Pnina Granirer and her mother escaped from Romania when they were ransomed for $100. This was done without the knowledge of the Jewish community at large and was kept secret from the world.
Pnina Granirer was born of Jewish parents in the Danube port-city of Braila, Romania, in 1935. Her childhood was lived under the brutal, fascism of the Iron Guard, an ultra-nationalist, anti-semitic movement, fueled by Orthodox Christian zealousness, under the dictatorial direction of Horia Sima. When Ion Antonescu came to power in September 1940 and soon destroyed the Iron Guard, the Romanian Jewish community were seemingly less endangered than other Eastern European Jews. But freedoms were steadily eroded. Ownership of telephones and radios were forbidden; cars and homes and libraries were plundered.
Only much later, when she read I.C. Butnaru's The Silent Holocaust: Romania and Its Jews, did Granirer understand the full extent of the devastation: half the Jewish population had been slaughtered. Cattle trucks stood ready to deport the remaining Jews to the death camps, even as the country was "liberated." by the Russian army. This salvation, greeted rapturously at first, turned into another form of persecution. Under Communist rule, Granirer's father, a committed socialist, was forced into hiding until he could be smuggled out to Israel. The rest of the family eventually followed him; their emigration made possible by Israel's willingness to pay ransom for Romanian Jews who constituted the largest number of European Holocaust survivors.
Her book, Light Within the Shadows: A Painter's Memoir (Granville Island 2017), recalls her World War II experiences. As a schoolgirl she was assigned the task of producing a portrait of Stalin. She was fortunate in 1950 when she and her mother were allowed to emigrate to Israel where she was reunited with her father who had fled Communist persecution via a Yugoslav freighter. Named Paula in Romania, she adopted Pnina -- meaning pearl in Hebrew. Granirer has described her adolescent years in Israel as relatively happy ones, in spite of the poverty and crowded conditions. As an immigrant who didn't know the language she worked hard to gain an education, met a fellow Romanian emigre who became her husband in 1954 and, until marriage exempted her, she did the required military service. The young couple hoped to remain in Israel but their departure, like that of most "brain drains" world-wide, resulted from the lack of jobs. The Hebrew University had no position for her husband, who had earned his Ph.D in mathematics there. The U.S, on the other hand, propelled into the space race by the Russian success of Sputnik, was recruiting mathematicians. Her family went to Illinois in 1962, then moved to Ithaca, New York in 1964.
Her husband's career brought them finally to Vancouver, where Granirer began to find her way as an artist. In Israel, after finishing her studies at the Bezalel School of Art, she had worked as an illustrator but, lacking a green card in the U.S., she was unable to work. Instead, she discovered a new freedom in drawing and painting, practising art for art's sake. During a year in Montreal, her camaraderie with artists living bohemian lives devoted exclusively to their art made her question the effect on her work of her own conventional life as a wife and a mother. Her doubts were reinforced by talking to other female artists and by attending a workshop in 1980 with Judy Chicago, whose sensational work 'The Dinner Party' was drawing crowds.
Judy Chicago's statement that no woman artist can ever make it big if she has a family resonated and propelled Granirer into her most ambitious work, The Trials of Eve. Reminiscent of works by William Blake, her Trials of Eve suite (1980-81) melded Old Testament and Westcoast Native symbolism. The Trials of Eve, a major work of 12 mixed media drawings and 12 poems, now in the collection of the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, was published as a limited edition book of 100 copies by Gaea Press, and as a softcover edition of 500 copies in 1993. A film by Gretchen Jordan-Bastow based on this work was first shown at the Fifa in Paris, on Bravo!TV, on Knowledge Network and other venues.
It was in Vancouver in 1965 that she made her first association with a gallery--the small Danish Art Gallery run by Peder Bertelsen. There, at the age of thirty, she made her debut exhibition. A year later, a second exhibition was scheduled in Victoria at a small gallery on Pandora Street. This brought her into contact with the artists who in 1971 formed The Limners Group-Pat Martin Bates, Herbert Siebner, Karl Spreitz, Myfanwy Pavelic and others. She was honoured that Maxwell Bates bought one of her woodblock prints. Granirer's paintings express her belief that "beauty has always existed side by side with violence, cruelty and war." In 1969, one of her monoprint drawings of her son, David, was selected for the cover of the UNICEF calendar. A triptych from the 1988 international exhibition Fear of Others -- Art Against Racism is now in the collection of the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem and a second painting is in the collection of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in New York.
