Bernard worked fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. His family communicated with him from the upstairs apartment through a speaking tube. When she wasn’t cooking, bringing down Bernard’s meals from upstairs, washing laundry, or scrubbing her immaculate floors, Rose sat behind the store counter, making change and crocheting. General opinion had it that the Bergs were a little strange. Bernard was rumored to be a semi-Communist, and some people wondered about a Jewish family that never went to temple. Still, they were well liked. For one thing, Bernard often didn’t charge poor families for prescriptions.
“They were so friendly and accommodating,” remembers Eugenia O’Connor, who grew up buying two-cent ice-cream cones from the Bergs. “They were old world people from the other side who seemed so grateful to be here. They were trying to be Americans, to blend right in. They weren’t greedy.”
No, they weren’t. They were ambitious. If Bernard had put his children to work for him, that might have suggested a man interested in swollen profits. Yet, he didn’t do that. Instead, he encouraged them to study. The only times a Berg child was asked to spend any time in the pharmacy were the occasional interludes when Sam pulled out his harmonica. When that happened, he was sent downstairs to play inside the wooden telephone booth.
THE REPORT CARDS Berg brought home from the South Eighth Street public school complained that he sang off key. His parents could overlook this peccadillo, though, because otherwise he was a seamless student. Knowledge came easily and stayed with him, all of it. Moe Berg had a photographic memory. On days when they confronted an unresponsive classroom, Berg’s teachers took to dealing with the languor by calling on him. “Moe, get up,” they would say, and he could be relied upon to rise to his feet and hold forth on the subject of the moment in the low, deliberate way in which he spoke. With his large head, thatch of black hair, soft olive complexion, wistful eyes, and serious mien, he was the sort of child friends of his mother’s would have referred to as “that wonderful little boy.”
Even as a toddler, he loved a game of catch, badgering Sam to toss an apple or an orange with him. A few years later, another favorite companion was patrolman Hibler, who lived across the street from the Bergs in Newark and could sometimes be diverted from his travels around the neighborhood. Hibler was brawny inside his brass-buttoned policeman’s uniform, and fastidious. Carefully he would set aside his derby and then sweat like a thresher as Berg, standing one manhole—twenty feet—down the street, yelled, “Harder, Mr. Hibler! Harder!” When there was nobody around to play with, Berg collected the baseball cards that were sold in cigarette packages—he didn’t ever smoke—and taught himself to juggle three apples. He tried juggling with raw eggs, too, but only once.
Frederick Law Olmsted’s lush, winding Branch Brook Park, with its famous bust of Mendelssohn, wasn’t far from Berg’s house, but he preferred the sandlots. Roseville, still converting from farmland into a residential neighborhood, was full of open spaces. Although baseball players in Roseville had to compete for the grassy tracts with hurling and cricket matches, there was usually just baseball on the vacant lots at North Eleventh Street and Sixth Avenue. Boys would play all day there, and then sometimes set up a gypsy kettle over a fire to cook molasses candy. An empty lot on South Fifteenth Street was another popular makeshift diamond. The land had once belonged to an Italian farmer, and around the neighborhood, the word once the crocuses were purple was “Meet you at the Guinea Farm.” Moe usually played there. Sure hands compensated for the fact that, growing up, he was small for his age. Berg was an excellent fielder always, and fearless. When anyone called him a “Christkiller,” he wasn’t slow with his fists, either.
From the first, baseball made him very happy. Berg couldn’t get enough of the game. He would spend a generous share of his life inside ballparks. He felt comfortable, truly at ease, on the field or in the stands. The famous old New York Giants pitcher “Iron” Joe McGinnity ended his career with the Newark Indians of the International League, and some of the best days of Moe’s childhood were spent seated beside Sam at Weidenmeyer Park, watching the Irishman, then in his early forties, try to nudge his faded fastball past a bunch of teenagers.
