The émigrés from Germany and Austria included Thomas Mann, Billy Wilder, Max Reinhardt, Bruno Walter, Berthold Brecht, S.

Salka increased her activist work on behalf of exiles, funding relatives to escape Europe, and even more friends of friends fleeing Nazi persecution and trying to make their way in the US. Rifkind does a wonderful job of telling the multifaceted and somewhat tragic life story of a brilliant woman. She was born Salomea Steuermann to prosperous (if not observant) Jews in Galicia (present-day Ukraine) when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Her subject, Salka Viertel, is likely not known to most readers, but her life unfolds in these pages.

These include Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (2003), Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (2009), and a memoir based on his German-Jewish refugee parents’ experiences, All About Eva: A Memoir of Holocaust Survivors, with a Hollywood Twist (forthcoming, 2021). She was born in Central Europe and was a thriving actress in Germany before making her way to Southern California a few years before Hitler's rise to power. Once in California, these dispossessed giants of German culture gravitated to the parties hosted by the charismatic and flirtatious Salka Viertel. Salka’s letters to and from her husband Berthold Viertel are of world-class literary quality in several languages.

It's all here in this book - war, passion, film, art, friendship, loyalty, exile, glamour, danger, love, heartbreak, and courage. As witnesses to this story, we might ask again: what does it say about our values that we have chosen to dismiss so large and estimable a life as Salka Viertel’s? Her siblings were the composer and pianist Eduard Steuermann; Rosa (1891–1972), married from 1922 until her death to the actor and director Josef Gielen; and Polish national football player Zygmunt Steuermann, who perished during the Holocaust. Some of the technologies we use are necessary for critical functions like security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and to make the site work correctly for browsing and transactions. Impressive…Rifkind chronicles in meticulous detail Salka’s substantial career in a hostile Hollywood studio system that regularly ignored the contributions of women…An impassioned and revelatory biography.Etsy’s 100% renewable electricity commitment includes the electricity used by the data centers that host Etsy. Queen Christina” (1933) ranks with “Camille” (1936) and “Ninotchka” (1939) as one of Garbo’s three greatest sound films.

Rifkind is] a superlative chronicler of Old Hollywood…This tour de force of a biography tells the story of an overlooked hero who helped make Hollywood’s golden age gleam. As was the case with US universities in the 1930s, Saunders notes that Hollywood studios could be so selective "that the list of emigres reads almost as a who's who of Weimar production"; he places Berthold Viertel as "only marginally less significant" than other emigres whom he considers "without peer. Berthold was back in Germany ready to direct a film when the book burnings started, and Jews were barred from working in the film industry. She also appeared on screen in the German version of Garbo’s debut in her first full sound film of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, directed by Jacques Feyder which Garbo herself preferred to her the English version, also released in 1930, directed by Clarence Brown, Viertel playing the old prostitute role of Marthy (who Marie Dressler played in English version). As plain-spoken Robert Frost declared: “No memory of having starred/ Atones for later disregard/ Or keeps the end from being hard.That last, from a letter Kurt Weill wrote to his wife Lotte Lenya, may be the most excusable, for distraught refugees were brittle, often depressed, and prone to lashing out at friends and benefactors. Yet Rifkind can also capture a complex character with a single snapshot-like sentence: “Shy or effusive, each person who shook [Thomas] Mann’s hand received the benediction of his kindly solemnity.