Salka Viertel - Personal Life

Personal Life

Salka Viertel was married to Berthold Viertel and they had three sons, one of whom, Peter Viertel, born in 1920 and an accomplished writer and screenwriter, was married to actress Deborah Kerr from 1960 until her death in 2007. The Viertels, members of the Jewish-German intelligentsia, moved to the United States in 1928 for a planned four year stay.

In 1932, due to Hitler's rise, they decided to stay in Santa Monica, California, where Peter grew up with his brothers, Hans and Thomas. The home in Santa Monica Canyon was the site of salons and meetings of the Hollywood intelligentsia and the émigré community of European intellectuals, particularly at the Sunday night tea parties. Salka Viertel was also active aiding those still trapped in Europe. She wrote a memoir The Kindness of Strangers.

Read more about this topic:  Salka Viertel

Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:

    The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    I feel the desire to be with you all the time. Oh, an occasional absence of a week or two is a good thing to give one the happiness of meeting again, but this living apart is in all ways bad. We have had our share of separate life during the four years of war. There is nothing in the small ambition of Congressional life, or in the gratified vanity which it sometimes affords, to compensate for separation from you. We must manage to live together hereafter. I can’t stand this, and will not.
    Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)