Connect with Our Authors & Books

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.

FICTION | $22
Trade Paper | 5.315” x 8.465”
ISBN: 9781960573919
Pub Date: 4/15/2025
Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life: A Novel
by Pamela Reitman
Get it wherever great books are sold
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.

Praise for Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life: A Novel
“A vividly detailed rendering of a real life caught in a maelstrom of 20th-century horror.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“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
“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.”
—Norman Fischer, Zen priest and poet, author of Selected Poems, 1980-2013