A Conversation with Cathleen Schine, author of KÜNSTLERS IN PARADISE

Tell me about this novel – what is Künstlers in Paradise about? Who are the characters?

Künstlers in Paradise is about exile, California, Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg, Greta Garbo, family, what it means to be Jewish, what it means to be young, what it means to be old, why we need stories, and, of course, the necessity of dogs in our lives. The Künstlers are a family who escape Vienna in 1939 and take refuge in Los Angeles when Mamie Künstler is eleven years old. She grows up in the extraordinary community of accomplished artistic and intellectual exiles, many of them German-speaking Jews, who fled Europe and tried to find work in the movie business in Hollywood. In 2020, when Mamie is 93, her grandson, Julian Künstler, arrives from New York for a short visit and the old woman and 24-year-old boy (believe me, he’s a boy, not a man, this one) find themselves trapped by the pandemic in Mamie’s Venice Beach bungalow with her ancient St. Bernard dog and her unintelligible, inexplicable housekeeper. In some ways, the novel is a story about Mamie’s stories, the stories she tells Julian: her memories of Vienna; of her grandfather who smells like a cigar; her mother who becomes a screenwriter through the good graces of the European Film Fund, an organization that rescued so many Jews by finding them jobs in Hollywood; her father, a composer whose work is neither known nor encouraged in the United States; and the eminent émigrés who surround Mamie as she grows up.

Los Angeles also seems to be a real character in this book in a way New York City or Westport, Connecticut have been in your previous novels. How did that happen?

I’ve been living in Los Angeles, full-time, for a while now. Ten years? Something like that. And before that I was bi-coastal, as they say. Back and forth from New York City. And even in the last ten years I went back to New York almost every month. The pandemic changed that. It forced me, and allowed me, to direct all my attention to the place I was in – Venice Beach, California. So I finally began exploring my little patch of L.A., walking farther than I had, spending more time at the beach when it finally opened up again, and making friends, from six feet away, with my neighbors who were also stuck at home.

And I finally began getting my bearings in this place. By bearings I mean getting used to the ocean being on the wrong side, yes, but also recognizing what the change in the light means, what months bring the reddest sunsets, when spring starts (January!), when different things bloom, the onset of butterfly season and buzzing house fly season. The observations or sensations that you take for granted, that you just feel, when you really live somewhere. Glimpses of Los Angeles appeared in some earlier books, but this is the first time I’ve felt the need to write about where I live now. To try to understand it better. Not just contemporary, sensory L.A., but historical L.A. as well. And by L.A. I mean the West Side. I’m a modest explorer! And by historical I mean the incredible, unlikely, surprising, eccentric and extravagant moment when so many intellectuals and musicians fled Hitler and wound up here. In Künstlers in Paradise, Mamie Künstler is part of that community.

Were you surprised to discover this émigré colony existed?

Really surprised! As a New Yorker I bought into the L.A.-cultural-wasteland slur for years. I did sort of know Thomas Mann had lived here. Why? Because Susan Sontag visited him and wrote about it. I knew there were German-speaking Jewish actors and directors and composers who worked in Hollywood because I’d seen them in the movies. But I never put it together. I never realized this was a wave of people fleeing Hitler and a real clan of friends and rivals and enemies who hung out together, helped one another, pitied another, envied one another, gossiped and slept with one another. So, yes, this was like a whole new world for me. 

How did you discover it?

I was writing about Gustav Mahler’s remarkable and somewhat appalling wife, Alma Mahler, for the New York Review of Books. And reading about her I noticed there were all these people, her friends and enemies and she herself, living in Los Angeles. Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Berthold Brecht. (Brecht hated it here, but then he preferred East Germany, so, yeah.) So, as with most things that really intrigue me, I accidently stumbled on this glamorous, ragged, exhilarating, and tragic world. I was fascinated by them, these Germans and Austrians and Eastern Europeans, so famous in Europe, practically unknown in the United States, suddenly waking up in a sunny cultural wasteland, which, arguably, it was before they arrived. But I didn’t want to write a straight historical novel. So many of them had written their own stories so beautifully. The memoirs from the period are very moving and I was heavily, maybe deeply is a better word, influenced by the memoirs and letters I read. But I also wanted to discover their stories in my own way. I wanted to understand the idea of exile, of leaving everything that is familiar and cherished, of trying to absorb a new world and fit into a new culture. I just wasn’t sure how to do it.

