Title: The Kindness of Strangers (New York Review Books Classics) Pdf
Author: Salka Viertel
Published Date: 2019-01-22
Page: 352
“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 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 émigrés. 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.
Salka Viertel’s autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman’s pilgrimage through the darkest years of the twentieth century, a journey that would take her from a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood. The Kindness of Strangers is, to quote the New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman, “a very rich book. It provides a panorama of the dissolving civilizations of the twentieth century. In all of them the author lived at the apex of their culture and artistic aristocracies. Her childhood . . . is an entrancing idyll. In Berlin, in Prague, in Vienna, there appears Karl Kraus, Kafka, Rilke, Robert Musil, Schoenberg, Einstein, Alban Berg. There is the suffering and disruption of the First World War and the suffering and agony after it, which is described with such intimacy and vividness that you endure these terrible years with the author. Then comes the migration to Hollywood, where Salka’s house on Mabery Road becomes a kind of Pantheon for the gathered artists, musicians, and writers. It seems to me that no one has ever described Hollywood and the life of writers there with such verve.”
Family plot Salka Viertel, an obviously kind, generous. warm woman, published her memoir in 1969, and the description is far more interesting than the soap opera she tells, which is mostly (for the first 100 pages) family history and then life as a screenwriter for Garbo, who became an intimate pal in Hollywood....meantime, she's bringing up 3 sons, financially supporting her husband Berthold, supporting relatives in Europe (as Hitler comes to power) and reporting for work at MGM. European refugees flock to her home in Santa Monica: Thomas Mann, Brecht, Schoenberg, Max Reinhardt, and so on. These are all cameos, just a running list. She suffers an excess of anxieties as she gets family out of Europe (they all waited til the last minute), and by the end of the 40s, she faces the blacklist for seeming to support Commie causes. Sturm und drang nonstop. We learn a little about being a contract studio writer, but nothing about Garbo (Wikipedia says they may have been lovers), or anyone else. Mogul LB Mayer is never mentioned. She isnt dissy; despite her long lamentation, she has only kind words for everyone named. All in all, it's like a "disaster pic" : who will live, who will die; which marriage will last, which will end in divorce; whose career will blossom or burn out. The answers are neither surprising nor memorable.
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