Yoo-hoo, it’s Gertrude Berg

If you had to guess, whom would you choose as the winner of the first best-actress Emmy? Who do you think came in second after Eleanor Roosevelt as the most admired woman in the country? The answer to both questions is Gertrude Berg, the woman who invented the situation comedy, according to a new documentary written, directed, and produced by Aviva Kempner. Kempner, the creator of “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg,” is frank about her goal to make inspiring and uplifting films about relatively unknown Jewish heroes. Accordingly, “You-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is far from an exposé or a probing look at Berg’s inner life. But Berg did accomplish a great deal in what must have been a hostile environment for an unattractive, heavyset Jewish woman, and did it while maintaining her dignity and independence. Kempner presents her story through a combination of narrative, interviews — with folks such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Norman Lear, NPR’s Susan Stamberg, and others — and film footage, and an impressive story it is, albeit with some dark shadows.

Born Tillie Edelstein in 1898, Berg grew up in Harlem, a vibrant Jewish community at the time. Her brother died in childhood, and this terrible loss pushed her mother to the brink of insanity and the woman never fully recovered. As a young teen, Tillie went off to the Catskills with her father to help at his hotel, Fleischmanns. She had a great deal of responsibility at a very young age there, and began writing skits to entertain the children on rainy days. She met her husband there too, a British Jew named Louis Berg, and they married in 1918. Tillie seems to have been lucky in her marriage. Berg, an engineer, was a cultivated man who encouraged her to develop her natural intelligence, and she began to read and learn about art and other cultural pursuits. They moved to Louisiana, where Louis had work, but Tillie was not happy there. The best thing to happen was that Louis invented instant coffee for the soldiers to drink at the front. That probably set up the Bergs handsomely for life.

It was when they moved back to New York that Tillie decided to try her hand at show business. The film doesn’t explain why she thought she’d succeed — she was far from a beauty even as a young woman — but radio was big then, and looks didn’t matter as much in that medium. First she changed her name and then she began to write radio scripts. Those scripts became “The Rise of the Goldbergs,” a character-driven show about a working-class Jewish family, which stayed on the radio for 17 years. Molly Goldberg, the character Berg created, was an idealized mother — warm, accepting, wise, and helpful — exactly the kind of mother Berg never had, and probably no one has ever had. Besides acting on the radio, Berg wrote all the scripts, managed the casting, and negotiated contracts. She published a cookbook (although she couldn’t cook) and even had a clothing line. Although Molly lived in a tenement apartment where she yoo-hooed her neighbors across the air shaft, the Bergs lived on Park Avenue in an apartment filled with beautiful things. But like Oprah today, Berg had that common touch. Molly was the kind of woman other women could imagine being at their very best.

After World War II, the show moved to television, where it was also a big hit. Trouble came during the McCarthy era, with the advent of the blacklist. On TV, Berg’s co-star was Phil Loeb, the leader of the actors’ union. When sponsors objected to him, Berg struggled but eventually let him go. Loeb’s sad end was memorialized in the film “The Front,” with Zero Mostel, another blacklisted actor, playing a character based on Loeb.

“The Goldbergs” was replaced by “I Love Lucy,” but Berg went on to other things, including a hit Broadway play.

Kempner’s film presents an entertaining and informative look at a very successful woman whom many people have forgotten and most people younger than 50 have never heard of.

“Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” will have its theatrical release at Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York on Friday, July 10, and will also open that day at the Quad Cinema there. It will open at Clearview Clairidge Cinemas in Montclair on July 24.

For more information, go to www.mollygoldbergfilm.org.