JACOB JR, MY JEWISH WORLD. CHARLOTTE SALOMON.

Thrusday, Kislev 12, 5778. November 30, 2017.

Shalom! World.

The details of  Charlotte Salomon's extraordinary life tend to overshadow her work. Often likened to Anne Frank, the Jewish artist was shaped by the Nazis' rise to power and by a suppressed Family history  of suicide, before her life was cut short at Auschwitz in 1943. She has inspired plays, an opera, a movie and an award-winning French novel, and is the subject of a forthcoming animated film. 

Salomon was born in Berlin 1917, came from na upper-middle-class Jewshi Family and watched as the world she had known as  a child disintegrated when Hitler came to  power. She was a  reserved child, but she clearly had a turbulent and  passionate inner life with na astute visual memory, "imprinting  everything for future  use," according to her  biographer Mary L. Felstiner.

Images she later  painted of this period reveal a wry, bitter humor. Hitler's election to chancellor in 1933 is illustrated with rows of faceless Brownshirts, painted in muddy, Expressionist streaks. The swastika on a flag is reversed, a sly attempt to neutralize its power.

The terror  of  Kristallnacht - November 9, night in 1938 when Jewish homes, schools and business across Germany were ransacked - made it clear that the Salomon Family was no longer safe, and Charlotte, then 22, was  sent to live with her maternal grandparents in the South of  France. 

It was there that her grndmother killed herself, na event that lled to the shattering revelation of a long line of  suicidesby women in the Family, including, most devastatingly to Salomon, her mother, whom she had thought died of influenza.

With her grandfather taunting that she would be next, Salomon embarked on artistic creations in a bid to stave off what she saw as a family tendency toward self-destruction, inspired by the ideas of Alfred Wolfsohn, her  stepmother's vocal coach, who she had known inn Berlin. Having suffered acute trauma during  World War I, he had developed theories of the curative power of creativity that had a lasting influence on her.

Resolving to go deep into herself in order to make sense of her life and the chaos around her, Salomon shut herself  away and, in a frenzy of creative activity, painted almost 1,400 gouaches from 1940 to 1943. The musical references  which accompany the work refer to "the music she was hearing in her mind while she was creating  the paintings," Ms. Knotter explains. Salomon hummed as she worked to jog her memory, nothing which song a painting was  inspired by on the rear of the paper. 

For Griselda Pollock, the author of  a  major study of Salomon's work, the artist's need to dramatize her past had a purpose: to help her uncover a history of sexual abuse by her grandfather - which may have included Salomon among the victims -  that Ms. Pollock believes provoked the Salomon family's many suicides.

A painted letter, kept secret by her family for decades, in which Salomon appears to confess to  killing her grandfather, which may give credencie  to the theory. However, given that Salomon's work so  clearly blends fact with fiction we are unlikely to ever know if  she actually did.

One thing that does seem clear is Salomon's desire to survive. The final image of "Life? Or Theater?" shows her in a bright green bathing suit, facing the sea, a paintbrush in hand. It is as if she had painted her past, real or imagined, so that she could turn to her future.

But perhaps she sensed she wouldn't be able to. Feeling a growing sense of uneasy as World War II raged on, Salomon packed up her work and left it with a doctor in the Summer of 1943, asking him to keep it safe, as she said it contained, "my whole life".

Shortly afterward, Salomon, then 26, was deported to KZ Auschwitz. She was killed on arrival.

Shalom! Aleichem.

Cultural Support:  Jacob Jr. B.A.C.E., avec L'Integration d'Association avec Israel et dans le Monde/Cz .