(2009) Yoo-hoo, Gertrude Berg, who are you? Before watching director/writer/producer Aviva Kempner's biographical documentary of one of America's foremost female pioneers in television, the inventor of the sitcom with the broadcasting in January 1949 of The Goldbergs, for which she wrote the scripts and played the lead role of Molly, which "paved the way for Lucille Ball" and all the others since, I could not have said anything about her.

Born in 1898 as Tilly Edelstein, she began writing sketches and playlets for entertainment during inclement weather in her father's hotel in New York. As a teenager she met a young scholar from London, Lewis Berg, who encouraged her to read literature and study the arts and culture; they married and moved to Louisiana where Lewis worked on a sugar plantation. Returning to New York City after the plantation burned down, she never again left the city.

Beginning with reading in Yiddish (a language she did not know) a cookie commercial on radio, she composed a script for a single episode of two progressive women, Effie and Laura, which in 1929 led to NBC's airing The Rise of the Goldbergs, a middleclass immigrant family - buxom and hippy Molly, the epitome of a positive, modern Jewish mother; her husband Jake; and their two children, Seymour and Rosalie - set in the Bronx, which became "a big, fat hit," second only to Amos 'n' Andy, acceptable and popular in a WASP world.

In a talent swipe, CBS hired her away from NBC. Playing Toselli's Serenade for the program's theme music, insisting on realism (e.g., featuring a real rabbi for an episode of seder), employing courage and humor in the face of Father Coughlin's anti-Semitism at home and the rise of Nazism in Germany, Gertrude was "the Oprah of her day," according to NPR's Susan Stamberg; some have attributed to President Roosevelt the declamation that she "got us out of the Depression."

But Molly's idealized family, according to her grandchildren and her biographer, Dr Glenn Smith Jr, Gertrude dreamed up from a dark childhood. A "brilliant businesswoman" - second only to Eleanor Roosevelt as the most respected female in the US (but earning more than the president's wife) - always appearing in public as "an elegant Park Avenue lady" "dressed to the nines," in 1945 after suffering the loss of her father Jake and the end of her radio program, she wrote a stage play, Me and Molly, as a vehicle to enter television.

The Goldbergs, "our American family," was aired live on TV, pitching Sanka coffee for General Foods: Molly (a mother with solutions to other people's problems) leans out the window, talking with two neighbor women in an air shaft; inside are her big-hearted husband Jake (Philip Loeb), Uncle David (Eli Mintz), son Sammy (Larry Robinson), and daughter Rosalie (Arlene McQuade); its comedy rose out of a lack of privacy and malapropisms. Among those making guest appearances were Steve McQueen and Anne Bancroft. Gertrude was presented with television's first Best Actress Emmy award.

But in the shameful period of McCarthyism, Loeb was targeted in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television as a communist (based on Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb's testifying) and blacklisted; and in September 1950 when Gertrude refused to drop him from the show, General Foods canceled sponsorship. (Loeb, who later committed suicide, was portrayed by Zero Mostel in The Front.)

Cardinal Spellman offered to intervene on condition that Gertrude convert to Catholicism. In 1952 she returned to NBC with a replacement for Jake's character, but with a move to the suburbs in 1955, achieving the post-World War American dream, the program came an end.

Following work in summer stock and writing a cookbook, she received a Tony award for her performance in A Majority of One on Broadway in 1959, but was passed over (in favor of Rosalind Russell) for the movie role. Sometimes dictatorial, throwing tantrums over scripts (of which she wrote 12,000), demanding perfectionist standards of herself, she also helped to break the blacklist in December 1959, taking part (having herself been regarded as a communist sympathizer) in the off-Broadway play The World of Sholom Aleichem among other blacklisted actors. She died in 1966.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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