The Yaddo artists’ colony wasn’t only a “comical writers’ foundation”, but also a place where writers, composers and translators could establish contact with one another and work together. Since 1926, the foundation had been providing scholarship holders from areas of the arts with the chance to spend 8 weeks working at the colony. Photographs were taken regularly when the director of Yaddo, Elizabeth Ames, attended the evening dinner there. 

This last group of scholarship holders before the outbreak of World War II also contained several emigrants: Martin Gumpert, Hermann Broch, Rudolf von Ripper and Richard A. Bermann. Gumpert, a visitor to Yaddo from 4 June to 20 August 1939, was working on Heil Hunger! Health under Hitler, an excerpt of which was translated into English and published in the Readers Digest in December 1939. Through Broch, he made the acquaintance of Ruth Norden, who translated the First Papers (1941) for him. And Hermann Broch found in Jean Starr Untermeyer a translator for the novel he was writing at the time, The Death of Virgil.

From among the American guests at Yaddo, it was mainly Marc Blitzstein whose work was influenced by German emigration. In 1937 he translated the Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill into English. His adaptation of the opera and his translation of the songs led to Brecht becoming famous in the USA from the mid-fifties.