Salka Viertel - The Kindness of Strangers

SALKA VIERTEL (18891978) was born Salomea Sara Steuermann in Sambor, a city in present-day Ukraine, where her father was the first Jewish mayor. In her youth she had a successful career onstage, marrying the director Berthold Viertel in 1918. The couple had three sons before moving to Los Angeles in 1928, when Berthold was asked to write a screenplay for F. W. Murnau. That winter, Salka met Greta Garbo. The two would become close friends, with Viertel appearing alongside Garbo in Anna Christie (1930) and co-writing a number of the actors 1930s films, including Queen Christina (1933) and Anna Karenina (1935). Viertel was active in the European Film Fund, which was designed to provide European artists with Hollywood jobs and American visas during the war years, and she and Berthold hosted star-studded salons at their house in Santa Monica. They divorced in 1947, and Berthold returned to Vienna. She remained in California until pressure from the FBI over her associations with alleged communists led her to return to Europe. She died in Switzerland.

LAWRENCE WESCHLER , the grandson of the migr composer Ernst Toch, is a former staff writer at The New Yorker and director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. Among his books are Vermeer in Bosnia, Mr. Wilsons Cabinet of Wonder, and Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. His biographical memoir of Oliver Sacks will be published in 2019.

DONNA RIFKIND is a book critic whose reviews appear in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other publications. Her biography of Salka Viertel is forthcoming in 2020.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

SALKA VIERTEL

Introduction by

LAWRENCE WESCHLER

Afterword by

DONNA RIFKIND

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright 1969 by Salka Viertel

Introduction copyright 2019 by Lawrence Weschler

Afterword copyright 2019 by Donna Rifkind

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Grete Stern, Dream No. 18, Caf Concert, 1948; Estate of Grete Stern; courtesy Galera Jorge MaraLa Ruche

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Viertel, Salka, author.

Title: The kindness of strangers / by Salka Viertel ; introduction by Lawrence Weschler.

Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2019. | Series: New York Review Books classics

Identifiers: LCCN 2018019340| ISBN 9781681372747 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681372754 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Viertel, Salka. | ScreenwritersUnited StatesBiography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts. |

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

Classification: LCC PN2287.V47 A3 2019 | DDC 812/.52 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019340

ISBN 978-1-68137-275-4

v1.0

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N OWADAYS THE TITLE reads not only as tepid and banal but as distinctly unrepresentative of the ensuing narratives principal themes and contours. In fairness, when the onetime Austro-Hungarian actress and subsequently Hollywood scenarist Salka Viertel first began auditioning the phrase the kindness of strangers for the title of her memoir in progress, back in the mid-1950s, as her forthcoming biographer Donna Rifkind has pointed out, the words were not nearly as hackneyed as they are today. (The sensational play A Streetcar Named Desire, from which they sprang, was only a few years old, having premiered in 1947; the film had only been released in 1951; and the primary chestnut to have emerged from the latter was Stanleys bloodcurdling scream of Stella! Stellllaaaa! and not so much Blanches breathy Southern belle protestations of having always relied on the kindness of strangers.) Salkas husband, the internationally acclaimed theater director Berthold Viertel, had been translating their friend Tennessee Williamss plays for some years already and staging them all over Europe, and perhaps Salka savored the nod in the young playwrights direction. Such selfless generosity, indeed such kindness on her own part, would have been just like her.

But set aside the books title and turn, instead, to the text, which gleams with a canny freshness from its first mischievous sentences:

Long, long ago, when I was very young, a gypsy woman said to me that I would escape heartbreak and misfortune as long as I lived close to water. I know that it is rather trite to begin a story with prophecies, especially when they are made by gypsies, but luckily this prediction did not come true.

That first sly upending of readerly expectations anticipates all the other upendings that will come to characterize our protagonists life course, but at this early stage of the narrative, she only goes on to admit that It was utterly irrelevant as far as the happiness or misery in my life was concerned, how near or how distant I might be to a body of water. Still, she concedes how often her own inner storms would subside when I looked at the crested waves of the Pacific or listened to the murmur of an Alpine brook, and that in addition the gypsys mention of water evoked the landscape of my childhood and the house near the river, where I lived and grew up.

And thus by the end of that first paragraph, we arrive, by way of a gracefully commodious vicus of recirculation, at Sambor, the small town by the banks of the Dniester River (only just emerging young and wild from the Carpathian mountains to the immediate west) in Polish, though at the time Austro-Hungarian, Galicia (and, actually, since the Second World War on the far western edge of the Soviet and subsequently independent Ukraine), where Salka was born in 1889, the eldest of the four children of Auguste and Josef Steuermann, a barrister who, following the turn of the twentieth century, began serving as this polyglot and marvelously jumbled towns first Jewish mayor, as he would for decades to come.

The Steuermann progeny would prove prodigiously accomplished in the years ahead. In addition to Salka, there came, in order, Rose, an eminent actress in her own right in pre and postFirst World War Austrian and German theaters, who would marry the immensely successful theater man Josef Gielen, fleeing with him to South America during the Hitler years though returning to Europe for further successes at the end of the Second World War (their son, Michael, going on to prove one of the most prominent Austrian avant-garde composers and conductors during the fifties and sixties); Edward, a pianist and celebrated acolyte of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, who among many other sterling accomplishments, both in Europe and America, would shepherd and premiere the masters Pierrot lunaire; and finally Zygmunt (universally known as Dusko), the runt of the litter, who went on, improbably, to interwar stardom as a professional soccer player.

The first third or so of Salkas book unfurls across pre-Hitlerian Europe, from an improbably idyllic evocation of her Galician home and family life (not yet particularly marked by intimations of virulent anti-Semitism), through accounts of her own headstrong determination, in the face of parental resistance, to pursue a career in the theater and her early successes in that regard (under the name Salome Steuermann) across the regional capitals of late-imperial Austro-Hungary before the outbreak of the First World War. She then goes on to vividly render the desolations of the war itself, especially on the home fronta horrific period to some degree leavened for Salka by her courtship and 1918 marriage to the vividly charismatic poet and director Berthold Vierteland following that, the couples triumphant sweep through the various centers of postwar Weimar-era Austrian and German cultural ferment.