Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life: A Novel

by Pamela Reitman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781960573919
Publisher:	Sibylline Press
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Pages:	392
Sales rank:	1,666,485
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Pamela Reitman is an award-winning writer with numerous publications in literary journals, news outlets, and magazines. She has a B.A cum laude in English from Columbia and an MPH from the University of California Berkeley. She is retired from a career in public health and community service aimed at reducing the stigma of mental illness. Ms. Reitman was a past Director of Makor Or: A Jewish Meditation Center in San Francisco. She is lay ordained in the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition. She lives in Healdsburg, California with her husband.

Editorial Reviews

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 in Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life. Sad though it is, this wonderful novel will give you hope.” —Norman Fischer, Zen priest and poet, author of Selected 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. This haunting book should help to bring more well-deserved attention to Salomon's important archive, and to remind a contemporary audience of innumerable losses beyond the frame.” —Elizabeth Rosner, author of Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory and Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening

“Evocative and moving, this gorgeous novel is perfect for fans of historical and literary fiction. With a firm grasp of the relevant history, Reitman immerses us in the time period with perfectly-placed details and captivating drama. From page one I was swept along for the glorious ride, anxious to discover what destiny awaits Charlotte.” —Heather Bell Adams, author of The Good Luck Stone

“Pamela Reitman has created a gorgeous, haunting portrait of a willful young Jewish woman who paints to save her life, to remember everything in images and words, as Nazi jackboots approach.” —Parul Kapur, author of Inside the Mirror 

From the Publisher