‘Baseball, Nazis & Nedick’s Hot Dogs’ Is a Story of Fathers, Sons, and a Lost America

Jerry Izenberg is the closest we can come to a time traveler. He was born in 1930, not only long before iPhones but more than 20 years before direct dialing. In the 92 years since, he’s written thousands of columns and a dozen books, covered 54 Kentucky Derbies, five Triple Crown-winners, and the first 53 Super Bowls.Yet Mr. Izenberg remains at heart a kid from Newark. His memoir, “Baseball, Nazis & Nedick’s Hot Dogs: Growing up Jewish in the 1930s in Newark,” begins where his amazing life did, he writes, “when Harry Izenberg and Sadye Weiser Izenberg threw back the covers, put their arms around each other, and created me.”Had either “begged off with a headache,” Mr. Izenberg says, “I wouldn’t be here and neither would this book.” This laugh is followed by another — what may be the world’s only first-person account of a bris told from the baby boy’s perspective — and as a reader, I was hooked.Hooked is what Mr. Izenberg got on the Newark Bears and baseball’s New York Giants at a young age, listening to games on his dad’s Philco radio. “Telling my father to talk about baseball,” he said in our “History Author Show” interview, “was like giving my first wife a valid credit card.”The Philco, Mr. Izenberg says, “has got to be the strongest machine ever,” for all the times his father punctuated strikeouts and wild pitches by banging it with his fist. The porch was a baseball sanctuary for father and son, even one evening when a rabbi — not family friend, Dr. Joachim Prinz, who knew better — came seeking a favor.“Not now,” the elder Izenberg replied. “Mel Ott is coming to bat with men on base.” Mr. Izenberg writes that he’s “convinced to this day that if the Messiah had actually come to 80 Shanley Avenue and said, ‘Harry, we need to talk because the time is near,’ my old man would have looked at his Philco, looked at the Messiah, and said, ‘Can’t it wait five minutes? Mel Ott is coming to bat.’”An immigrant and World War I veteran left deaf in one ear, Mr. Izenberg’s father was also a second baseman who “didn’t even think about what was ahead when the calendar caught him.” He never made the big leagues, but showed natural talent the first time he picked up a bat, which helped him assimilate with the neighborhood kids and onto teams where he was often the only Jewish player.“Baseball, Nazis & Nedick’s Hot Dogs,” as the title says, also covers how the family followed the rise of Adolf Hitler. At one point, the young Mr. Izenberg asked what the family had to fear. Weren’t the Nazis far from the Brick City, an ocean away in Berlin? “No, no,” his father replied. “They’re here.”Mr. Izenberg’s father took him to a movie theater to see a newsreel of Madison Square Garden festooned in swastikas for the fascist German American Bund’s rally. “Me and my sister,” the future Newark Star-Ledger columnist says, “were the only two kids in the state of New Jersey, I’m sure, who knew what the Reichstag was, where it was, and who burned it, because we talked about Hitler and the Nazis and the Bund almost every night.”Mr. Izenberg’s father softened the moment by offering to take his son to Nedick’s for hotdogs. Only, the boy responded, if he could get an orange soda, the trademark drink of the popular chain, which opened in 1913, toasting buns until 1981 when it, too, passed into history.Mr. Izenberg also recalls what the fight between America’s Black boxer, Joe Lewis, and his German opponent, Max Schmeling, meant to the family. At the time, the Izenbergs believed Schmeling was a Nazi, but Mr. Izenberg got to know both fighters, and learned how Schmeling had enraged Hitler by refusing his overtures.“Baseball, Nazis & Nedick’s Hot Dogs” is the origin story of a great American sportswriter who, although inducted into 17 halls of fame, is forever fixed in time on his father’s porch in Newark, refusing to let the calendar catch him and asking God to hold off calling him home, because he still has innings left to play.“Baseball, Nazis & Nedick’s Hot Dogs: Growing up Jewish in the 1930s in Newark.”Jerry IzenbergThe Sager Group LLC, 198 pages

‘Baseball, Nazis & Nedick’s Hot Dogs’ Is a Story of Fathers, Sons, and a Lost America

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