ABSTRACT
How I survived that wretched year could fill a whole book. Thank God, in retrospect most of it seems funny. Actually, I survived because luck had taken over again. Just when everything looked especially grim, a letter arrived from the Turnabout Theater in Hollywood. By chance, the three Yale Puppeteers – creators and owners of the Turnabout – had been in New York when the Peppermill opened and failed at the Chanin Theater in 1937 and they had asked me to join them when we closed. I would have accepted gladly, but there was an obstacle: California was enforcing a new curfew for “enemy aliens.” As a former German, I was prohibited to be away from my home address after nine p.m. – exactly the time when the show started. But now in 1943 the curfew had been lifted. Would I come and join them?
