Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg

As the lights dim and you notice that you are surrounded by geriatrics, you may wonder why you skipped “(500) Days of Summer” for a documentary about an actress you’ve never heard of who bears a striking resemblance to your cousin Yetta. But make no mistake, director Aviva Kempner’s “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is an entertaining and thoughtful examination of the fascinating life of Gertrude Berg—a writer, actress, and all-around trailblazer who, unfortunately for our generation, has been largely forgotten.

Never a suffragette or a flapper, Gertrude berg was a refined, upper middle-class mother of two, and a breakthrough female leader, rising against societal expectations for both Jews and women to become a wildly successful celebrity. After finding herself dissatisfied with mundane voiceover work, Berg created her own radio show, “The Rise of the Goldbergs” (later shortened to “The Goldbergs”). Centered on the life of a lower East Side Jewish family of immigrant parents and first-generation American children, the show was a national hit. Berg played the doting mother, Molly Goldberg, while also producing and writing every script for the show that ran Monday through Friday from 1929-1945. The radio program later spawned a television show of the same name, which won Berg the first-ever Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy.

Through an array of colorful interviews from Berg’s close family and longtime fans, including “All in the Family” creator Norman Lear and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kempner communicates the determination and warmth that made Berg, as one 1930s poll revealed, the second-most popular woman in America (just behind Eleanor Roosevelt). Although her show was clearly about a Jewish family, the Goldbergs’ laughter and struggle were accessible and comforting to immigrants throughout the nation, even in the depths of the Great Depression. The humor found in stumbling over English words, the hope of a better future for one’s children, the communal compassion that grew out of many tenement neighborhoods—these were familiar pictures of the American experience for those of the first generation, and Kempner contextualizes this environment with rich footage from old film reels and television clips.

While a movie composed largely of interviews from adoring fans and samples of Berg’s best radio and television work may seem like a rose-colored, almost sappy celebration of her life, Kempner manages to keep the film from drowning in sentiment. True, it never tackles certain contradictions of Berg’s life and career, including how a woman who was in many ways the personification of strong female leadership won her success by embodying the traditional mother and housewife. Yet, a subject as fascinating and as overlooked as Gertrude Berg all but begs Kempner and her audience to indulge in this almost uniformly positive portrayal. It’s difficult to find fault with a woman who raised a family while writing her own award-winning show for over 25 years—decades before the Women’s Liberation movement began to take shape.