The Catcher Was a Spy

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg is a 1994 biography written by Nicholas Dawidoff about a major league baseball player who also worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Moe Berg, the subject of the book, was an enigmatic person who hid much of his private life from those who knew him and who spent his later decades as a jobless drifter living off the good will of friends and relatives. The book spent seven weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, which described the biography as "The life of Moe Berg, big-league catcher, O.S.S. agent, lady's man, and freeloader." Book summary Early years Berg was born in 1902 to a Jewish couple that lived in New York City, not far from the Polo Grounds, the home of the New York Giants baseball team. His father, Bernard Berg, was a pharmacist who emigrated from Ukraine in part to escape from what he considered to be the oppressive nature of an almost entirely Jewish village. Berg's mother, Rose Tashker, was also a Ukrainian Jew. She was engaged to Bernard prior to his emigration. The couple, along with their three children lived in the Harlem section of New York City until 1906 when Bernard Berg bought a pharmacy in West Newark, New Jersey. Subsequently, the family moved to the Roseville section of Newark.