Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life: A Novel [Paperback]

Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life

Inspired by the life and work of Charlotte Salomon, this novel shows an artist intent on pursuing her art against all odds. As a young German-Jewish art student at The Berlin Art Academy during Hitler’s rise to power in 1938, Charlotte’s first place prize is denied because she is a Jew, her enrollment annulled. After Kristallnacht, she is sent from Berlin into exile with her grandparents.

When Charlotte’s grandmother leaps to her death, her Old World grandfather shocks her with the family secret, a legacy of female suicides. She struggles against her grandfather’s insistence that suicide, not art, is her destiny too.

Haunted by the encroaching terror of the Third Reich and the threat of psychological disintegration, Charlotte clings to her determination to become a serious modernist painter, to complete her monumental work “Life? Or Theater?” and get it into safekeeping in a race against time before capture by the Nazis.

“A vividly detailed rendering of a real life caught in a maelstrom of 20th-century horror.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The story of Charlotte Salomon is perhaps the most dramatic Holocaust narrative we know. Based on decades of research and reflection, Pamela Reitman brings Charlotte’s experience vividly alive inCharlotte Salomon Paints Her Life. Sad though it is, this wonderful novel will give you hope.”—Norman Fischer, Zen priest and poet, author ofSelected Poems, 1980-2013

“Pamela Reitman's vividly imagined novel dares to explore beneath the surface of Charlotte Salomon's remarkable paintings, a body of work that managed to survive the Nazis even though the artist herself did not. While Reitman's fictional account is supported by careful and extensive research, she acknowledges her own artistic choices to embellish and interpret. Thislƒt