So much more than a hausfrau

If Semitic sitcom star Gertrude Berg had merely portrayed radio and TV’s first baleboste, that would have been enough (Dayenu!). Had Gertrude Berg merely been a female writer/producer in a male-dominated world of early radio and TV, that also would have been enough (Dayenu!). But Gertrude Berg was all these things: a sitcom star, a prolific writer and a strong-willed producer. Documentarian Aviva Kempner (The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg) reclaims Berg’s place in TV history by lovingly and exhaustively itemizing the successes and difficulties of her pioneering career. The doc is nicely mounted and will score with TV nostalgia buffs and those interested in Jewish-American history, but its financial prospects are best realized by the likes of PBS.

Kempner has a juicy subject in Berg, whose story strafes early-to-mid-20th century issues like immigrant assimilation, early Jewish success in Hollywood and the Blacklist. But the spine of the subject is the groundbreaking days of radio and television, when today’s clichés were yesterday’s fresh ideas. Berg’s decades-spanning creation was the fictitious Goldberg family, whose surname combined her mother’s maiden name (Goldstein) with her husband’s last name (Berg). Its first iteration was The Rise of the Goldbergs, which debuted on NBC radio in November 1929. Unlike the characters of Amos ‘n’ Andy, a more popular radio program where White actors affected an insulting African-American dialect, The Goldbergs was a homey Jewish sitcom family who faced the problems of real pre-WWII immigrants. Berg played the show’s motherly and meddlesome Jewish matriarch, Molly, who was introduced as “a woman with a place in every heart and a finger in every pie.” The elders kept their Yiddish accents. The children, one generation closer to assimilation, talked with more Americanized accents. When the radio program moved to CBS in the 1930’s it was rechristened The Goldbergs. But Berg, who wrote every episode, made sure the matronly Molly presided over serious subjects alongside the usual family froth. In one 1933 broadcast, a real rabbi conducted a Passover seder. In another, the family hinted at friends trying to escape the Holocaust. Much of this radio material still exists and Kempner includes decent-sized snippets.

Kempner’s b-roll is fairly standard (shots of Eisenhower-era families sitting around the radio and that sort of thing) and the talking heads are okay, lead by producer Norman Lear and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The director makes ample use of Berg’s wonderful interview with Edward R. Murrow, which represents the only first person insight we get from Berg. There are also numerous photos of Gertrude and her family in their younger years, the better to tell the story of her childhood. The daughter of a Catskills resort owner, Gertrude’s creativity was sparked by writing and directing sketches to occupy young guests at the resort during rainy weather. When her father Jake wanted Gertrude to run a second hotel in Florida she refused, citing a desire to do something on her own. Jake did not approve of Gertrude’s career, but her husband Lewis did. They met when Gertrude was 13. They married when she was 18. After their Louisiana sugar plantation burned down, they returned to New York where Gertrude made her acting debut speaking phonetic Yiddish in a commercial for Christmas cookies.

Although Kempner doesn’t establish however difficult it was for women to become writer/producers back then, it’s safe to say her career was unique. It’s also safe to say she didn’t shy away from the challenge. If you include The Goldbergs’ lengthy TV run, which began in 1949, Berg wrote over 12,000 TV and radio scripts during her career. She was also stubborn to the point of heroism. The film’s most memorable passage sees Berg standing up for Philip Loeb, who played Molly’s husband on the TV series. After Loeb was named in the Red Channels pamphlet of supposed Communist sympathizers, sponsor General Foods gave Berg two days to fire him. Berg courageously told General Foods she’d go public with their cowardice, which worked, but probably led CBS to eventually cancel the series. Loeb, a good friend of fellow blacklisted actor Zero Mostel, would later commit suicide.

Berg, who won the very first Best Actress Emmy Award, turned The Goldbergs into a cottage industry that spawned a movie, jigsaw puzzles, a comic strip and a cookbook. But by the mid ’50s the series was running on fumes on NBC, where it was cancelled and replaced by I Love Lucy. The show’s waning seasons saw the family living comfortably in the suburbs, assimilation complete. And maybe after World War II, that’s what TV audiences wanted to see. But they didn’t want to see it from the Goldbergs, a very Jewish family with very Yiddish accents dealing with very real problems. Gertrude was a progressive voice during a non-progressive time. She was a feminist years removed from suffrage, but years away from Women’s Lib. Yet Kempner’s doc about her is not a feminist tract. It’s an appreciation of an underappreciated life and career. And it makes the domestic silliness of I Love Lucy seem downright insulting to women. Indeed, the next time you watch sitcoms like Maude or Roseanne, imagine there’s an apron-clad baleboste smiling from above and voicing her approval with, as she’d say, “all the letters of the alphabet.”

Distributor: International Film Circuit
Director/Producer: Aviva Kempner
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 92 min.
Release date: July 10 NY, July 17 DC, July 24 LA