Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood
    The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood
    The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood
    Audiobook12 hours

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

    Written by Donna Rifkind

    Narrated by Heather Henderson

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The little-known story of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in 1930s and 40s Hollywood created a refuge for a multitude of famous figures who had escaped the horrors of World War II.
     
    Hollywood was created by its “others”; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was all three and so much more. She was the screenwriter for five of Greta Garbo’s movies and also her most intimate friend. At one point during the Irving Thalberg years, Viertel was the highest-paid writer on the MGM lot. 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. In Viertel’s living room (the only one in town with comfortable armchairs, said one Hollywood insider), countless cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships were born.

    Viertel combined a modern-before-her-time sensibility with the Old-World advantages of a classical European education and fluency in eight languages. She united great worldliness and great warmth. She was a true bohemian with a complicated erotic life, and at the same time a universal mother figure. A vital presence in the golden age of Hollywood, Salka Viertel is long overdue for her own moment in the spotlight.

    Editor's Note

    VIP access…

    For a period of time in the 1930s and ’40s, one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters was the incredible Salka Viertel, a Jewish woman and recent immigrant. She and her director husband became well-known for their infamous Sunday parties which attracted countless other entertainment luminaries, particularly those who, like Salka, escaped Germany as Hitler rose to power. Donna Rifkind’s debut book is like an invitation to these rollicking parties and a VIP look at the tumultuous and scandalous world its guests inhabited.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Productions
    Release dateDec 22, 2020
    ISBN9781094411774
    The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood
    Author

    Donna Rifkind

    Donna Rifkind’s reviews appear frequently in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times Book Review. She has also been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, and other publications. In 2006 she was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

    Related to The Sun and Her Stars

    Related audiobooks

    Entertainers and the Rich & Famous For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Time Of Miracles

      Oct 16, 2023

      A Time Of Miracles
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Sins Of The Father

      Apr 16, 2020

      Four years ago, the BBC aired a deeply disturbing documentary called My Nazi  Legacy. It followed the journey of Horst Wächter, the son of notorious Nazi leader Otto Wächter, as he visited the places in eastern Europe where his father had presided ov

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Republic And LGBTQ + History

      Jul 14, 2022

      Queer culture is often depicted as ‘flourishing’ during the Weimar period, how true is this? Queer culture really did take off in new and exciting ways after the end of the First World War in Germany, with new clubs, bars, magazines and political org

      4 min read

    • Article

      Les Monstres Among Us

      Jul 16, 2018

      Les Monstres Among Us
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Lost Piece of Trans History

      Jan 15, 2019

      A Lost Piece of Trans History
      7 min read

    • Article

      1940s

      Mar 6, 2020

      1940s
      9 min read

    • Article

      TV, FILM & RADIO

      Feb 16, 2023

      TV, FILM & RADIO
      5 min read

    • Article

      To Move Is To Live, To Live Is To Move

      Apr 8, 2023

      What is the common thread uniting the Neanderthals, Turkish guest workers, Christopher Columbus and the Trojan prince Aeneas? They were all migrants. The Neanderthals moved around seasonally, guest workers travelled from Turkey to Germany for work in

      1 min read

    • Article

      Love After an Apocalypse

      Jan 22, 2019

      Love After an Apocalypse
      4 min read

    • Article

      1940s

      Mar 6, 2020

      1940s
      9 min read

    • Article

      5 Top Biographies Of March

      Mar 19, 2019

      A wide-ranging collection of biographies includes a Hollywood special effects artist, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, a sculptor, and a Soviet dissident writer.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Escape To Victory

      Jun 28, 2023

      Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival By Daniel Finkelstein William Collins £25 Danny Finkelstein is a columnist at the Times, and a moderate Tory peer, and he lives in Pinner, north London. My mother asked me, ‘Why does

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Kindness of Strangers

      Jan 3, 2019

      By Salka Viertel NYRB Classics, $17.95 For decades now, Salka Viertel’s long-out-of-print The Kindness of Strangers has survived through secondhand booksellers and word of mouth. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in what is now part of Ukraine, Viertel

      1 min read

    • Article

      Writing Against Wrongs

      Jan 26, 2024

      Writing Against Wrongs
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois

      Feb 14, 2018

      The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois
      15 min read

    • Article

      Occult-Nazi Fact And Fantasy

      Mar 23, 2023

      The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich Stephen E Flowers Inner Traditions 2022 Pb, 544pp, £26, ISBN 9781644115749 Everybody knows how deeply the Nazis were into the occult; between Indiana Jones, the Hellboy franchise, Ca

      3 min read

    • Article

      Global Go-betweens

      Apr 15, 2021

      The Ambassadors: Thinking About Diplomacy from Machiavelli to Modern Times by Robert Cooper Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 576 pages, £25 This book is not primarily about ambassadors; its subtitle is a much better guide to the contents. Cooper’s main interes

      4 min read

    • Article

      Luxury At Any Cost

      Oct 2, 2018

      Luxury At Any Cost
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Village in the Third Reich

      May 4, 2022

      Elliott & Thompson £25 Take a small English country town – Sherborne, say, or Kendal – picture-postcard cute and surrounded by beautiful landscape. Then imagine it after a defeat in war, a sixth of its men dead, chaos in the capital, hyper-inflation

      3 min read

    • Article

      Charged Affairs

      Apr 25, 2017

      Charged Affairs
      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Sun and Her Stars

    4/5

    51 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      What a waste. Such badly written, cliche-studded prose.! So little understanding of Salka Viertel’s profound influence on the culture of wartime Hollywood, her witty, ironic Mitteleuropa sensibility— completely misses Salka’s embrace of her Jewishness in a very particular form characteristic of that generation … really disappointing.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Very interesting book about Screenwriter Salka Vierten, so little remembered today, who supported and gave refuge in Los Angeles to so many exiles during WWII, and who brought together at her famous salons and parties, artistic and entertainment luminaries.
    • 1/5
      If I could give it a zero stars I would. If I wanted to hear all about current politics, I would rather watch the news.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Interesting. I love old movies and I ended up watching a few from the book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is a very well written story, and the author is obviously very talented, If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top