Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

training, while his teacher, Usatov, spared neither effort nor cost to rein him in;

Then just like that, Feodor was hired to perform in Petersburg and Moscow at the Imperial Opera, and the rest was smooth sailing.

“C’est ma vie,” Chaliapin stated, and toasted every second year of his development, which he recounted bit by bit, with a sip of sherry; today he is up to fifty-two.

Never have I known that there could be so many questions. What would Chaliapin’s aunt have named her son if it had been up to him? And what about the everlasting nature of art? Isn’t it really about time for them to straighten out the Leaning Tower of Pisa? The pay, how much? And so forth.

He raved about Toscanini and Rachmaninoff and others. But Wagner, on the other hand, was not for him, you know—

The conversation turned to Soviet Russia. Chaliapin hadn’t been there for five years. Those on the right wanted firm proof that he was against his homeland. Those on the left latched onto everything positive Chaliapin had to say about Moscow.

It seemed to me that Feodor was celebrating his brothers fervently, though at a distance. But I didn’t speak my mind.

Ate only caviar, genuine Astrachan caviar. Went down the stairs and whistled softly—out of reverence, I suppose—the burlaks’ song, “Ej Uchnem” [i.e., from Song of the Volga Boatmen]. Da svidania, gospodin Feodor!

Berliner Börsen Courier, November 12, 1927

Claude Anet in Berlin

Yesterday I met Monsieur Claude Anet on the Esplanade, and I have to say that I don’t know what you want from him; I find him very serious. When I happened to bring up the subject of Anita Loos, her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I thought I saw a furrow forming on Claude Anet’s pleasant forehead; he resented my mentioning him in the same breath as Dekobra and other popular writers. He’s right, of course, because he is in the business of literature and takes it quite seriously.

We should not, of course, misconstrue that. Anet is not the man of letters we take him to be. One topic we spoke about was the German novel, but alas, Anet had only this to say, in an extraordinarily charming manner—naturally—that apart from Goethe he knows only one single German: Dr. Peltzer, whom he saw running at the Stade de Colombes, and that it was simply formidable how the German outran Séra Martin.

Anet’s enthusiasm for the sport is quite touching. After all, he himself was a French tennis champion for years! And he put Suzanne Lenglen, the queen of tennis, on a pedestal. Sports and women are two topics that appeal to him in equal measure.

Anet, French and of noble descent, born at Lake Geneva, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and earned his teaching certificate, yet he never practiced the profession. He wrote. When a Frenchman writes, he writes about love, in a hundred out of a hundred cases. He spent some time in Russia as a correspondent for the Petit Parisien, and even though there was a revolution in progress, he found enough time to fall head over heels in love with the Russian women. It was here that he wrote Ariane, which brought Anet fame. He continues to write about love and women; heaven knows he never runs out of material. But the women requite his love; his Notes sur Amour are on the night tables of the madams, in London and in Prague, in Paris and in Berlin.

I will leave the closing words to Claude Anet himself:

“The lady-killer disappears after his victory. Then the women curse the hour he was born, yet they regret not that he came, but that he went.”

Berliner Börsen Courier, November 25, 1927

At the Home of the Oldest Woman in Berlin

Frau Auguste Richter, Berlin-Moabit, Birckenstr. 30, is celebrating her one-hundredth birthday today. The Berlin magistrate, Zörgiebel, the police chief of Berlin, and many other officials showed up in their capacity as well-wishers.

The birthday girl who is the object of the excitement in Moabit today, with all conversations revolving around her and flowers and little heartfelt gifts delivered here, is lying in a snow-white bed, her toothless mouth in a smile, training her beady eyes, red-rimmed but alert, on each intruder as if to say, I’m happy you’re happy that today’s my one-hundredth birthday.

They’ve put a hundred things in Frau Richter’s room: porcelain cups, real pure coffee, lace hankies, chocolates, candies, prayer books with ivory covers, and a silk scarf. The door to Frau Helene Wendlers, the daughter of the woman who’s turned a hundred, doesn’t stop opening, and everyone is there to see the marvel: the oldest woman in Berlin.

Frau Auguste Richter is actually an exception in her family. Her father “only” made it to age sixty-five, her mother “only” to age eighty-four. She has spent her entire life in Moabit, where she was also born. She still has a sister in Berlin, who is all of eighty-eight and may be well on her way to beating Auguste’s record.

Grandchildren play ring-around-the-rosy around their hundred-year-old grandmother’s bed, she always laughs, pulls her hands out from under the blanket—slender, wax-colored hands full of wrinkles, but still strong—and claps out the beat. And downstairs in the courtyard, someone plays on the guitar:

We’ll never meet again while we’re so young

It’ll never be so wonderful again …

Berliner Börsen Courier, December 9, 1927

Felix Holländer

ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY

The latest to turn sixty years old is Felix Holländer, who will join these ranks tomorrow, in a series of milestones among the generation once called “naturalist,” which started with Gerhart Hauptmann, Max Halbe, and Otto Erich Hartleben. Holländer was one of the first in line. He launched his career in the newspaper business, dealing with the restlessness of the day in a way that requires the sharpest vigilance. Like Hauptmann, he is Silesian. In one of his best novels, he portrayed the middle-class patriarchal sphere of his childhood home, and in Dream and Day he depicted nature and the villages of the Riesengebirge.

In