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From Prague To Park Slope: In Pete Hamill's new novel, a golem, a `Shabbos goy' and a magical team called the Dodgers.
ERIC J. GREENBERG
Staff Writer
It's December 1946. World War II veterans are struggling to return to a normal life in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Jackie Robinson has yet to shatter baseball's racial barrier and transform a nation. Captain Marvel is still beating Superman as America's most popular comic book hero.
And in Brooklyn, residents are being pummeled by the worst snowstorm in the borough's history.
On the blizzard-stricken streets of the working-class Park Slope section, Michael Devlin, an 11-year-old Irish Catholic altar boy is wrestling with his conscience. Should he come to the aid of the local synagogue's new rabbi, a lonely Holocaust survivor from Prague, and risk reprisal from anti-Semitic neighborhood toughs?
With this rich backdrop, New York newspaper icon Pete Hamill transports readers 50 years back in time to explore the timeless themes of friendship, love and irrational hatred in his latest novel "Snow in August" (Little Brown) published this week.
The story is magical, literally, as Hamill weaves a tender tale that links a young Catholic boy's fascination with Captain Marvel's magic word "Shazam!" to the centuries-old Jewish magic of the Kabbalah and the mystical golem.
But the sentimental plot is also rooted in the reality of the American immigrant experience, a subject dear to Hamill, who after a lifetime in New York newspapers was recently named the Daily News' new editor-in-chief. The book follows his bestselling memoir "A Drinking Life."
In his latest book, young Michael uses newspapers, big-band music, and baseball (Hamill's beloved Brooklyn Dodgers) to teach the refugee rabbi how to be an American. In return the rabbi uses Yiddish and ancient wisdom to teach Michael about life.
"There's a whole theme in the book about language and the magic of words," Hamill says during an interview last week with The Jewish Week. "Human beings are the creatures that name things."
The novel cuts between Michael's gritty Irish-Italian Brooklyn neighborhood and the devastated Jewish ghetto of Rabbi Judah Hirsch's war-torn Prague. Then it seamlessly reaches even farther back to the mysterious 16th-century world of kabbalistic...