The Kindness of Strangers

Salka Viertel (1889-1978) was born Salomea Sara Steuermann in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the late 1920s, Salka and her husband, Berthold Viertel, left Berlin for Hollywood, where Berthold wrote screenplays and directed films and Salka began acting in motion pictures. There, she befriended Greta Garbo on the set of Anna Christie and co-wrote screenplays for many films. During World War II, the Viertels started a salon in their home for other émigrés. In 1942, Salka was put on an FBI watch list and later her salon was dissolved under the inquisition of the Hollywood film industry. After the war, she returned to Europe where she lived until the end of her life.Lawrence Weschler, the grandson of the eminent Viennese-born Weimar-era emigre (and Hollywood) composer Ernst Toch, has written several celebrated works of of literary nonfiction, including Vermeer in Bosnia, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, and Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing of One Sees. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker for over twenty years and is a contributing editor to McSweeney’s, The Threepenny Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, he recently retired as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. He is currently completing a biographical memoir of Oliver Sacks.