"Something on My Own": Gertrude Berg and American broadcasting, 1929-1956.(Book review)

Smith, G., Jr. (2007). "Something on My Own": Gertrude Berg and American broadcasting, 1929-1956. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. 293 pages.

Gertrude Edelstein Berg, whose public image became interchangeable with that of Molly Goldberg, the quintessential Jewish mother whom Berg played in radio and television, was known as the "First Lady of Television" at the mid-point of the twentieth century. Yet few remember her today, thanks in part to the McCarthy era blacklist that tarnished her program, The Goldbergs, based on her family's own experiences as struggling immigrants living on New York's Lower East Side. Berg's extraordinary career as the creator, writer, producer and star of her own shows was reduced after her death in 1966, at the age of 65, to a collection of her papers at Syracuse University. Fortunately, Smith, an assistant professor at Mississippi State University, discovered this treasure throve, and has resurrected Berg in a succinct biography based on his dissertation which won the annual Blanchard prize for excellence from the American Journalism Historians Association.

Smith deals competently with a multitude of themes--the struggle of an ambitious woman to achieve in her own right, the use of ethnic humor over the airwaves, the rise of commercial radio followed by television, changing patterns of sponsorship and programming within the broadcasting industry, and the damage inflicted on vulnerable individuals by Congressional witch-hunting of alleged communists during the 1950s. What emerges is an insightful story of one remarkable woman's presence in American broadcasting from 1929, the year that Berg began her popular radio serial, The Rise of the Goldbergs, to 1956, when the television version of The Goldbergs finally failed in a syndicated film format. Ironically, only a few years before, from 1949 to 1951, Berg had won the "first lady" title as one of the most celebrated performers on television when The Goldbergs starred as CBS's primetime showpiece.

The program's rapid demise came after Berg put up a valiant but unsuccessful fight to keep her costar Philip Loeb on the show in spite of his being investigated for alleged subversive activities by the Senate Internal Security Committee. At the same time, The Goldbergs lost favor with network executives who did not want to appear to be "too Jewish," and viewers lost interest in urban ethnic settings as they trekked to the suburbs with their homogenous life style. Nevertheless, during its heyday, the influence of The Goldbergs had been striking, leading to a lessening of anti-Semitic feeling as listeners and viewers were drawn to the universal human values symbolized by the problems of Mollie Goldberg and her family, treated in a comedic vein. Broadcast on NBC and CBS from 1936 to 1945, its radio version was second only in popularity to Amos 'N' Andy, the all-time top comedy hit.

Berg herself became a celebrity, appearing on stage and in films based chiefly on her identity as the hard-pressed Mollie, although in reality she enjoyed a luxuriant lifestyle. Smith deftly sketches the details of Berg's life which included limited formal education, an apprenticeship in writing to entertain customers at her father's struggling Catskill hotel, an enduring marriage to a successful engineer, who encouraged her career, and her relationship with her two children. The book would make excellent supplementary reading for broadcasting classes.

Maurine H. Beasley (Ph.D. George Washington University) is a professor of journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland College Park. Her research interests include the role of women within the history of mass media.

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