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

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Donna Rifkind‘s reviews appear frequently in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times Book Review. 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. Between cities, sons, and gigs, she also knocked out a screen treatment for Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal. 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. 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.

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.As I began to read the histories of the two intersecting arenas where Salka Viertel rang up her accomplishments during the 1930s and 1940s—the film studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the gathering places of the antifascist emigration—I found myself asking again and again: where are all the women? Yet it was impossible to begin again without the help of people like Salka Viertel, who welcomed them into a community after their own had been eradicated. James Rudin (he/him) is the former head of the American Jewish Committee’s Department of Interreligious Affairs and author of seven books, including The People In The Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes, And Presidents. You would not discover that it was Nelly Mann who more or less carried her seventy-year-old husband Heinrich Mann over the Pyrenees in the stifling heat of an early October day in 1940 as they tried to evade capture and certain arrest. It was a personal financial crisis that had brought Salka Viertel to California in 1928, and it was another that forced her to leave, in the early 1960s, to begin a self-imposed exile in the Swiss Alps.

On another occasion, the director Fred Zinnemann, who lived near Salka, was patrolling the neighborhood as an air-raid warden. 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.

This leaves read­ers won­der­ing: with lim­it­ed time at hand, is there val­ue to read­ing Rifkind, rather than Vier­tel her­self? In the documentation about the antifascist intellectuals who fled from Hitler’s Germany, I found a similar absence. 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.