Читать книгу Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women онлайн

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“The area was fairly Jewish then and also Ukrainian. Our neighbors had numbers from concentration camps on their arms; across the street a rabbi had his schul; and on the first floor of our house they baked bagels. I attended the acting school in the West Village to learn to act in English. I was the ‘key student’ in the class of Herbert Berghoff; this meant I was keeping the log and this allowed me to attend the school tuition-free. Later I also had lessons with his wife, the famous Uta Hagen.

“The young women in class envied me for my boyfriend. Peter was handsome, and it was unusual that I cohabited with him. In the early 1960s America was very prudish. It was almost a tragedy if a woman at twenty did not yet know whom she would marry. She would be seen as lost, an old maid. Many girls were advised to go to college, mainly to find a husband as ‘security for life’! Women earned much less than men in all professions. The pill would start to change everything.

“Feminism and emancipation were at first just small trickles, but exploded in the 1970s and 1980s.” Linda Geiser was given a part in a film with Rod Steiger. “My first work in film in America! I found out that famous actors behaved simply and naturally. In Germany, for example, you could always feel a difference between those who were already successful and those who were not there yet. Not so in New York. I played with a large touring ensemble that included stars such as Sir John Gielgud and Vivien Leigh, and we all sat down at the same table for meals, unthinkable in Europe.”