Donna Rifkind
Donna Rifkind is an American literary critic and author whose biography The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, published in 2020, was named a best book of the year by the Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Book Council, and other outlets. Rifkind has been a book critic for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Wall Street Journal for many years, and she brings the precision and breadth of a career critic to her biographical scholarship.
The Sun and Her Stars recovers the remarkable life of Salka Viertel — a Polish-born Jewish actress and screenwriter who came to Hollywood in the 1920s and whose Santa Monica home became the central salon of European intellectual exile life during the Nazi era. Viertel was Greta Garbo’s closest collaborator and friend, and she helped dozens of European artists, writers, and intellectuals — including Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, and Thomas Mann — find their footing in America. As the Red Scare targeted European leftists in Hollywood, Viertel’s life unraveled even as her humanitarian work continued.
Rifkind draws on extensive archival research, including Viertel’s own unpublished letters, to reconstruct a life and milieu that illuminate the profound cultural exchange between exiled European modernism and Hollywood’s golden age. The book is both a biography and a work of cultural history, examining how trauma, exile, and creative community intersect.
Rifkind continues to write literary criticism and is a contributing editor to several publications. Her biography stands as a significant contribution to the literature of Hollywood history and the culture of European Jewish exile.
