“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



“Salka ends her book with a phrase about her ‘incorrigible heart.’ It is this quality which sustains and ennobles all the artistic, intellectual, social and political events which her book narrates. It gives us a sense of what it is to be a true person. Without that core of warm humanity all the rest would be vanity.”??Harold Clurman,?The Nation



“From early childhood in the Polish Ukrainian sector of Austria-Hungary through her experiences in the German theater and Hollywood, Mrs. Viertel shares a full life, candidly and rewardingly.”
?Kirkus Reviews


“Salka is forgotten today. Biographies have been written about her ‘genius’ husband Berthold, but Salka appears only as footnote in works about Greta Garbo. She deserves better, and her extraordinary story should to be read today by anyone interested in the German exile experience.”?Dialog International