Berg retrieves his films from the attic. They get back in the car, and passing references are made to the time Berg spent studying at the Sorbonne in Paris (Schacht calls it the “Sunburn”). Eventually they arrive at Princeton, Berg shows his movies, slips off to purchase a few books—“seven big ones—I can’t even understand the titles,” says Schacht—and then, twenty miles down the road back to New York, Schacht is forced to turn back. Berg has forgotten his films.
The mysterious Berg becomes Kieran’s response to Ring Lardner’s fictional Jack Keefe, the solecistic Busher whose streak of artless volubility is nearly as strong as his pitching arm. Each Kieran column about Berg serves as another chapter in the meandering comic adventures of baseball’s erudite eccentric.
For a 1937 column about the reluctance of ballplayers to talk about their own team unless it is winning, Kieran places Berg hurrying through Grand Central Terminal in New York just after the Yankees have, as usual, smothered the Red Sox. Berg is carrying “a bale of newspapers under his arm, foreign and domestic,” and when he spots Kieran, he greets him in Japanese. Berg is prodded into joining Kieran for lunch, at which he orders applesauce, “no more, no less.” Awaiting his applesauce, Berg settles his newspapers onto a chair beside him, whereupon a paperback copy of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “by a certain David Hume, not known in American League circles,” falls to the floor. “It was a wonder he didn’t come up at that dark moment with a volume of Schopenhauer,” says Kieran, who then begins grilling Berg on the source of the Red Sox latest swoon. Kieran asks about pitching. Berg explains his ambition to own the New York Times. Kieran inquires about a particularly ineffective pitcher. Berg outlines the subtleties of ordering roast beef in a London restaurant. Kieran wants to know about the Boston outfield. Berg tells him about Japanese foreign policy. In desperation, Kieran asks about the Yankees. He hears about Al Schacht’s latest comic skit, a pigeon act.
Berg is even summoned into service for a January 31, 1939, column about ice hockey. Kieran finds himself much confused following a disputed goal and “this puzzled observer determined to see a lawyer about it. Just by luck Professor Moe Berg was encountered in conversation with a literary gent, Mr. Percy Waxman.… It will be remembered that Professor Berg, the Red Sox catcher who officiates only in the second games of doubleheaders and not even then if it is a hot day, is a licensed barrister in this area.”
Kieran summarizes the controversial goal problem. “ ‘It sounds like Sanskrit to me,’ muttered Mr. Waxman.
“ ‘That reminds me,’ said Professor Berg,” who then launches lengthily into a discussion of the roots of Sanskrit, with attendant remarks upon the Rosetta Stone and Egyptian hieroglyphics until Kieran interrupts with another swipe at Berg’s baseball skills.
“Very interesting, but it had nothing to do with the flowers that bloom in the Spring, tra-la, or the summary removal from office of a goal judge at a hockey game. Professor Berg was, allegedly, a big league ballplayer in the summertime. Anyway, he had a uniform and was allowed to travel with the team.”
Undaunted, through the course of the next few paragraphs Berg offers up the fact that the word “league” is derived from the same Latin root that gives us the word “ligature,” discusses the Basque, Magyar, and Finno-Ugric roots of modern diction, explains that the Canary Islands are not named after canaries but “are really the Dog Islands, from ‘canis’ in Latin,” and drops in Jacob Grimm, the German philologist, as well. The controversial goal problem remains unresolved.
“Professor Berg” proved irresistible to many sportswriters, and while none gilded him with prose as witty as Kieran’s, the Berg that appeared in columns and features around the country during his life and afterward was a consistent, recognizable character.
Berg was a voracious reader, and journalists, naturally, liked that, especially when they caught sight of the tomes he was hauling around the American League with him to complement his copy of their newspaper. “What’s the book?” Berg was asked by a writer one day in the Washington Senators clubhouse. “ ‘Oh, just a little thing I picked up in England,’ he answered nonchalantly, heaving the volume to an adjacent table. ‘Not very deep reading, but it’s interesting,’ he added deprecatingly. The volume was titled Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas.”
