Currently available on DVD: "Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg"

“The Oprah of her day” is one talking head’s description of the broadcasting pioneer Gertrude Berg in Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Aviva Kempner’s engrossing documentary portrait of a once-beloved radio and television star who died in 1966 and today is barely remembered. The film could be described as Exhibit A in a study of media celebrity and collective forgetfulness in the age of information overload.

On Nov. 20, 1929, less than a month after the stock market crash, The Rise of the Goldbergs, a 15-minute family sitcom Berg wrote, produced and starred in, was first heard on the radio. With its name later shortened to The Goldbergs, the show, chronicling the domestic life of a struggling Jewish family in a Bronx tenement, remained on the air for the next 17 years and earned its creator the nickname the First Lady of Radio.

When it moved to television in 1949 in a time slot later taken over by I Love Lucy, it established the character-driven domestic sitcom as a staple television genre and won Berg the first Emmy for best actress.

At the show’s peak of popularity in its radio incarnation, Berg, who adopted a Yiddish accent to play the malapropism-spewing Bronx Jewish matriarch Molly Goldberg, was voted the second-most-admired woman in America, after Eleanor Roosevelt, according to the film. The signature gesture of the homey, gregarious Molly was to lean out her apartment window and call out “yoo-hoo” to neighbors with whom she exchanged the urban equivalent of back-fence gossip.

Before and during World War II, the show had its serious moments. In one episode a rock was thrown through the window as the family held a Passover Seder. Other shows included references to overseas relatives threatened by the Holocaust.

Berg, who was born Tillie Edelstein in 1898, was not at all like her character. Elegant and well dressed, a workhorse and a taskmaster with a home on Park Avenue, she wrote 12,000 scripts for the show, which consumed her life to the point that in a Person to Person interview with Edward R. Murrow, excerpted in the documentary, she muses that she spent more time researching, writing and playing Molly than being herself.

The daughter of a Catskills hotelier, Berg developed her talents writing and directing sketches to entertain guests during rainy weather. At 18 she married Lewis Berg, an older Englishman and chemical engineer, with whom she had two children.

The Goldbergs flourished until the publication in 1950 of Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television named Philip Loeb, who played Molly’s husband, Jake, as a Communist sympathizer. When the show’s sponsor, General Foods, delivered an ultimatum that Loeb be fired within two days, Berg stood by him and threatened to persuade the public to boycott the company. Although General Foods backed down, the show was canceled several months later.

Berg went so far as to appeal for help to Cardinal Francis Spellman, who agreed only on the condition that she convert to Roman Catholicism, which she refused to do. A broken man, Loeb committed suicide in 1955. Although a replacement was later found, and The Goldbergs returned to television, it was never the same, and when its setting was moved to the suburbs, it lasted for only one season.

Forging on, Berg joined a cast of blacklisted actors in a TV presentation of The World of Sholom Aleichem, a show that helped break the blacklist, and went on to triumph on Broadway, winning the 1959 Tony Award for best actress in a play for A Majority of One. She was heartbroken when Rosalind Russell got her role in the movie adaptation.

Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg has a generous helping of old kinescopes of The Goldbergs and respectful recollections of grandchildren, acquaintances and admirers, including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But the only significant footage of Berg not playing her character is her Person to Person interview, in which she comes across as a gracious grande dame with a dry sense of humor.

Describing a real mother’s creation of a fictional one, she declares: “Molly learned everything from me. I taught Molly everything she knows.”