emigre

In 1957, actress Isabella Giori hopes to land a career-making role in a Hitchcock film; when her circumstances change and she winds up secluded in a tiny cottage in Carmel-on-the-Sea, a blacklisted emigre screenwriter named Léon Chazan saves her.

The Central Intelligence Agency’s Manhattan-based “book club” office was run by an emigre from Romania named George Midden, who managed to send 10 million books behind the Iron Curtain.

Marsak’s affection for the past extends to Arnold Hylen, a solitary, mild-mannered Swedish émigré, whose book of mid-20th century photos and an essay about old Los Angeles, “Los Angeles Before the Freeways 1850-1950: Images of an Era,” was recently reissued by Angel City Press in a new edition curated and expanded by Marsak.

Like Schoenberg before him, the Russian émigré composer tried but failed to get a lucrative contract scoring a Hollywood film.

And, lately, he’d been having clandestine trysts with a Russian emigre with KGB ties, Svetlana Ogorodnikova, in cars and cheap hotels around Los Angeles.