Künstlers in Paradise
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
There was a time when the family Künstler lived in the fairy-tale city of Vienna. Circumstances transformed that fairy tale into a nightmare, and in 1939 the Künstlers found their way out of Vienna and into a new fairy tale: Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
For years Mamie Künstler, ninety-three-years-old, as clever and glamorous as ever, has lived happily in her bungalow in Venice, California with her inscrutable housekeeper and her gigantic St. Bernard dog. Their tranquility is upended when Mamie’s grandson, Julian, arrives from New York City. Like many a twenty-something, he has come to seek his fortune in Hollywood. But it is 2020, the global pandemic sweeps in, and Julian’s short visit suddenly has no end in sight.
Mamie was only eleven when the Künstlers escaped Vienna in 1939. They made their way, stunned and overwhelmed, to sunny, surreal Los Angeles where they joined a colony of distinguished Jewish musicians, writers and intellectuals also escaping Hitler. Now, faced with months of lockdown and a willing listener, Mamie begins to tell Julian the buried stories of her early years in Los Angeles: her escapades with eminent émigrés like Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann. Oh, and Greta Garbo. While the pandemic cuts Julian off from the life he knows, Mamie’s tales open up a world of lives that came before him. They reveal to him just how much the past holds of the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schine (The Grammarians) delivers another witty novel of manners, this time juxtaposing 1940s Hollywood with the present. Mamie Kunstler, 11, escapes from Vienna with her well-to-do Jewish family just as WWII begins. They settle in Los Angeles, where Mamie's playwright mother, Ilse, lands a job writing for the movies. In 2020, as L.A. goes into pandemic lockdown, cantankerous Mamie takes her 24-year-old grandson, Julian, into her crumbling Venice home. Mamie entertains Julian, who's having trouble finding himself, with stories about her charmed life around the movies, when, at a young age, she knew Christopher Isherwood, Anita Loos, and Greta Garbo, the last of whom she encountered on the beach at 12 and reconnected with at 20, the details of which she teases out to an increasingly enraptured Julian. One day while walking Mamie's Saint Bernard, Julian meets Sophie, an attractive neighbor, and the two strike up a friendship with the promise of romance. Nothing much happens over the course of this effervescent confection, but it hardly matters because Mamie, Julian, and company are such enjoyable characters to hang out with. Reading like a cross between Leopoldstadt and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, this does the trick as an emotionally resonant meditation on family, memory, and the need for stories.
