A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age, complete with encounters with Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Greta Garbo along the way.
Salka Viertel (1889-1978) was born Salomea Sara Steuermann in
Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the late
1920s, Salka and her husband, Berthold Viertel, left Berlin for
Hollywood, where Berthold wrote screenplays and directed films and
Salka began acting in motion pictures. There, she befriended Greta
Garbo on the set of Anna Christie and co-wrote screenplays for many
films. During World War II, the Viertels started a salon in their
home for other emigres. In 1942, Salka was put on an FBI watch list
and later her salon was dissolved under the inquisition of the
Hollywood film industry. After the war, she returned to Europe
where she lived until the end of her life.
Lawrence Weschler, the grandson of the eminent Viennese-born
Weimar-era emigre (and Hollywood) composer Ernst Toch, has written
several celebrated works of of literary nonfiction, including
Vermeer in Bosnia, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, and Seeing is
Forgetting the Name of the Thing of One Sees. He was a staff writer
at The New Yorker for over twenty years and is a contributing
editor to McSweeney's, The Threepenny Review, and The Virginia
Quarterly Review. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the
National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, he recently
retired as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at
New York University. He is currently completing a biographical
memoir of Oliver Sacks.
“Thank goodness Greta Garbo encouraged her confidante Salka Viertel
to write. With cameos by Kafka, Sarah Bernhardt, Eisenstein,
Isherwood, and many others, Viertel’s memoir is humane, lightly
ironic, and dizzyingly entertaining. It’s a portrait of two lost
worlds—the pre-Hitler German-speaking stage and the pre-CGI
Hollywood—as well as the story of an actress and screenwriter who
all her life was bold in love and passionate for the arts.” —Caleb
Crain
“Salka ends her book with a phrase about her ‘incorrigible heart.’
It is this quality which sustains and ennobles all the artistic,
intellectual, social and political events which her book narrates.
It gives us a sense of what it is to be a true person. Without that
core of warm humanity all the rest would be vanity.” —Harold
Clurman, The Nation
“From early childhood in the Polish Ukrainian sector of
Austria-Hungary through her experiences in the German theater and
Hollywood, Mrs. Viertel shares a full life, candidly and
rewardingly.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Salka is forgotten today. Biographies have been written about her
‘genius’ husband Berthold, but Salka appears only as footnote in
works about Greta Garbo. She deserves better, and her extraordinary
story should to be read today by anyone interested in the German
exile experience.”—Dialog International
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