Inspired by the life and work of Charlotte Salomon, this novel depicts a young woman intent on pursuing her art against all odds. During Hitler’s rise to power, she loses her first-place prize at The Berlin Art Academy because she is a Jew. After Kristallnacht, she is sent from Berlin into exile with her grandparents on the Côte d’Azur.
When Charlotte’s grandmother leaps to her death, her Old-World grandfather shocks her with the family secret: a legacy of female suicides, her own mother included. She struggles against his insistence that suicide, not art, is her destiny too — all the way from their internment in a bleak camp in the Pyrenees through their arduous trek across mountainous backcountry to Marseille.
Haunted by the encroaching terror of the Third Reich and the threat of psychological disintegration, Charlotte clings to her determination to complete “Life? Or Theater?” — a radical masterpiece of 869 watercolor/gouache paintings — and risks her life to get it into safekeeping in a race against time before capture by the Nazis.

Fiction
Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life
- From the Publisher
September 1, 2024
Discussion Questions

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