YO HO, MRS. GOLDBERG!

Friday is our traditional night for pizza. It became a tradition for TLW (The Little Woman) when she was a stay at home mom, and wanted a night off from cooking. I’m glad it was pizza and not chopped liver! She would order the pizza and she was done!

One recent Friday, in the spirit of our pizza tradition, TLW decided we would watch a Netflix DVD while we ate. What does she pull out but a retrospective of Molly Goldberg! Some of you may not know Molly, but she was an icon to mother’s in the early 50’s, a symbol of Jewish culture in this country, and a reminder that we are all humans, sharing the same earth.

Molly Goldberg (Her real name was Gertrude Berg) had this situation comedy that was the forerunner of Lucille Ball’s I Love Lucy show. There were wonderful actors (Philip Loeb) who populated the show and gave one an insight into the lives of Jewish families in America. Keep in mind, in the 50’s; people were just starting to emerge from the cultural cocoons of their ethnicity. Italians were mingling with Jewish or Eastern Europeans peoples and Irish and German mixed in with everyone as an interwoven thread in the fabric of our collective lives.

But the show that began when a neighbor calls out from across the way from her apartment window: “Yo Ho, Mrs. Goldberg!” was a calling to me to watch and be prepared to enjoy an evening with the Goldberg’s. She would talk to her neighbor, then maybe talk to the audience and proceed to live her life for the next half hour.

The DVD brought me back in time. The clothing she wore was my grandmother’s dress and apron. The apron was a symbol of warmth and comfort, and she cooked great simple Italian dishes. My grandmother didn’t own a cookbook: she cooked from the heart. She was a master! Jake, Molly’s husband, was the epitome of the immigrant husband, and it didn’t matter what the language was he spoke, to his wife it always came out: “Yes dear” with a little argument, just to show her he was listening!


The Senate committee, investigating communism in the government and Hollywood, accused Philip Loeb, the fine actor who portrayed Jake, of being a Communist. General Foods, the sponsor of the show demanded that he be fired. Gertrude Berg kept Philip Loeb on the payroll at full salary. He was, and Gertrude Berg went on a campaign to re-instate him. Loeb denied he ever was a communist, and because of the blacklisting, took his own life one day, back in 1951 or 1952.

But with a traditional dinner of pizza, a traditional wife and memories that flooded my mind, I enjoyed myself for a while!

Yo Ho, Mrs. Goldberg, thanks!