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

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Salka Viertel has been more or less forgotten in America because too few people believed that what she accomplished was important.

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The émigrés from Germany and Austria included Thomas Mann, Billy Wilder, Max Reinhardt, Bruno Walter, Berthold Brecht, S. 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. Their home in Santa Monica Canyon was the site of salons and meetings of the Hollywood intelligentsia and the émigré community of European intellectuals, particularly at their Sunday night tea parties.The best biographies tell the story not only of the individual but of the entire milieu in which they lived. 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.