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Biographical/Historical Information

Efraim Frisch was a German writer, editor, and translator born into an Orthodox Jewish family. He first attended rabbinical school in Vienna, but dropped out and later settled on art and literature at the University of Berlin. In 1900 he moved to Berlin and worked as an editor and freelance writer. There, he befriended Martin Buber and Christian Morgenstern and became involved with the magazine "Das Theater in Berlin", which then spurred him to become a dramaturg at the Deutsches Theater from 1904 to 1909. Frisch moved to Munich in 1912, once again working as an editor. In 1914 he helped found "Der Neue Merkur" [The New Mercury], a cultural magazine. He served as a medic in World War I, after which he was the editor in chief of his magazine before moving on to write and edit for various serials such as the Frankfurt Newspaper and the European Revue. He emigrated to Switzerland in 1933 to escape Nazi rule, but was unable to secure a work permit. Thus, he wrote under a number of pseudonyms for various Swiss serials, in addition to taking help from friends and using scholarship money granted by the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom to stay financially stable. Frisch began suffering from muscular dystrophy in 1939, and was confined to a wheelchair in 1941. His literary work included a number of novels, short stories, essays.

Suzanne Carvallo-Schülein was born in Paris into a distinguished family of Portuguese-Jewish descent. As an art student at the private school “La Palette” in Paris, she met and later married Julius Schülein. The couple worked and exhibited in Paris and then settled in Munich for twenty years, where Carvallo-Schülein was in great demand as a portrait painter and became one of the first women to belong to the Munich Secession. In 1930 the couple moved to Berlin, attracted by the city’s growing significance as a cultural center. After the Nazis came to power the Schüleins went from Germany to France, constantly plagued by the political turmoil facing German Jews. They were finally able to emigrate to the US in 1941 after a dangerous border crossing into Spain. In 1945, Carvallo-Schülein exhibited her still lifes and portraits at the Knoedler and the Caroll Carstairs Galleries in New York, and in 1973 at the Goethe House She is best known for her portraits of prominent German intellectuals. Her portrait of the conductor Bruno Walter hangs in the Munich Opera House; the likeness of her grandfather Jules Carvallo can still be found at the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris, which he co-founded.

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Citation

Carvallo-Schülein, Susanne: Portrait of Efraim Frisch, Leo Baeck Institute, 77.4.