Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life

Charlotte Salomon Paints Her LifeInspired 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 Hitlers rise to power in 1938, Charlottes 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 Charlottes grandmother leaps to her death, her Old World grandfather shocks her with the family secret, a legacy of female suicides. She struggles against her grandfathers 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.