Book Talk & Signing with Pamela Reitman, Author of CHARLOTTE SALOMON PAINTS HER LIFE at BOLD Coffee & Books
“A vividly detailed rendering of a real life caught in a maelstrom of 20th-century horror.” -Kirkus Reviews.
On May 9th, Pamela Reitman, author of Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life will talk about how the young German-Jewish Charlotte Salomon created a masterpiece of 20th-century art while in exile, alone without identity papers, in the South of France at BOLD Coffee & Books. Pamela will share the artist’s creative process, how she struggled against madness and the impulse to die by suicide, and finally risked her life to save her work. Her talk will focus on the power of art to transform suffering.
EVENT INFORMATION:
May 9th – 7pm-8:30pm
BOLD Coffee & Books
1755 SW Jefferson St
Portland, OR
About 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.
About Pamela Reitman:
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 Northern California with her husband.