Berg also enjoyed talking, and in many tongues, another endless source of editorial delight. “Movius Berg Homo Eruditissimus Est / With a Gift of Languages He Is Blest” was the headline for John Drohan’s May 23, 1935, column in the Boston Traveler, a mock screed charging Berg with “having too much education.”
“ ‘Nobody can have too much,’ replied the illustrious Berg, as he gently perspired in the Red Sox dugout.” Drohan takes it upon himself to investigate how much is too much. “Having studied cologne bottles, we decided to try out our French on him.
“ ‘Comment vous portez-vous?’
“ ‘Ça va bien, merci,’ rejoined Berg. (Maybe he was calling us names. We wouldn’t know.)” After Berg passes a similarly taxing Spanish test, Drohan calls upon outfielder Edmund “Bing” Miller to “put a stop to this nonsense by giving him some of that Iowa German by gargling, ‘Wie geht es Ihnen?’
“Without so much as the quiver of an eyelash, Berg replied, ‘Sehr gut, mein Herr.’ ” Drohan adds Hungarian and Italian to Berg’s tally before confiding that the player some of his teammates call “Lingwee” is now learning Gaelic. That won’t take long, he thinks, if Berg’s Japanese study is any indication; on his trip to Japan the previous year Berg “picked up the Japanese language so well in three weeks, he could speak it like a native.” Other Drohan disclosures include Berg’s conversational Greek—he’s a marvel in coffee shops—his preference for baseball over his off-season job as a lawyer at “one of the largest firms in lower Manhattan,” a fondness for movies, and a bug for travel; Berg has just been to Russia, where he was arrested six times in a matter of weeks for making films without permission.
Berg spent his summer afternoons at the ballpark, but at other times he could turn up anywhere. Frank Yeutter in the December 17, 1938, Philadelphia Bulletin portrays a Berg who is as comfortable with aristocrats as he is with infielders. “The other night in New York, while thousands waited to hear Anthony Eden, former British foreign minister, talk on foreign affairs, shortly after his arrival, the dapper British diplomat was chatting with a baseball player.
“The player was Morris Berg, of the Boston Red Sox, otherwise Moe, a graduate of Princeton who later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and Heidelberg in Germany. Moe’s forte is Oriental languages and he reads them as a hobby. While Mr. Eden was adjusting his white tie, Moe lounged in a chair in his room discussing certain Sanskrit verb forms.” Just why he was in Eden’s room to begin with is left unexplained.
In 1938, there was a new dimension. It was all Kieran’s doing. Kieran was one of the regulars on the popular radio program “Information, Please!”—the intellectual’s quiz show. New Yorker magazine literary critic Clifton Fadiman sought to stump a panel of learned experts—Kieran, Franklin P. Adams, Oscar Levant, and a special guest—with questions on arcane subjects sent in by the listening public. At Kieran’s suggestion, Berg appeared as the guest panelist in early 1938. He performed superbly. The sporting press was ecstatic, and Berg spent much of the following summer seated in the dugout, answering trivia questions. The transcripts of those sessions, of course, became columns.
In 1942, Berg abruptly retired from the Red Sox and accepted a position offered him by Nelson Rockefeller, the coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs. The OIAA was responsible for maintaining friendly relations between the U.S. and its Central and South American neighbors during the Second World War. Berg was to be a goodwill ambassador. Baseball and brains meshed triumphantly with jingoism on sports pages from Chattanooga to New York. In a column headlined “Dodgers Cheer As Their Brain Joins Uncle Sam,” Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram wro
te that “this is no empty title, no empty assignment. It’s a job Moe Berg, the veteran catcher, can perform as competently and diplomatically as any man in the country.”
Berg spent the first part of 1943 working for Rockefeller before signing on with the OSS. He returned to Newark in 1946, and for the next twenty-five years was a habitué of New York ballparks, where he watched several dozen games each summer, often from a seat in the press box. What Berg was doing for a living was anyone’s guess. For such a raconteur, he had always been extremely reserved. There was something forbidding about him. People sensed that this was a person you didn’t push. Cajoling the “man in the black suit,” as Francis Stann of the Washington Star called him, wouldn’t have worked anyway. To those who wondered aloud about his work for the OSS or about his life after baseball, Berg only put a finger to his lips and issued a sibilant rebuke. Most didn’t ask, though. There were rumors that Berg was a CIA agent, and any fool knew that discussing that kind of work was verboten.