And when I finally, after so much research, tried to begin writing during Covid, all I could focus on, to the extent that I could focus on anything, was whatever I was dully staring at at the moment, whatever was right in front of me. Which was usually, in those early days, jasmine. Because I was usually sitting in our little garden, with closed notebook and capped pen, staring mindlessly straight ahead. The jasmine was blooming like crazy. And sitting there staring mindlessly at these little perfumy white flowers, I realized I was in a kind of exile in paradise. There were eerie parallels between the émigrés, knowing their friends and their world was being destroyed, and the people quarantined in California watching the suffering and destruction in New York in those early pandemic days – exile, fear, guilt, death. And, at the same time, the abundant beauty of California.

So that’s when 24-year-old Julian appears on his grandmother Mamie’s doorstep. He comes to Venice in 2020 to help her and also to find a job. And his stay in Venice is another kind of exile – a New Yorker who gets stuck in his grandmother’s Venice bungalow with her for the entire lockdown.  

Comedy or horror story?

Right? But also a chance for him to grow the hell up and for Mamie to pass on the stories of her life in that tight, fraught German-speaking colony to another generation.

How did Arnold Schoenberg become a character in this novel? Are you a 12-tone-music fan?

Schoenberg’s 12-tone methods influenced horror movie scores, by the way. I could barely listen to his music when I began writing this. Now, yes, I am a fan, though, philistine that I am, mostly of his more tonal music. But, when I was still a Schoenberg innocent, I saw a photo of him playing tennis, this bald man with big ears and intense eyes, and he just looked like someone’s Jewish uncle, like a nice tennis-crazed Jewish uncle, which is not the received Schoenberg story, and that made me read about him and just fall in love with him. He was stern and he was goofy. He was an inventor who invented toys and games for his children. He was a talented painter (mostly self-portraits!) and the house of this brilliant, underappreciated man was filled with noisy little children and dogs. I don’t know, there was just something so human about him: this world-famous, bitter, bristling genius who wound up teaching undergraduates at UCLA before there was even a music department and who knew he had done something revolutionary but was practically invisible in the United States, especially in L.A. And then he had a feud with Thomas Mann that divided the entire Colony – Oh, he is just irresistible to me.

And Greta Garbo?

Well, you know, she’s Greta Garbo! She was a close friend of Austrian actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel whose memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, was a real inspiration for the Künstlers. Garbo is such a strange character – so enigmatic, so seductive and sometimes so dull, it seems. And very much a part of that émigré community. I was so happy when who should come striding along the beach to greet 12-year-old Mamie but Greta Garbo. Mamie is immediately enamored. Me too.

As a child Mamie was close to her grandfather whose only words in English were “husky voman” and “dirty bastards.”

Yes! They take walks together on the beach. He remains a stubbornly devoted supporter of Austrian and German culture even after being chased out of Vienna by the Nazis. He was a successful musician in Vienna, but was never able to find his place after emigrating. For Mamie, he is her only tie to the old world, a place her parents understandably don’t want to talk about, but a life she, understandably, misses at first.  

There’s a remarkable section about the history of Venice Beach and its Black residents.

One of Mamie’s stories is about her grandfather and Irving Tabor. Tabor was a chauffeur and advisor to Abbot Kinney, the founder of Venice-of-America. When Kinney dies, he leaves Tabor his house on what was then the Grand Canal in Venice-of-America, but Tabor can’t live there because he is Black. He comes up with a wonderful solution!

Is this story about the house true?

It is! I’ve always wanted to write about Irving Tabor and particularly this episode in his incredible life. It’s like a fairy tale. And like Mamie and Julian, his house also becomes a kind of émigré. A fair bit has been written about Venice, which is truly the weirdest place in all its iterations, but not enough on the Black community that had so much influence on the culture: the way Venice looks, its traditions. I was so struck by this particular story, though. An act of pure imagination in ugly circumstances with a happy ending? I think about it all the time. I walk past Tabor’s house and feel hopeful even in these awful times. Of course, the hope passes by the time I get to the corner. But, you know, you just have to walk past it again the next day.