The Riddle Behind the Mask
SHEPARD, RICH ARD F.
The Riddle Behind the Mask_ The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg By Nicholas Dawidoff Pantheon. 453 pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Richard F. Shepard Former cultural reporter,...
...In addition, Dawidoff plowed through mountains of copy produced over decades by sportswriters marveling at an intellectual who pitched Sanskrit and caught fastballs for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Chicago White Sox, the Washington Senators, and the Boston Red Sox...
...His skills still won him small acclaim in the sporting world, but the very fact that he was a ballplayer turned him into a star in intellectual spheres, where, were he less of an exotic creature, he might not have been noticed...
...But after growing up in a family that declared it had no religion and purposely settled in a non-Jewish neighborhood, he did learn what it meant to be "a Hebrew," as the Class of 1923 yearbook described him...
...rather, they send us into fits of conjecture about exactly what kind of man he was...
...Perhaps his greatest talent was intruding himself into other people's lives, while keeping them out of his own...
...Moe did well in school and developed a love for playing baseball...
...During World War II, in fact, he performed well enough in the OSS to be awarded the Medal of Freedom, only to turn it down because "the whole story of my humble contribution [cannot be] known or divulged...
...He was many things ballplayers are not supposed to be: educated, intelligent, cosmopolitan, well-spoken, Jewish, and slow-footed...
...Forever the oddball, he descended unannounced on friends, let them pay for his meals, stayed at their homes or hotels—for a night or a week?then melted away...
...By now Berg had switched to catcher, a position he discovered himself slightly more competent at than shortstop...
...He died in 1972 at age 69...
...Great copy, indeed, Berg...
...Short of numbing prose, it would be difficult to make his story tedious...
...At one moment, Berg sounds like a character fashioned by Saul Bellow...
...But he had neither the eclat nor the statistics of Hank Greenberg, who was idolized by Jews throughout the country in the 1930s...
...Berg missed the first two months of a couple of seasons because he was attending Columbia Law School...
...He passed the bar exam, spent three or four winters working at a New York law firm, then concluded—inevitably, it would appear—that he was better suited to the outdoor diamond trade...
...Worried that the Germans were close to perfecting their own horror bomb, the U.S...
...Nonetheless, he does confirm Berg's frequent hints that he was involved in espionage...
...the answers, besides exhibiting considerable knowledge, were brilliantly phrased...
...That the Germans were found to be nowhere near reaching their goal was important, albeit less exciting than actually thwarting a working plan close to execution...
...he was a real person, and his extraordinary life has been captured in Nicholas Dawidoff's The Catcher Was a Spy...
...He didn't hit many home runs either, only six as a major-leaguer...
...I remember Berg as an occasional guest panelist on the radio quiz show "Information, Please...
...He was also a spy—again mediocre...
...None hang together...
...But I suspect that the real man still awaits a novelist to ferret him out...
...Early in his career...
...His contribution was in the area of atomic weaponry...
...His experience, of course, was nothing like that of the Jews in Europe...
...Dawidoff explains that Berg, betraying the eccentricity that was to characterize his entire life, refused to field anything about law...
...What made Berg tick...
...Moe Berg wore aprofessional baseball uniform for 19 years, more than a quarter of his life, and far longer than most men last in the game," the biographer writes...
...Reviewed by Richard F. Shepard Former cultural reporter, New York "Times" IF EVER A MAN was grist for a novelist, that man was Moe Berg...
...He was a versatile linguist, too, though maybe not fluent in all the languages he was said to know...
...The questions were eclectic, often eggheaded, always interesting...
...bombing of Tokyo...
...His lifetime batting average was a feeble .245...
...On one program a legal question was put to him anyway...
...Berg located several, befriended them and sent home valuable information...
...Happily Dawidoff has laid it out in an engaging if straightaway journalistic style...
...Clifton Fadiman presided over a clutch of wits that included John Kieran, a sportswriter for the New York Times and one of Berg's great boosters...
...He rarely told even his best friends much about his private life or how he passed his time...
...When baseball took him to Japan, Berg shot home movies that he later boasted were used to plan the U.S...
...He was neither, of course...
...His success at shortstop for the Princeton Tigers won only disapproval from his father, a pharmacist who believed his children should become intellectuals and professionals...
...A strange fellow, this Moe Berg...
...Dawidoff has devotedly assembled and lucidly presented the facts in a biography well worth the reading...
...In 1919 he entered Princeton University, where in those days a Jew was a square peg facing well-rounded aristocratic holes...
...But Berg's is one of those cases where the facts do not tell us everything that we want to know...
...The biographer tirelessly tracked down every trace of Berg as remembered by his surviving friends and acquaintances...
...dispatched teams of spies, including Berg, to make contact with the European scientists who knew where things stood...
...Moe's older brother, Sam, was a physician, and his sister Ethel taught school...
...It seemed odd that a man of such parts should have remained committed to something that freighted him with mediocrity...
...He told reporters that he had not yet decided to make baseball a career and might return to his studies...
...He drifted, always accompanied by the mounds of daily newspapers he pored through and stacks of books on linguistics and philosophy...
...Berg dodged it, quietly finished the show and left, never to return...
...Dawidoff disputes that claim...
...Morris Berg was born in 1902, the third child of an immigrant Ukrainian Jewish family living in New York City's Harlem...
...At another, he seems a figment of Graham Greene's imagination...
...Dawidoff rightly observes that one would have expected Berg to be highly touted in Brooklyn's many Jewish communities...
...Nevertheless, following his graduation he joined the Brooklyn Robins, soon to become the Dodgers...
...As a fan of both games, however, he was terrific...
...Here was a charmer, a raconteur, a bon vivant, who was also a loner and extremely sensitive to slurs...
...And he was a lawyer who barely practiced, but enjoyed elucidating his sport for Einstein-league scientists...
...After the War ended, Berg appears never to have held a regular job again...
...He was a major league baseball player—not a star, but passable...
...Ultimately, he made very little of his faith, yet in passing Dawidoff drops tantalizing references to a number of Moe's affirming Jewish actions...
...Within a few years the Bergs moved to Newark, New Jersey...
...Dawidoff can only speculate, eventually reaching the same unsatisfying explanations others have offered...
Vol. 77 • August 1994 • No. 8
