Pamela Reitman to Present on Charlotte Salomon at Enso Village in Healdsburg, CA
“A vividly detailed rendering of a real life caught in a maelstrom of 20th-century horror.” -Kirkus Reviews.
Pamela Reitman will show slides and talk about how the young German-Jewish Charlotte Salomon created a masterpiece of 20th-century art while in exile, alone without identity papers, on the Côte d’Azur. She will share the artist’s struggle with madness, her impulse to die by suicide, and how finally she completed her work and risked her life to save it. Her talk will focus on the power of art to transform suffering and the role of fact and fiction in the creation of a biographical literary novel.
EVENT INFORMATION
June 2nd, 7pm
Enso Village
1801 Boxheart Drive
Healdsburg, CA
Books will be available to purchase at the event.
About Charlotte Salomon:
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.
