Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life
In Pamela Reitman’s bittersweet historical novel Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life, the German Jewish artist struggles to express herself and survive in the shadow of the Third Reich.
In 1939 in Berlin, Kristallnacht shatters remaining hopes that Jews can safely live in Germany. Sent away by her parents, Charlotte moves in with her grandparents, who have “trying natures.” They board at a villa in Nice, France, with other Jewish refugees.
Charlotte finds artistic and emotional solace with the villa’s owner and fellow boarders; they encourage Charlotte to show her work and to continue painting. But a sudden, shocking tragedy lays bare a truth that her predatory grandfather is all too eager to share: There’s an extensive line of mental illness and suicides in Charlotte’s maternal line that he says she cannot escape. Despite this, Charlotte resolves to approach “the lives of her family’s suicides in paint. She looked on the act of painting as the making of memory for them.” The result is her masterpiece, Life? Or Theater?, a massive series of watercolors that would earn her posthumous renown.
Reitman’s re-creation of Salomon’s life is composed of two opposing themes: art as a tool to interpret trauma, and the intractable tentacles of family secrets and shame that threaten to choke artistic expression. With flashbacks to formative moments in Charlotte’s younger life—including her unrequited love for an artistic mentor—Reitman achieves a fuller portrait of her subject than the 1939–1943 timeline might otherwise allow. Blending fact with fiction, the novel is a touching synthesis that celebrates Charlotte’s fearless belief that only in art can one defy “the erasure of identity.”
Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life is a powerful historical novel, at turns winsome and wrenching, about a gifted artist caught in the maelstrom of madness and war.
Reviewed by
Peggy Kurkowski
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