About The Salon of Exiled Artists in California: Salka Viertel took in actors and intellectuals in exile fleeing from Nazism by Núria Añó
Salka Viertel was a Jewish actress who emigrated to Hollywood and was the screenwriter of the Swedish actress Greta Garbo. Besides, she had a salon in Santa Monica, which was attended by a large part of the European intelligentsia in exile.
The book deals with topics such as Salka Viertel’s alleged bisexuality and the number of friends she had, to name but a few: Albert Einstein, Charles Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, Max Reinhardt, Arnold Schönberg, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Greta Garbo, Montgomery Clift… Also, like Gertrude Stein and other notorious women, she had her literary salon through which writers like Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal and many other writers passed. Other themes she covers are the Berlin of the 1920s; the transition from silent to spoken film, as seen from the Mecca of Hollywood. Then, the rise of Hitler and what it meant for the Jewish condition; the exile of those intellectuals who could not return to their respective countries because of the Second World War. Later, the Cold War and the witch-hunt against communism. The background to the life of Salka Viertel and her circle of friends encompasses the significant events of the 20th century.
Salka was a very modern and interesting woman for her time.
“Even though Salka Viertel was such a pivotal figure in the exile community, very little has been written about her, so Núria Añó’s book is a corrective, and she fills in many of the gaps of The Kindness of Strangers.”—Dialog International
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Author Bio:
Núria Añó (1973) is a Catalan/Spanish writer. They translated her work into twelve languages. Her novel “Els nens de l’Elisa” (2006) was the third finalist in the 24th Ramon Llull Prize. This was followed by “L’escriptora morta” [The Dead Writer] (2008), “Núvols baixos” [Lowering Clouds] (2009) and “La mirada del fill” (2012). Her biography on Salka Viertel “El salon de los artistas exiliados en California” [The Salon of Exiled Artists in California] (2020) is the result of three years of research. She won the 18th Joan Fuster Award for Narrative Ciutat d’Almenara, the fourth international writing award 2018 Shanghai Get-Together and has been awarded prestigious international grants: Nuoren Voiman Liitto (Finland, 2016), Shanghai Writing Program (China, 2016), Baltic Centre (Sweden, 2017), IWTCR (Greece, 2017), Krakow UNESCO City of Literature (Poland, 2018), IWTH (Latvia, 2019-2013) and IWP (China, 2020). More information at nuriaanyo.com.