Salka Viertel (1889–1978)

Salka Viertel was born Salomea Sara Steuermann in Sambor, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine, to a prosperous Austrian Jewish family. She learned French from a governess, spoke Polish and Ukrainian at home, and studied Latin, Greek and German at school. She worked as an actress in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland before moving to Berlin to join Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. In 1908, she joined the Neue Wiener Bühne in Vienna as a leading actress. In 1916, she met Berthold Viertel, an Austrian director and writer, and married him in 1918. They had three children. In 1928, the Viertels went to Hollywood, where Salka had minor roles in three German-language films and later became a screenwriter. Her marriage to Berthold ended in 1944. She later moved to Switzerland and New York. Her memoir The Kindness of Strangers, was published in 1969.