The Sun And Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

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The questions Salka asked herself about one’s responsibility in the face of bigotry and exclusion are the same questions we’re asking today. Rifkind sadly notes there were “Not nearly enough miracles” for those who desperately attempted to escape Nazism in the years before America’s entry into World War II.

He paid Salka’s generosity forward by writing affidavits for Jews desperate to leave Europe, including a family of Viennese Waxmans who were no relation but who saw his name on movie credits and wrote him for help. Many were Jewish and many were world-renowned figures in the arts, most notably composer Arnold Schoenberg, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann, stage and film impresario Max Reinhardt, playwright Bertolt Brecht and screen legend Marlene Dietrich. I’ve been writing about the rise of the National Socialists in 1930s Germany while neo-Nazis are rallying murderously in America’s cities, chanting “Jews will not replace us”; while synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in America are vandalized and desecrated; and while authoritarian pronouncements demonizing immigrants and inviting racism, layered insouciantly with lies and misinformation, are issuing almost daily from the commander in chief on Twitter, just as they did from the radio in Hitler’s time. Salka, a self-described “Jewish girl from Stambor,” a small Galician city now in western Ukraine, spoke eight languages and rapidly assumed the role of “den mother” for the often bewildered exiles. S. and settled in Klosters in Switzerland, where later, her son Peter and his second wife, actress Deborah Kerr, [2] lived.Before long, she brought her sons to California, setting up household in a Tudor-style cottage on Mabery near the ocean in Santa Monica. Such vituperation may seem extreme toward a woman who titled her memoir The Kindness of Strangers and who is remembered, if at all, for inviting people to parties on Sunday afternoons.

Among mid-twentieth-century America’s most influential women, Salka Viertel finally gets her due in Donna Rifkind’s marvelous, knowledgeable The Sun and Her Stars . For many of Hitler’s exiles, Hollywood beckoned because the movies always need scripts, music, imaginative directors and glamorous faces.

Among mid-twentieth-century America’s most influential women, Salka Viertel finally gets her due in Donna Rifkind’s marvelous, knowledgeable The Sun and Her Stars.

In 1911 she played briefly under Max Reinhardt in Berlin, whereupon she followed an offer in 1913 to go to Vienna to work on the Neue Wiener Bühne. Rifkind notes that in 2017 when she was writing this section of the book, she was shocked by the live news coverage in the streets of Charlottesville, VA, carrying torches and shouting anti-Semitic racist slogans “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us. It was just one woman’s response to the events of her day—events that, clear as they may seem in hindsight, were as bewildering in their time as those in our time are to us.Despite her success on German and Austrian stages, Salka Viertel was only modestly successful as an actor in movies. 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. The desolate American years of Heinrich and his wife, Nelly, form just one of the many fascinating but often distressing side stories told in “The Sun and Her Stars.

Salka's house in Santa Monica became the gathering place for a who's who of European exiles who were lucky enough to get out in time. In her old age, when her fortune was gone, only a few family members and friends remained to feed and comfort her, and to remember her after her death. The Salon of Exiled Artists in California: Salka Viertel took in actors, prominent intellectuals and anonymous people in exile fleeing from Nazism, ISBN 9780463206126, ISBN 9798647624079, Los Gatos: Smashwords. Viertel was a classical stage actress in her own right for 20 years in Germany during the Weimar era. com, the Sell on Etsy app, and the Etsy app, as well as the electricity that powers Etsy’s global offices and employees working remotely from home in the US.The best biographies tell the story not only of the individual but of the entire milieu in which they lived. Chock-full of scandalous affairs and wartime atmosphere, this sparkling account brings overdue attention to a woman who helped make Hollywood’s golden age possible.