Well whaddya know?! Not only does Jewnion Label have a guild for Yiddishe Mammes like me, it has made a little promo film about (or, rather a recruitment film aimed at) those of us who make our children call when they get there, worry whether they have eaten enough, and always ask them whether they are wearing a sweater. It’s nice to be in the spotlight for once.
© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.
This post first appeared as “Gertrude Berg, My Inspiration” on The Sisterhood blog in the Forward. Click here to read it there.
Gertrude Berg when she started out in radio.
Gertrude Berg left this world at the age of 68 on September 14, 1966, two months to the day before I entered it. I’d like to think that maybe our souls met one another in a possible netherworld between life and death. I imagine that the departed Berg whispered something in my fetal ear — planted a seed — that would come to fruition exactly 43 years later, when I sat down last September at my laptop and wrote my first blog post as a first step on the path to a new career in journalism.
Actually, I thought it was Berg’s dramatic alter ego Molly Goldberg, and not Berg herself, who was my muse. After all, it was Molly’s photo that I put on my blog’s header. It was in homage to Molly, the quintessential Jewish mother, that I assumed the persona of “The Gen X Yiddishe Mamme.”
However, since recently reading Berg’s 1961 memoir, “Molly and Me” (co-authored by her son Cherney Berg), and viewing Aviva Kempner’s documentary film, “Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!” — the DVD was released this week, and is reviewed here — I realized that I have even more to learn from and be inspired by Berg than I do the Jewish uber-balebuste character she inhabited for nearly 30 years that “The Goldbergs” ran on radio and TV. (The radio version was called “The Rise of the Goldbergs.”)
It was Berg who was ultimately far more of an interesting character. Unlike Molly —an impossibly great cook, attentive parent, loving wife and loyal friend and neighbor — Berg was a real person with real faults. It’s not as though Berg didn’t possess some or all of Molly’s positive qualities, it’s just that she didn’t lead an existence in which all loose ends were tied up and problems solved at the end of every episode.
But don’t think that Berg didn’t try to make us think that her life played itself out like Molly’s. Not only did she make public appearances as Molly (à la Stephen Colbert) but she also recounted the story of her life as though it were a sitcom. Her autobiography is not so much of a memoir as it is a collection of beautifully crafted short stories and sketches about the real-life characters who served as inspiration for the fictional characters that populated the thousands of shows she wrote. Other than the occasional short-lived bout of garden-variety anxiety or self-doubt, Berg presented her life as consistently rosy and invariably amusing.
Not once did she make mention of an older brother who died in childhood of diptheria, and all references to her mother ended after the chapters recounting Berg’s teenage years spent at her parent’s hotel in the Catskills. A product of her era and without the benefit of hindsight, Berg did not understand how much more she would have been appreciated by Jewish women of future generations had she revealed the hardships she endured, including her mother’s downward spiral into mental illness and eventual institutionalization.
It is Berg, far more than Molly, who would capture the attention and gain the admiration of mothers today. Molly was the exemplary — yet typical — immigrant who struggled to rise to the middle class and raise first-generation American children, and it was because of this that so many listeners and viewers identified with her. But it was Berg who uniquely managed to build a remarkable creative and business career at a time when very few women were doing so. She paved the way for women, and also Jews, in American society.
When I look at my blog’s header, I now see both Molly Goldberg and Gertrude Berg. Molly Goldberg was a woman of her times. Gertrude Berg was a woman before her time. I am a woman of my time who is grateful to them both.
© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.
This post was published today as “The Implication of Being Jewish and Childless by Choice” on The Sisterhood blog of The Forward. Click here to read it there.
Somehow, I am not surprised that just as I find myself at what has for me been the hardest stage of parenting (working mom with three boys, ages 9, 14 and 16), studies are showing that fewer women are choosing to be mothers.
A recently released Pew Research Center study shows that a quarter of American women in my age and demographic group (40-44 , with an advanced academic degree) are childless. While that percentage is down from 31% in 1994, there is evidence that choice, and not just infertility, is involved.
The recent report cited a 2007 poll, showing that 41% of respondents felt that children were essential to a successful marriage, down from 65% in 1990. A recent, much-talked-about article in New York magazine titled, “All Joy and No Fun,” covered the supposed revelation that parenting is hard and captured the zeitgeist of today’s young parents hating to be parents.
While I view this change in numbers — and more importantly attitudes — as a shift for women, I also see it as one for Jews. Half a generation after I married and began having children, more young women think that the economic expense and drag on personal fulfillment that come with having kids are legitimate reasons for having fewer, if any, babies. While I don’t think that this is a primary consideration for most young Jewish women, I do think that they are unburdened by a religious and national procreative responsibility that my cohort shouldered.
Growing up in Jewish day schools and spending time in Israel learning about the Holocaust, and even being taught by Holocaust survivors, we perceived a clear directive on doing our part to carry the Jewish people forward. Pru u’rvu (Be fruitful and multiply), Am yisrael chai (The People of Israel Lives), and “Never Again!” combined with one another to create a potent message.
Then, not too many years later, I arrived as a newlywed at the Jewish Theological Seminary for graduate studies in the immediate wake of the release of the National Jewish Population Survey in 1990. That was the study that sounded major alarms in the Jewish community and seared the notion of “Jewish continuity” and all its attendant desperation into our consciousnesses.
This double-whammy, together with my innate desire to be a parent, resulted in my husband’s and my welcoming our first child just one week after my 28th birthday. From recent conversations I have had with several of my former students from my days of teaching in New York day schools, it sounds like things are different for them. They are not taking any calculations other than the personal kind into consideration.
“[Having children] is important because I love children and want a family, and having children is a big part of life,” said one of these young women — now the same age I was when I was rushing home from her 5th grade classroom to be with my newborn.
“I don’t really think my Jewish identity factors into this,” she continued, noting that community and raising children in the Jewish faith are important to her, but being Jewish is not the reason why she would like two or three children.
“While my mother has always said that all Jewish women should have three children in order to deal with Jewish continuity and numbers, I think the numbers have more to do with simple family math and affordability,” explained another of my former students.
Caught in the middle, between the generation of these young women and that of their mothers, I identify with both. I admire my former students for being more level-headed than I was about the costs of parenting. But at the same time, I cannot but be concerned about what this will mean for future generations of the Jewish people.
© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.