Talking baseball was another matter. Berg never tired of that. And so he remained a popular subject for sportswriters for all the usual reasons. When, for instance, a United Press International reporter asked him about George Scott, a hulking Red Sox rookie in 1966, Berg replied, “I believe there are fortunes to be made by the contractors who replace the walls he will tear down by the force of the baseballs he will hit.” Berg, said the UPI writer, knows Sanskrit but “he gets a bigger kick out of George (The Great) Scott.”
It all did make for wonderful reading, and there were crumbs of truth in every story, yet the jolly world of Professor Berg was false at the center. This was not the man, it was caricature on a grand scale. Which didn’t bother Berg. In fact, he encouraged the burlesque and guided the creation of this shimmering distortion. By cloaking himself in the quirky adventures of Professor Berg, he carefully obscured the real Moe Berg. Behind the prop stood something quite different. Berg’s was a life of abiding strangeness. The secret world of Moe Berg was charming and seamy, vivid and unsettling, wonderful and sad. And unlike the caricature, it was resonant with ambiguity.
2
Youth: Runt Wolfe
When Bernard Berg left behind the tiny Ukrainian village of Kippinya in 1894, and headed west, no doubt he hoped for prosperity. But it’s also true that he was on the run. It wasn’t easy for the slim young accountant with the thick hedge of mustache and dark brown eyes to part from Rose Tashker. Rose came from a nearby town in the Kamenets-Podolski region of the Ukraine, along the Bug River not far from Romania. Her father worked as the accountant for a Prince Krapinsky, who had a vodka distillery and other holdings there. Rose was beautiful, she was mellow, and she had agreed to marry Bernard. All his life, however, Bernard Berg’s ethical sensibilities attenuated any conflicting strains of sentiment, and leaving Kippinya was a moral decision. Kippinya was entirely populated by Jews, a place where the laws and superstitions of Eastern European Judaism permeated every moment of a man’s day. Bernard Berg could not abide such complete deference to faith. What to others was a comfort and a fillip was to him a burden. And so, promising Rose he’d send for her when he was settled, he left Kippinya behind. Another of Rose’s virtues was patience. It would be two years before she saw Bernard again.
He traveled first to the U.S., didn’t like what he saw and went to England, where he’d heard that citizenship would be granted to anyone volunteering for service in the Boer War. Upon arrival in London, he was told he was too late. The offer had been rescinded four days earlier. So Bernard went down to the docks, found a New York-bound freighter, and shipped out, earning his passage back across the Atlantic by shoveling coal in the engine room.
In New York, Bernard took an ironing job in a Ludlow Street laundry on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Like most streets in the neighborhood, Ludlow was a narrow channel lined with walk-up tenement apartment buildings and stables. Small shops selling everything from fresh matzo to salt herring spilled onto the sidewalks, while a chaos of pushcarts, horses, and shoppers wheedling for bargains in plangent Yiddish clogged the street. It was New York, but it was also very familiar. Bernard had no intentions of staying in the Jewish ghetto and began to put away money. When Rose joined him in 1896, he was running his own laundry and taking evening classes at the New York College of Pharmacy. During the day, he propped open his textbooks on a washboard as he pushed the heavy black iron across shirts. Bernard learned without any apparent strain. Before reaching New York he had taught himself to read English, French, and German, which meant that, also including Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, he could now understand six languages. Once he was settled in New York, he learned very quickly to speak acceptable English. After that, he did his best never to speak Yiddish again, and banned it from his home.
Between 1898 and 1902, Rose and Bernard had three children. A son, Samuel, came first, born in a room at the back of the laundry. A daughter, Ethel, followed in 1900, and then another son, Morris, two years after that. By this time Bernard had sold the laundry and begun clerking at an uptown pharmacy. The family had moved north, to a cold-water tenement not far from the Polo Grounds on 121st Street in Harlem, by March 2, 1902, when Morris was born. He was immediately and forever called Moe, a slim appellation that from the start belied his husky stature: Moe Berg was a twelve-pound baby.
