Volume 55, Number 8 · May 15, 2008
Falling Stars
By Robert Gottlieb
Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts
by Joseph Horowitz.
Harper, 458 pp., $27.50
Joseph Horowitz's Artists in Exile is very ambitious, very stimulating, and very confused. Much of the confusion comes from the disparity between what the book says it's going to be about—in the words of its subtitle, 'How refugees from twentieth-century war and revolution transformed the American performing arts'—and what it actually turns out to be: the stories of scores of European artists who happened to come to America in the twentieth century. Almost none of them 'transformed' the American performing arts, and many of them weren't refugees at all but immigrants in the great American tradition. After all, we all came from somewhere else.
Review, 3791 words
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