Like the author Adrienne Thomas, Soma Morgenstern was also able to escape from France to the USA with the assistance of the Emergency Rescue Committee. He arrived in New York on 15 April 1941 after a two-week sail from Lisbon on the SS Guiné. He rented a room a the Park Plaza Hotel, which was a residence and meeting place for a great number of emigrants. Other hotel residents besides Morgenstern and Thomas were also Hermann Kesten, Frank Leonhard, Hertha Pauli, Walter Mehring and Hans Sahl. With the exception of a one-and-a-half-year stay in California from 1941 to 1943, the Park Plaza was to remain Morgenstern’s place of residence until 1967.

The hotel was situated right across the road from the Museum of Natural History, where Morgenstern was a regular in the museum café. He wrote later in his childhood memories that it reminded him of the lovely Café Museum in Vienna, despite the fact – he said – that the American café was about as similar to its Viennese counterpart as a monkey was to a human being.  (Soma Morgenstern, In einer anderen Zeit, p. 342)

When Morgenstern received US citizenship in 1946, his wife Inge and son Dan also moved to New York one year later in 1947. The family hadn’t been together since 1939, and yet Morgenstern did not give up his hotel apartment until 1967, when he moved in with his wife because he needed to be cared for following a heart attack.