A survivor of the Holocaust during childhood, Gelman became a playwright and screenwriter after working as a newspaper journalist in Leningrad in the 1960s, winning the USSR State Prize in 1976.

After the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the occupying German forces deported the Gelman family to the Bershad ghetto in Transnistria, where his mother died.

It depicted a construction crew's rejection of a salary bonus on the grounds that they felt cheated by bad management and poor workplace organization.

[2] Acclaimed as a sociological drama, the film won director Sergey Mikaelyan and screenwriter Gelman the USSR State Prize in 1976.

Boris Kagarlitsky writes of his plays (through the late 1980s):Gel'man is free from naïve technocratic illusions; he knows economic reality other than by hearsay.... Real people appear on the stage.

Instead of Shatrov's faceless technocrats we see live production-workers who turn out to be very different, unlike each other, complex, unexpected.... Gel'man's most recent plays ... localize the conflict, so to speak – confine it to a small group of people.

[4] Elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1989, Gelman was an outspoken supporter of liberal changes and of general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost package in the 1980s, but in a 1989 interview with David Remnick of The Washington Post'' characterized the idea of the liberal politician Boris Yeltsin taking the place of Gorbachev was "a bit ridiculous".