On many spring evenings, Moe would creep out of the house with his glove when Bernard would have preferred him to be studying. Over time, Moe grew brazen about it. His father, who knew nothing about American sports, wondered aloud to some of his neighbors whether baseball was a sordid influence on his son. Yet if he thought about it, Bernard had to admit that nothing kept Berg away from school. Once Berg challenged his father to a race from the front of the store to the rear. Bernard would go straight through, while Moe would run around the building. A coal chute had been left outside leaning against the side of the house, and Moe collided with it, tearing cuts up his leg. He insisted upon going to school the next day, and he did, in a wheelbarrow.
Founded in 1838, Barringer High School was the nation’s third oldest free public high school, and probably Newark’s best. By the time he graduated from high school, in 1918 at the age of sixteen, Berg had been awarded a stack of certificates for “attendance,” “deportment,” and “diligent attention to study.” His classmates voted him “Brightest Boy.” He studied Latin and Greek, was awarded a French medal, visited his friend John Jennings every day when Jennings had polio, worked a summer in the shipyards, played basketball, and made his first headlines as a baseball player.
In an article entitled “Here Are the Stars,” the Newark Star-Eagle selected a nine-man “dream team” for 1918, drawn from the city’s best prep and public high school baseball players. “Third base on the mythical team is taken care of by Berg of Barringer,” said the newspaper. “If size were to count in choosing this team, Berg probably would have been overlooked when it came down to a choice for ‘substitute water carrier.’
“But Berg, in spite of his four feet and some odd inches, is a crackerjack in scooping them up around the dangerous corner. He has an arm like a whip and is a steady batter.” In the three years Berg played for Barringer varsity coach “Chief” Broadhead, Berg never once made a throwing error.
Yet for all his accomplishments, he was not a school sensation at Barringer. In part, this was a function of personality. In the high school yearbook, The Acropolis, under Berg’s class photo, appeared a quatrain:
There is a boy who is a star,
Now this might seem quite queer;
Though Morris Berg is smart, you know,
It’s not known when he’s near.
It went further than being withdrawn, however. Barringer was the first of the series of institutions Moe Berg joined during his life where his religion made him unusual. At Barringer, most of his classmates were either poor East Side Italian Catholics or rich Protestants from Forest Hills. Moe saw wealth and he saw misery at Barringer, but he didn’t see many Jews, and that’s how Bernard wanted it.
There were no bar mitzvahs, no confirmations, no formal introduction to Judaism of any sort for Bernard Berg’s children. But they were Jews, of course, and religion affected them in different ways. Sam was full of conflict. Following his father, he would write late in his life that “to be polite, religion is a bunch of equine droppings.” A year before he died, he seemed to soften, writing, “Moe, as Ethel and I, returned to our Jewish faith always, though not to the extent of observing orthodox Judaism. We did not flaunt it, though we were proud of our heritage.” As a grown woman, Ethel solicited advice from a local rabbi and developed an interest in Israel, which she visited. Moe Berg generally made it his policy to distance himself from the religion, a practice he began as a boy, when he adopted the slightly less ethnic pseudonym Runt Wolfe and joined the Roseville Methodist Episcopal Church baseball team. He also spent a lot of time with John Jennings, whose family was Catholic. The Jenningses annually invited Berg over to help trim their Christmas tree, and he sometimes accompanied them to Mass. He particularly liked the midnight service on Christmas Eve. Afterward, he went home with the Jenningses for a
breakfast feast. All his life, Moe would enjoy attending an occasional Sunday service, but it was pleasure of an aesthetic or even recreational variety, rather than any stirrings of Christian faith.
His early interest in the Hebrew language was similarly secular. Moe liked languages, and one day he asked his father how he could learn some Hebrew. “Go see the rabbi,” Bernard told him. Moe did so and reported back, “The rabbi’s talking to me about religion. I want to learn Hebrew.”
“Okay,” said Bernard. “Sit down.” And he taught Berg himself.
3
The Stiff Collar
Most of the 211 members of the Princeton Class of 1923 were the children of wealthy Christians, prep-school graduates who began a typical college morning reading the New York Times, later lunched at an eating club, and finished their day with tie loosened and sleeves folded to the elbow, puffing on a pipe and playing bridge. On weekends they went to football games, perhaps a dance in the evening, and definitely chapel every other Sunday. For Princeton students, attendance at services every other week was mandatory.
