Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life, with Pamela Reitman

Please register to attend this free in-person program. The Library is located at 1835 Ellis Street in San Francisco, with free garage parking at 1227 Pierce Street between Ellis and Eddy.  

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.

Pamela Reitman is an award-winning writer with numerous publications in literary journals, news outlets, and magazines. She has a BA cum laude in English from Columbia University 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. Reitman served as director of Makor Or: A Jewish Meditation Center in San Francisco, and is lay ordained in the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition. Her novel, Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life, recently won the PenCraft Award for Literary Excellence in the category of historical fiction.