An impassioned and revelatory biography occasionally hampered by excessive detail.
Remembering a neglected woman of early Hollywood.
Journalist Rifkind begins her impressive biography of screenwriter Salka Viertel (1889-1978) with a question: How can so “large and estimable” a woman “been more or less forgotten in America”? The author hopes Salka (as she is referred to throughout) will provide a role model for a new generation of readers, especially women, currently experiencing the same kinds of geopolitical issues of human migration and anti-Semitism that Salka also suffered. Her early years in Austro-Hungary were privileged. She acted on stages throughout Europe, and her circle of friends included Franz Kafka and Max Brod. In 1928, with National Socialism on the rise, Salka and her filmmaker husband, Berthold, along with thousands of other refugees, fled to greater Los Angeles. They both worked with F.W. Murnau on film projects and befriended other immigrants like Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ernst Lubitsch. Rifkind chronicles in meticulous detail Salka’s substantial career in a hostile Hollywood studio system that regularly ignored the contributions of women. She wrote screenplays for a number of films, most notably Queen Christina (1933), working closely with producer Irving Thalberg and the film’s star, Greta Garbo, who took Salka under her wing. Their relationship would become the “longest and most important…either of them would ever have in Hollywood.” Rifkind calls Salka a “connector of people.” Her legendary Sunday afternoon gatherings at her Santa Monica home on Mabery Street became an intellectual “place of shelter” for immigrants, including Sergei Eisenstein, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Mann and Christopher Isherwood, two of Salka’s best friends. She helped refugees find jobs and places to stay, and she provided financial support. Her activities with political organizations supporting refugees drew the attention of the FBI, which tapped her phones and read her mail. In 1953, Salka moved to Switzerland, where she wrote her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers.
An impassioned and revelatory biography occasionally hampered by excessive detail.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-721-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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