JUDITH S. GOLDSTEIN 77
woman capturing and then rearranging the lives and interactions of her
family and friends, manipulating them back and forth between actual
personalities and theatrical characters. A Jewish woman, frightened and
furious over vicious persecution which closed in on her life and on her
family.
On sheet upon sheet of notebook-sized paper, she painted thousands
of memories and imaginings, internal and external conversations, feel–
ings, and landscapes. Sometimes there is only one image on a page; at
others a vertiginous multiplicity of figures and settings-but often mag–
ically spilling over into each other. Sometimes she imposed thoughts
from texts outside the picture; sometimes words flowed directly out of
the brains or mouths of her characters. Sometimes she used tones of
detachment and distance; at other times, the fiery intensity of the deep–
est emotions.
Ultimately no simplistic explanations describe Salomon's work.
Appreciation and understanding will differ from viewer to viewer. But
"Life? or Theater?" has the potential to expand and uplift a viewer's
understanding of art and life. As European anti-Semitism spewed forth
in
I939,
the year Salomon fled to France, a non-Jewish friend of the
Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian remarked to him: "J'aime les Juifs.
Je les aimes passionement. Ce n'est pas parce qu'ils sont malheureux.
Non. Je les aime parce qu'ils eloignent l'horizon."
Salomon did all of her frenzied work, driven by a unique gift and
controlled by discipline, skill, and mastery of multiple representative
forms. She accomplished this with a fierce imagination and self–
restraint. She was immersed in her history and her desire to escape mad–
ness, chaos, and futility-but not possessed by self-absorption. She
refused to stay the eternal child or the beleaguered adolescent. She
moved on to a tragic adulthood through personal and social encoun–
ters-real and imagined-that were daring, painful, probing, honest,
and richly creative.
