Viva Aviva

The “Oprah” before Oprah Winfrey

By Brian Truitt

Producer and actress Gertrude Berg, as the character Molly Goldberg in CBS’s 1949 sitcom “The Goldbergs.” Courtesy of International Film Circuit/Family Collection

Can you imagine if we didn’t know who Oprah Winfrey was in 50 years? Neither can local filmmaker Aviva Kempner. Yet her newest documentary looks at the life of Gertrude Berg, a woman who broke stereotypes, used her celebrity for good, and whose name—if you’re not a baby boomer—is likely unfamiliar.

The tagline for “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is “[t]he most famous person in America you’ve never heard of,” and its lead actress enjoyed Oprah-esque popularity back in the mid-20th century. A Jewish actress, producer and writer, Berg came to prominence first in 1929 with her radio show “The Rise of the Goldbergs,” then took it to another level in 1949 with her CBS sitcom “The Goldbergs.” Everybody knew her as mother Molly Goldberg, yelling “Yoo-hoo!” out the window of her Bronx apartment to neighbors and her adoring audience. We might think of Kramer from “Seinfeld” as perfecting the comedic element of entering an apartment, but it’s Berg, as Kempner, 62, points out, who pioneered that and other aspects that went into such iconic shows as “I Love Lucy,” “The Honeymooners” and “Friends.”

“What was also great was that it was a very positive Jewish family at a time when things were so tough for Jews and of course, what was happening with Hitler,” Kempner says. “But it was universal. People lived with their family members; oftentimes the family members had accents, and she had an incredible appeal.”

So why isn’t Berg, who was a New Yorker from her 1899 birth to her 1966 death, better known? For one, Kempner says, women’s roles in early TV and cinema have never received the credit they deserved. Plus, we often don’t remember pioneers, she says. Third, the Hollywood blacklist affected her greatly in the 1950s when her co-star Phillip Loeb came under fire and she used her celebrity to help him. That was Berg’s way, Kempner says: During World War II, she would speak for war bonds and, when no one else would show anything Holocaust-related on radio or TV, she did time and time again. “I really commend her for that,” Kempner says. “My aunt and my grandparents died in Auschwitz, so of course I want to make a film about a woman who spoke up about it.”

Profiling lesser-known Jewish heroes is Kempner’s forte—she released the acclaimed “Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” in 1999, about the 1930s Detroit Tigers slugger and baseball’s first Jewish star. Kempner was born in Berlin to a U.S. soldier and a Holocaust survivor, grew up in Detroit, moved to Washington for law school—“Thanks to the D.C. bar, I’m a filmmaker,” she’ll joke—and was inspired to make a film about Jews fighting Nazis, “Partisans of Vilna.” She founded The Ciesla Foundation, named for her grandparents, in 1981, partly to make these movies that educate the public about social issues of the past and present. Many of her crew members for “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” are Northern Virginians, as are many of the Ciesla Foundation donors, including Ted Leonsis, former AOL Time Warner, strategic advisor George Vradenburg and Tysons Corner developer Ted Lerner.

Kempner’s already looking at topics for her next film, from Navajo activist Larry Casuse to the turn-of-the-century black Rosenwald schools to labor leader Samuel Gompers. “I live very much in the future, but creatively I go to the past,” she says. “There were great challenges in the 20th century, and it’s just really important for us not to forget our heroes and bring them alive.”

(August 2009)