It was a little different to be the Newark-bred son of immigrants and “a Hebrew,” as the Class of 1923 yearbook would describe Moe Berg beneath his senior photograph. Berg was never exactly sure how he felt about Princeton. Years later, as an adult, when he talked about college with his friend Ted Sanger, also a Princeton graduate, his classmates were “all those conservative so and sos.” Yet when Jimmy Breslin, a raffish young newspaperman with whom Berg drank Bloody Marys in blowsy New York City bars in the 1950s, would say “to hell with those stuffy bastards,” Berg would be horrified and admonish him, exclaiming, “Oh, no! That’s where you learn to be truly liberal.” Berg found Princeton immensely appealing, but it made him wary as well.
The shortstop on a Princeton baseball team that won eighteen consecutive games during his senior year was also a scholar of distinction, a modern languages major who graduated twenty-fourth in his class. But his notoriety didn’t go much beyond recognition. Nobody at Princeton could honestly claim that they knew him. They knew things about him, that he took copious notes, never carried any books but was always prepared for classes, wore hair tonic, maybe even that he sent his laundry home to his mother in Newark for washing. But he had no intimate friends or even close ones, and he divulged almost nothing about himself to anyone.
After graduating from Barringer High School in the spring of 1918, Berg had entered New York University the following fall at age sixteen. He spent two semesters there, and played basketball and baseball. His NYU transcript is unavailable, but it must have sparkled, because when Berg sent it along with his application to Princeton, he was accepted and enrolled as a freshman in September 1919. He didn’t glance back, never mentioning his year at NYU in conversation or acknowledging that he’d been there on either job or government service applications. He presented himself exclusively as a Princeton man, and that is how the world knew him.
Princeton was a country village in 1920, known affectionately as the University in the Jungle. The isolation and the absence of women made the school’s social institutions loom prominent for all but the most detached students. Bicker, the competition to be among the 60 percent of each class chosen for membership in one of the eighteen eating clubs in the sprawling mansions along Prospect Street, lent intrigue and some hoopla to a sedate setting. This Princeton was largely a hermetic society that thrived on pedigree and rewarded reputations established at prep schools like Andover, Choate, and Lawrenceville. It was a Princeton Berg never penetrated.
He didn’t really have any choice. At the school F. Scott Fitzgerald fondly described as “lazy and good looking and aristocratic,” there were very few men with names that ended in “berg” or “stein.” “I’d say he was a loner,” said Berg’s classmate and double play partner on the baseball team, Crossan Cooper. “He had very few intimate friends. There weren’t many Jewish people at Princeton. As a group they were kind of looked down upon.” Howard Baer, a Jewish member of the Class of 1924, who joined the Cloister Inn, says he felt that he “led a double life there. I was the only Jewish guy in my class that made a club. I was living in two worlds, but it wasn’t easy.” Religious discrimination at the college was so strong that one of Berg’s Jewish classmates pretended to be a Christian. After graduation, when he revealed the truth, “his standing suffered an eclipse,” according to Don Griffin, Class of 1923.
Berg’s situation was much like that of Robert Cohn, the Jewish middleweight boxing champion in The Sun Also Rises, of whom Hemingway writes, “No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton.” Princeton, like Barringer, made Berg aware that he was branded with the mark of a faith he had been raised to resist. Yet Berg made no attempt to hide his Jewishness. When a group of Jewish students decided to hold Friday night services, Berg was asked to preside. Baer says Berg readily agreed. It wasn’t that prejudice was making a believer of him, though. The services were a ruse. Mandatory biweekly attendance at chapel and the absence of Sunday morning rail service from New York and Philadelphia to Princeton meant that, half the time, it was impossible to flee campus for a weekend in the city. But for students who were not Christians, an exception was made. “The weekend problem,” says Baer, “was solved!”
