Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg

I won't rehash most of what has been written about this terrific film already, but there are some things I would have liked to have learned about from the filmmaker. For example, the audience gets to see Gertrude Berg's grandson and granddaughter both being interviewed, but what happened to Berg's actual son and daughter?

It is always fun to go back and see the early days of TV. Coming as it did mostly or frequently from radio, this early look at a woman that was as popular as Oprah in her day.

The intense rush of nostalgia that Aviva Kempner's film floods the audience with is carefully interrupted with well-placed--though brief--darker sides of the facets of Gertrude Berg's extraordinarily unique life. For instance, we're shown the close relationship with her mother in earlier years, but later told a more troubling aspect which adds depth but never spoils Berg's optimism that was such a hallmark in her material.

The story of Gertrude Berg, creator of Molly Goldberg, is told in a slow-starting but ultimately affecting documentary that concentrates on her professional life as the better story -- when you write the script for a five-times weekly radio show for twenty years, star in it twice a day and follow that up with half a dozen years in a weekly situation comedy for television, you don't have that much time for a personal life.But the story of Miss Berg and her ultimate failure-by-success -- it reached the point where instead of Molly Goldberg being a recognizable expression of the American spirit, she became too old-fashionedly Jewish, viewed as caricature -- is only half the story.

History is replete with countless stories of exceptional individuals. Unfortunately, when people discuss famous women, African Americans, Hispanics, ,etc.

Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg is American pop history with a twist.

Although "Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg" is not superbly edited, it is fun to watch, fascinating, and certainly historically significant.

Gertrude Berg was a force to be reckoned with. In 1929,she produced, wrote & acted as the head of a Jewish American household,by the name of Tilly Goldberg,in a series called,The Goldbergs (how original!

When is a Jewish mother not a Jewish Mother? When she doesn't act just like Molly Goldberg, the heroine of a popular radio and television comedy, The Goldbergs, in the first half of the 20th century.