Arts & Entertainment

Television Pioneer

A documentary examines the life of Gertrude Berg,
the driving force behind TV's The Goldbergs.

Marissa Brostoff
Special to the Jewish News

New York (Tablet Magazine)

B

efore there was Lucille Ball, there
was Gertrude Berg. On the same
network, in fact: Berg's show,
The Goldbergs, aired in primetime on
CBS-TV when Ball's antics were still con-
fined to the network's radio station. But
while Lucy is constantly in reruns, Berg
— who, according to former Detroiter
Aviva Kempner's new documentary, Yoo
Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, virtually invented the
sitcom — is nowhere to be found.
"My whole MO is making films about
under-known Jewish heroes," Kempner
said in an interview with Tablet. "In
Partisans of Vilna, it's about the Jews who
fought back against the Nazis. In Hank

Greenberg, it's sort of the counterexample
to the nebbishy Jewish hero."
Berg is certainly little known to all but
the oldest generation of today's television
viewers, thanks to her absence from the air-
waves since the early 1960s. But Kempner
also makes a convincing argument that
Berg was a kind of hero — a hilarious,
empathic writer, actress and business-
woman who elevated the already-maligned
figure of the Jewish mother to the bustling,
beaming center of her own world.
Tilly Edelstein, the future Gertrude Berg,
was born in 1898 on New York City's Lower
East Side. In the summers, the Edelsteins
ran Fleischmann's, a Catskills resort, where
young Tilly's tasks included putting on
plays with the guests on rainy days. She
married at 18 and moved for a time to
Louisiana, where her engineer husband
was helping to invent instant coffee.

But by 1929, she had launched her own
career with The Rise of the Goldbergs,
a series she penned for New York radio
about a Jewish family not unlike her own.
In a mildly Oedipal gesture, the father
character shared a name with Berg's own
father, Jacob, while Berg voiced Molly, the
family matriarch.
The Goldbergs ("The Rise of" was
quickly dropped) became the No. 2 show
on radio after Amos Andy, but while the
latter is famous for its wild caricatures of
blacks, who were voiced on the show by
white actors, the former realistically por-
trayed urban Jewish life.
Every morning, Kempner says, Berg
went down to the Lower East Side with a
notepad to gather material. In 1933, she
conducted an entire seder on the air.
In 1949, Berg adapted her show for
television, creating the sitcom that brought

her to the peak of her fame. Despite the
show's obscurity today, the image of
aproned Molly Goldberg kibitzing in the
window — and, often as not, trying to sell
the television audience vitamins or knives
— has become iconic.
"The apartment with people constantly
coming in and out, the product placement,
are industry standards now," Kempner
said. She pointed to Seinfeld and Friends
as shows that employ the former; as for
the latter, Berg wasn't just marketing
instant coffee but also her own lines of
dresses, toys, comic books and cookbooks.
"She had a media empire:' screenwriter
Margaret Nagle says in the film. "She
was the Oprah of her day." (TV producer
Norman Lear, Supreme Court justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg and NPR special cor-
respondent Susan Stamberg also make
appearances in the film.)

TV Pioneer on page 40

August 13 2009

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