Berg was the rare Jew invited to join an eating club. Yet the offer came with a caveat: he was welcome so long as he did not press for the admission of any other Jews. Berg declined. His cousin Elizabeth Shames remembers Berg describing the situation. “When his name was coming up, he left campus and went home,” she says. “I said, why? He said you had to be there for your name to come up. He said, ‘I was too proud of being a Jew to allow them to bandy my name about.’ He said this with intensity.”
The Princeton where Berg felt comfortable was the Princeton that stood as one of the nation’s best academic institutions. To other students, he seemed a little shy. “He was not unfriendly,” says Griffin. “He had a certain reserve about him, but he was extremely courteous. There was never a time when he didn’t regard traditions. But he was so devoted to scholarship and his interest in languages that he didn’t have time for the life of the campus.”
Berg was a superior student. Foreign languages were what interested him, and by the time he received his B.A. degree, magna cum laude in modern languages, he had studied seven of them at Princeton: Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Sanskrit. He did well with each, except during an unaccountably moribund second junior semester, when he nearly failed German and dropped Spanish. To that point, both had come easily to him, so perhaps his mind was elsewhere. He impressed some of the university’s finest instructors—Christian Gauss, his adviser, who taught him the French romantics; J. Duncan Spaeth, the famous Shakespeare lecturer; the classics professor Edmund Robbins; and especially Harold Bender, the chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures, who offered courses in German, Sanskrit, and linguistic science.
Developing his lifelong zest for eclectic knowledge, Berg found himself engaged by all manner of subjects, from the satires of Juvenal and Dryden to economic conditions in eighteenth-century France to Petrarch’s sonnets to Boccaccio’s Decameron, and mathematics, philosophy, and biology besides. He didn’t enroll in the last, but he attended lectures on the side, because his brother, Sam, studying medicine in New York City, “told me to.”
His moods varied. As a junior, during exams, he complained in a terse letter home that the work was “hard.” He could also be testy with himself, writing elsewhere, “I am a great procrastinator and it will get me into trouble some day.” At other times, however, he sounded pluckier. To his family he declared, “I’m feeling fine and rather ambitious now. My studies take up most of my time, but I find enough leisure moments to play ball.” Berg’s letters home were littered with descriptions of courses, critiques of professors, and classroom bon mots. He traveled to football games in New Haven, attended the Triangle cabaret show,
occasionally went home to Newark for dinner with the family, joined the Whig Hall debating society, and played in the class baseball championships.
Bernard Berg still wasn’t interested in baseball, and he thought it high time for his son to put away his childish things. But Moe Berg was more drawn to sports than ever, and couldn’t resist saying so. Thus he regaled a man who’d grown up walking through the fields outside a small Ukrainian country village with tales of the Princeton football team’s heartbreaking loss to Navy—“an example of how much our opponents like to beat us.” Not only had Bernard raised a partisan Princetonian, his son was also developing into the best baseball player in the school’s history.
Berg played basketball during his first three winters at Princeton. He was, of course, a fine athlete, and had grown. He had filled out to a willowy six foot one, so he handled himself adequately, but it was in the spring that he excelled. As a freshman, he played first base on an undefeated team. The following spring he became the varsity shortstop, starting every game there for the Tigers over the next three years. The Princeton coach was Bill “Boileryard” Clarke, a witty, profane man who’d played with John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson on the hardscrabble Baltimore Oriole teams of the mid-1890s. Clarke told Berg that he ran so slowly that he’d “get to first base just as fast wearing snowshoes,” and the coach was right; Berg was a hopeless plodder. He compensated in the field, though, with a strong, accurate throwing arm and with what can only be called sound baseball instincts. The best infielders sense the path of the ball before it is struck, and Berg did that. Howard Baer, a lifelong baseball enthusiast, remembers Berg in a game against Yale, floating into shallow left field, behind the third baseman, to spear a line drive as “one of the two greatest plays I’ve ever seen.” The other was Enos Slaughter’s famous sprint home from first on a single in the 1946 World Series.
The Catcher Was a Spy Page 3