Snow in August

The year is 1947, and a young man named Jackie Robinson is preparing for his major-league debut with the Dodgers. Meanwhile, in an Italian and Irish Catholic working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, 11-year-old Michael Devlin makes friends with a Czech emigre, rabbi Judah Hirsch. The two companions exchange more than lessons in English and Yiddish, as Michael's world of baseball, comic-book heroes, and movie stars meets the rabbi's centuries-old legends of Prague. Lifelong journalist and current editor in chief of the New York Daily News, Pete Hamill writes with snap and humor in Snow in August, from Michael's first dry mouthful of matzo (''A Hershey bar it's not,'' says the rabbi) to Hirsch's unforgettable first visit to Ebbets Field. A