Rose Berg crocheted beautifully, spending days on pieces of handwork that were later exhibited in museums. Her youngest son hadn’t the same patience and could be a capricious child. At three and a half, he begged his mother to let him start school, “like Sam and Eth.” His aunt Sophie overheard. “Dress that boy and send him to school,” Sophie told her sister-in-law. Moe wore a suit with short pants, a white shirt with a starched collar clasped high at the neck, stockings, and leather shoes laced well up the calf. The laces took his mother a while to fasten. When she was finished, off he went.
By 1906 Bernard had bought a pharmacy on Warren Street in West Newark, operated it there until 1910, and then purchased a building at 92 South Thirteenth Street, on the corner of Ninth Avenue; this was the Roseville section of Newark, not far from West Orange, and very close to Bernard Berg’s notion of perfection. Roseville had good schools, middle-class residents, and very few Jews. He would work there, and the family would live in an apartment above the pharmacy, until he died.
When the Bergs arrived in Newark, it was a raucous place. “The city of Newark is undergoing the most astonishing changes in its history,” said Newark mayor Henry M. Doremus in his 1907 address to the city. Between 1870 and 1910, 250,000 immigrants, including 40,000 Jews—or Hebrews, as the Board of Trade referred to them—poured into the self-described “Workshop of the Nation,” leading the city’s historian Frank John Urquhart to marvel in 1913 that “it is to be doubted if more than a few hundred who can trace their lineage back to the founders still remain in Newark.” The Germans and the Irish had come first, followed by Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, and Russians. “Here the natives of every country under the sun have found and are finding a conjenial [sic] home,” declared a pamphlet published by the city. If there was anything truly congenial about life in rough, hard-nosed immigrant neighborhoods, where the stench of the Passaic River floated over teeming streets, it was the abundant supply of jobs. Antebellum Newark, a city of not quite 350,000 people, had over 2,200 factories, 11 miles of industrial wharfs, 14 freight yards, and ambitious city fathers who sponsored a near surfeit of public works projects, including a railroad tunnel under the Hudson River to Manhattan, parks, hospitals, paved streets, gas lights, trolley lines, 19 new schools between 1908 and 1912, and even, in 1909, a Newark museum.
It was also a city of self-contained neighborhoods. Most of Newark’s 21,000 recent Russian immigrants crowded onto and around Prince Street, the Newark version of New York’s famous Hester Street, but Bernard Berg no longer required the whiff of the old country that kept many immigrants clinging to the slums. By moving to the Christian, middle-class neighborhood of Roseville, he was dispensing wit
h his past and savoring the self-determination he’d come looking for in America. The Bergs weren’t wealthy and they never would be, yet without question Bernard had elevated them.
Once known as Boiling Spring, Roseville was renamed for James Rowe, a stubborn Irish dairy farmer who refused to sell his land to the city until someone thought to grease his vanity with nomenclature. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Roseville was a pretty neighborhood. People went to their jobs, kept up their property, and sat on their stoops in the evening, talking with the family. As the owner of a pharmacy, Bernard was at once chemist and physician. Customers would come into the store and describe their own or their child’s symptoms. If things sounded serious, they were told to see a doctor. Otherwise, Bernard treated the affliction himself. For constipation, he’d put a spoonful of castor oil in a root beer soda, with instructions to drink it up and go straight home without any stops. When a prescription was called for, he went to the rear of the store and ground up the compound in his mortar with a pestle. Over time, people came to trust him, and the drugstore prospered to the point where it became the locus of neighborhood activity. Women sat together gossiping on the long bench near the front door, teenagers ate banana splits and egg creams at the soda fountain, and children came in for penny candy, unlacing their high leather shoes to fish change from their socks. There was a scale where you could weigh yourself, cosmetics and school supplies for sale, and a wooden telephone booth.
The Catcher Was a Spy Page 2