000 02196cam a2200253 i 4500
001 037933
005 20231009192646.0
008 190530t20191969nyu 000 0 eng
020 _a9781681372747 (paperback : acid-free paper)
050 0 0 _aPN2287.V47
_bA3 2019
082 0 _a92 VIE
_2
100 1 _aViertel, Salka
_d(1889-1978)
245 1 4 _aThe kindness of strangers
_c/ Salka Viertel ; introduction by Lawrence Weschler ; afterword by Donna Rifkind.
300 _axx, 343 pages
_c; 21 cm.
490 0 _aNew York Review Books classics
520 _aA memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age, complete with encounters with Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Greta Garbo along the way. 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 Maybery 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.
600 1 7 _aViertel, Salka
_d(1889-1978)
650 1 4 _aScreenwriters
_x-United States -- Biography
650 1 4 _aEntertainment and performing arts
650 1 4 _aPersonal memoirs
700 1 _aWeschler, Lawrence
700 1 _aRifkind, Donna
942 _cMO
999 _c246583
_d246583