From the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood

An autobiographical portrait of two lost worlds [THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS]( BY SALKA VIERTEL Introduction by Lawrence Weschler Afterword by Donna Rikfind Salka Viertel’s memoir 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." Viertel writes about her idyllic childhood and her adult life in Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, where she rubbed shoulders with Rilke, Musil, Schoenberg, Kafka, and others. In the late 1920s, Salka and her husband, Berthold Viertel, left Berlin for Hollywood where they worked in the film industry. During World War II, the Viertels created a community for other artists exiled from home. "Thank goodness Greta Garbo encouraged her confidante Salka Viertel to write. With cameos by Kafka, Sarah Bern­hardt, Eisenstein, Isherwood, and many others, Viertel’s memoir is humane, lightly ironic, and dizzyingly enter­taining. It’s a portrait of two lost worlds—the pre­-Hitler German­-speaking stage and the pre-­CGI Hollywood—as well as the story of an actress and screenwriter who all her life was bold in love and passionate for the arts." —Caleb Crain [READ MORE]( For three days only, The Kindness of Strangers will be available at 30% off, along with these other memoirs by people who devoted their lives to the arts: [Dance to the Piper]( by Agnes de Mille [Really the Blues]( by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe [Renoir, My Father]( by Jean Renoir The Kindness of Strangers is the January selection for the [NYRB Classics Book Club](. If you join the club by January 16, The Kindness of Strangers will be your first selection. You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can [choose the types of mailings you wish to receive](: [Update preferences]( New York Review Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 Not a subscriber? Sign up for our newsletter [here](. [Unsubscribe](