[4] Adolf Schenk was born in Óbuda (part of Budapest), a member of the Hungarian speaking Jewish community in what was at that time an ethnically diverse city.

[13][14] By 1911 (not for the last time in his life) he had returned to Paris, where during 1911 and 1912 he worked on Les Hommes nouveaux, a newly launched Franco-German literary journal produced by a group of proto-libertarians with Cendrars.

He met again with his old friend the socialist poet Lajos Kassák, founder of the anarchist-pacifist magazine A Tett which had been quickly banned on account of its "anti-militarist" tendencies.

[18] In 1918–1919 he teamed up with Karl Lohs and Hans Richter to produce the short-lived Dadaist literary periodical "Horizont-Flugschriften" which was published in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest.

In 1923 he published "Kuriositäten-Kabinett: Begegnungen mit seltsamen Begebenheiten, Landstreichern, Verbrechern, Artisten, religiös Wahnsinnigen, sexuellen Merkwürdigkeiten, Sozialdemokraten, Syndikalisten, Kommunisten, Anarchisten, Politikern und Künstlern", a volume of pen-portraits and memories.

With mentions of around 1,000 individuals, it has been described as an indispensable information pool on Europe's counter-culture during the early decades of the twentieth century, though critics have complained that some of the detail is, allegedly, unreliable.

[7] In Paris he teamed up with Paul Ruhstrat to launch and produce yet another short-lived literary journal (also touching on politics, the arts more broadly, science, theatre, music and the rapidly evolving medium of broadcast radio), "Die Zone".

[2][17] As the German armies entered Paris in June 1940 Emil Szittya and his little family were already clear of the city, having fled south with hundreds of thousands of other Parisians.

However, a reissue, with an introduction by Emmanuel Carrère appeared in 2019, and was enthusiastically reviewed by at least one scholarly critic, who wrote that the 220 page work "cries out for a German [translation and] publisher".

For many years he worked at the nearby Café Les Deux Magots, which at that time was famed as a meeting point for the Parisienne literary and intellectual élite.

Those whom he treated in this way included Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall, August Wilhelm Dressler, Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, Braque and Masereel.