Yoo Hoo, Remember Mrs. Goldberg?

Before “30 Rock,� before “Friends,� before “Seinfeld� and “All in the Family� and “I Love Lucy� and even “The Honeymooners,� there was “The Goldbergs.� First on radio, then television, the show was the creation of Gertrude Berg, who wrote over 12,000 episodes and starred in every single one.

   In “Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg,â€� filmmaker Aviva Kempner traces the story of the fiercely determined Berg, born Tillie Edelstein in New York City in 1898. Her father, a tailor turned Catskills hotelier, wanted her to run the family business, which she was very good at. But she didn’t want to keep the books and produce the shows, she wanted to be the show, and with the support of her wealthy engineer husband, Lewis Berg, she moved to New York. Her first job was to narrate a commercial for cookies in Yiddish, but being American-born, she didn’t speak the language and Lewis had to write out the script phonetically for her. With her warm motherly voice she quickly became the most popular pitchperson the companyer had.   

   It wasn’t long before she began writing her own show. First called “The Rise of the Goldbergs,â€� it was set in the Bronx, and Gertrude assumed a Yiddish accent to play the part of Mrs. Goldberg, the immigrant matriarch who called out the window at the start of each show to gossip with her neighbors across the airshaft.

   Dispensing pearls of warm homespun wisdom like “A man on a desert island. A man near another man is a human being,â€� she depicted family life that was decidedly Jewish — the family celebrated Passover seders — and decidedly American as well. From the start of the Depression through World War II and beyond, she provided comfort to the anxious and a human message. She touched on serious issues — the show made reference to the Holocaust and anti-Semitism — and may have been the first Jewish family many Americans ever got to know.

   Starring alongside her were actors who had made their name in Yiddish theater, including Philip Loeb as her husband. Loeb had been a leader in the actor’s union, winning important rights for performers. But in the 1950s he was named a communist sympathizer. Berg stood by him and her sponsor, General Mills, canceled the show. The film details his decline and sad end, dead of an overdose in a Manhattan hotel room. (His story is also chronicled in “The Front,â€� the film by Loeb’s good friend Zero Mostel.)

   Loeb was replaced, the show went on, but didn’t last much longer — in the late ’50s the fictional family moved to the suburbs, and both the characters and the scripts never quite found their bearings in the new environment. With no airshafts, and no upstairs neighbor, the plots dried up and the show was quickly canceled.

   The film touches on the complex place the show held for American Jews. It was hugely popular.  Berg won the first Emmy awarded for best actress. She was voted second-most admired woman (behind only Eleanor Roosevelt). When she stayed home from work one day with a sore throat, NBC got 100,000 letters and phone calls from fans – she had become a true phenomenon. But for a generation of immigrants eager to blend in and lose their ethnicity, her accent was a source of discomfort. Ed Asner and Norman Lear, both interviewed here, watched her too, and these two first-generation Jews went on to create the next generation of TV comedies: the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,â€� “All in the Family,â€� cut any obvious Jewish identity.

   Why hasn’t the show retained, or regained, its popularity like “The Honeymoonersâ€� and “I Love Lucy?â€� The clips shown in the movie were brief ­­— no scene was played out in its entirety — but from what was shown, perhaps the comedy was more gentle, the plots less absurd than the ones that have kept their retro appeal. But Berg, who died in 1966, deserves to be remembered as the Oprah of her day. She ran a media empire and her creative vision set the tone for a century of entertainment to follow.

“Yoo Hoo Mrs. Goldberg� is well worth seeking when it’s released on DVD.