(She’s best known for The Love Letter.) From the fast-moving first chapter, a reader might naturally expect further dramatics. Mamie soon becomes the protagonist of Künstlers in Paradise, Cathleen Schine’s 12th novel. By Thanksgiving, the family found themselves eating a lavish meal at a studio exec’s palatial home, with, among others, Greta Garbo in attendance. They ate oranges and walked in “the odd, charming fog” of Santa Monica beach. The family’s first full day in Santa Monica, September 13, fell on daughter Mamie’s 12th birthday. Despite the fact that Ilse knew barely a word of English, she copped a job as a junior level screenwriter at the princely salary of $100 a week. The European Film Fund took up her cause, and the wife of an executive at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer responded. What saved the Künstlers from the death camps was Ilse’s job in the Viennese theater. “We are lucky to be refugees!” retorts father Otto, a middling Viennese classical composer, who ends up teaching piano lessons to bored children in Los Angeles. “We’re refugees!” fumes the cranky grandfather, bitter about this forced exile from his homeland, from Vienna and all its cultural glories. “We are lucky to have the chance,” replies mother Ilse. “Do we really have to leave?” asks daughter Mamie Künstler, 11. Published by Henry Holt and Company, 259 pages, $27.99.
Künstlers in Paradise by Cathleen Schine. This is a whimsical, well-written novel about an artistically respected Jewish family who managed to escape Nazi-annexed Austria at a perilously late date - September, 1939.
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