As a result of government hostility raised by unfounded allegations of communism, she was denied a passport.

The “Jewish girl from Sambor” loved Santa Monica, America, Hollywood, and her Sunday afternoon salons. S. military intelligence officer and later wrote the screenplay for the 1951 award-winning film “Decision Before Dawn,” as well as “The African Queen” and other notable films. She contributed financially to a relief fund that assisted destitute German-speaking refugees in the film industry. 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. Imagine this alternate history of movies: Had Hitler not become a political force during the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin rather than Hollywood could have been the epicenter of film.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. S. government blackout rules, while a houseful of enemy aliens who had barely escaped their deaths in Europe let off steam. The Viertels, members of the intelligentsia in Europe, moved to the United States in 1928 for a planned four-year stay. 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. Max Reinhardt, the legendary director who had once simultaneously operated 11 major theaters in Berlin, was reduced to opening “…a drama school on Sunset Boulevard and began to give acting lessons to young Californians, most of whom had little idea who he was.

While nei­ther Vier­tel nor her fam­i­ly were cer­e­mo­ni­al­ly Jew­ish, this idea of open­ing your home to strangers and the needy was her own way of being Jewish. Well known to film scholars and classical music lovers, the Thalberg/Schoenberg impasse is one of the great when-worlds-collide moments in pop cultural and modernist history. In the documentation about the antifascist intellectuals who fled from Hitler’s Germany, I found a similar absence. In The Sun and Her Stars, Donna Rifkind delves into the fascinating, complex life and work of one of Hollywood’s unsung screenwriting legends and emerges with a rich and illuminating biography, one that Salka Viertel herself would have undoubtedly adored.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. Before her death at age 89 in 1978, an increasingly lonely Salka corresponded with her favorite writing partner, the debonair playwright S.

Meanwhile, at her house in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to scores of European émigrés who had fled from Hitler—such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg—along with every kind of Hollywood star, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters.S. citizen in February of 1939, only months before the official outbreak of war in Europe on September 1 of that year. 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. Salka Viertel has been more or less forgotten in America because too few people believed that what she accomplished was important. 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. was directing on One in his retinue correctly predicted that Salka, then 39, would not find much work as an actress in Hollywood, where her stage presence and talent would be trumped by the more highly valued Hollywood assets of youth and beauty.

A valuable and graceful book that rescues Salka Viertel from being mostly famous as a minor character in Greta Garbo's life. In 2006 she was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

In less­er hands, this book could have been noth­ing more than a vehi­cle to name­drop, but native Ange­leno Rifkin unearths the larg­er, mov­ing sto­ry of how Sal­ka Vier­tel pro­vid­ed not just a famil­iar cul­tur­al base, but a true safe haven for fel­low Jew­ish immi­grants. 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. Or that it was Marta Feuchtwanger who planned and implemented the escape of her novelist husband Lion Feuchtwanger from the concentration camp at Les Milles in southern France at the end of the summer of 1940.