Before her death at age 89 in 1978, an increasingly lonely Salka corresponded with her favorite writing partner, the debonair playwright S. As to whether or not they were lovers, there is ample gossip but no smoking lipstick or other positive evidence, says Rifkind, who gives a literary shrug at this facet of the Greta/Salka relationship.

to speak out against intolerance, censorship, political inquisitions, and the curtailing of human rights in the name of national security—all seeds of fascism in the United States that threatened to sprout as poisonously as they had in Germany: in the end, none of this has been deemed thus far to be worthy of our attention. 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. A close con­fi­dante and fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor of Gre­ta Gar­bo, Sal­ka had fled Nazi Ger­many and quick­ly emerged as the keep­er of artis­tic and intel­lec­tu­al soci­ety in WWII-era Los Ange­les. After all, hers had been a remarkable life and she had been blessed with extraordinary friends, as Rifkind again shows us, with much additional detail, in “The Sun and Her Stars. These were Hitler’s gift to America— prodigious individuals who enriched the film culture and the intellectual life of our nation, and whose influence continues to resonate.Hav­ing stud­ied the rise of fas­cism in Ger­many, Amer­i­can poli­cies on immi­gra­tion, and House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Committee’s sur­veil­lance and intim­i­da­tion tech­niques, Rifkind learned of real­i­ties that Vier­tel could only sus­pect. 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. Bilski and Emily Braun’s essay about Salka Viertel, “The Salon in Exile,” from Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation have all begun to fill in the blanks. The immigration procedures were daunting, for one, war refugees had to have someone sponsor them financially if they couldn’t prove they could be self-sufficient. Little wonder that Salka fantasizes about a future Hollywood dominated by “the Warner Sisters, Louisa B.

We take intellectual property concerns very seriously, but many of these problems can be resolved directly by the parties involved.Don­na Rifkind recounts Viertel’s life sto­ry fol­low­ing a fair­ly tra­di­tion­al chrono­log­i­cal path, with use­ful end­notes and a sprin­kling of pho­tos. I’m writing this book in mid-2017, while an even larger human migration is taking place around the world, forced by civil war, ethnic cleansing, poverty, and climate change. Her care­ful intro­duc­tions of new­com­ers to the more estab­lished, her old-world cakes and cof­fee — she fed phys­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al hungers. Viertel was a classical stage actress in her own right for 20 years in Germany during the Weimar era.

Or the title of this review, which Rifkind uses to describe Viertel's last view of Berlin when she left: "Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too," from a poem by Rilke, another Viertel acquaintance.An immersive biography…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. Donna Rifkind ‘s reviews appear frequently in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times Book Review . Yet these glimpses can’t compensate for the absence of real women in the copious nonfiction, where at best they are underrepresented and at worst virtually erased. With over 6 million of the world’s best eBooks to choose from, Kobo offers you a whole world of reading. 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).