he just kind of went to the park to find something to do and kind of heal from that loss and he started playing basketball. He was good, then he was very good and then he was very, very, very good. My grandparents didn’t know what the game could do for someone.
“I write about it in my book. My grandfather used to always make my dad come to the store to work and after seeing that first game, he told him, ‘You never have to come again. Just worry about your basketball.’ “
It’s been a mutual beneficial relationship between the Grunfeld family and the sport of basketball. And that’s where the title of this book comes from.
Today. Grunfeld’s grandmother Livia is 95 years-old, plays bridge five days a week and still cooks for the large family. And his father Ernie, who won an Olympic gold medal on the United States team in 1976, married a “nice Jewish girl” Nancy – as Dan Grunfeld lovingly puts it - shortly after being drafted by the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks in 1977 and they are happy still today.
It is a heart-touching update to a life that saw so much struggle.
And it offers hope.
“That’s the word, hope,’’ Grunfeld said. “I saw it firsthand, and I grew up with it. What my grandparents and my dad grew up with, the values they applied to their lives – love, compassion, hard work. Those things that built a life in America and certainly have been an inspiration for me to work hard and stay positive. That’s what I hope readers get from this book.
“There’s a lot of difficult things. I mean my grandparents survived the Holocaust, my dad lost his brother. These are really hard things in life ... but finding this game [of baskeball] and traveling the world and building a life in America, there’s a whole lot of beauty in that. So that feeling of positivity and hope is something I hope readers get from this book.’’