A forty-year retrospective of 120 works at the Richmond Art Gallery in January of 1998 reflected the artistic development over her long career. Published in conjunction with a 40-year retrospective of her art at the Richmond Art Gallery, Ted Lindberg's lavishly illustrated Pnina Granirer: Portrait of an Artist was launched at the opening of the exhibition.
In 2005, a film about Granirer's work by Mehdi Ali was launched on Bravo! TV. In 2014, her work was included in the encyclopedia of international surrealism by Arturo Schwarz. In 2015, Granirer returned to her hometown of Braila and re-united with school friends and a close friend of her mother's, Marcela Dermer.
"Only now do I understand how lucky we had been to escape the camps and death trains." -- Pnina Granirer
BOOKS:
The Trials of Eve (Barbarian Press 1993)
Pnina Granirer: Portrait of an Artist by Ted Lindberg (Ronsdale Press 1998)
Light Within the Shadows: A Painter's Memoir (Granville Island 2017) $24.95
Duo: Marcela Dermer and Pnina Granirer, 2015
Pnina Granirer was born of Jewish parents in the Danube port-city of Braila, Romania, in 1935. Her childhood was lived under the brutal, fascism of the Iron Guard, an ultra-nationalist, anti-semitic movement, fueled by Orthodox Christian zealousness, under the dictatorial direction of Horia Sima. When Ion Antonescu came to power in September 1940 and soon destroyed the Iron Guard, the Romanian Jewish community were seemingly less endangered than other Eastern European Jews. But freedoms were steadily eroded. Ownership of telephones and radios were forbidden; cars and homes and libraries were plundered.
Only much later, when she read I.C. Butnaru's The Silent Holocaust: Romania and Its Jews, did Granirer understand the full extent of the devastation: half the Jewish population had been slaughtered. Cattle trucks stood ready to deport the remaining Jews to the death camps, even as the country was "liberated." by the Russian army. This salvation, greeted rapturously at first, turned into another form of persecution. Under Communist rule, Granirer's father, a committed socialist, was forced into hiding until he could be smuggled out to Israel. The rest of the family eventually followed him; their emigration made possible by Israel's willingness to pay ransom for Romanian Jews who constituted the largest number of European Holocaust survivors.
Her book, Light Within the Shadows: A Painter's Memoir (Granville Island 2017), recalls her World War II experiences. As a schoolgirl she was assigned the task of producing a portrait of Stalin. She was fortunate in 1950 when she and her mother were allowed to emigrate to Israel where she was reunited with her father who had fled Communist persecution via a Yugoslav freighter. Named Paula in Romania, she adopted Pnina -- meaning pearl in Hebrew. Granirer has described her adolescent years in Israel as relatively happy ones, in spite of the poverty and crowded conditions. As an immigrant who didn't know the language she worked hard to gain an education, met a fellow Romanian emigre who became her husband in 1954 and, until marriage exempted her, she did the required military service. The young couple hoped to remain in Israel but their departure, like that of most "brain drains" world-wide, resulted from the lack of jobs. The Hebrew University had no position for her husband, who had earned his Ph.D in mathematics there. The U.S, on the other hand, propelled into the space race by the Russian success of Sputnik, was recruiting mathematicians. Her family went to Illinois in 1962, then moved to Ithaca, New York in 1964.
Her husband's career brought them finally to Vancouver, where Granirer began to find her way as an artist. In Israel, after finishing her studies at the Bezalel School of Art, she had worked as an illustrator but, lacking a green card in the U.S., she was unable to work. Instead, she discovered a new freedom in drawing and painting, practising art for art's sake. During a year in Montreal, her camaraderie with artists living bohemian lives devoted exclusively to their art made her question the effect on her work of her own conventional life as a wife and a mother. Her doubts were reinforced by talking to other female artists and by attending a workshop in 1980 with Judy Chicago, whose sensational work 'The Dinner Party' was drawing crowds.
Judy Chicago's statement that no woman artist can ever make it big if she has a family resonated and propelled Granirer into her most ambitious work, The Trials of Eve. Reminiscent of works by William Blake, her Trials of Eve suite (1980-81) melded Old Testament and Westcoast Native symbolism. The Trials of Eve, a major work of 12 mixed media drawings and 12 poems, now in the collection of the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, was published as a limited edition book of 100 copies by Gaea Press, and as a softcover edition of 500 copies in 1993. A film by Gretchen Jordan-Bastow based on this work was first shown at the Fifa in Paris, on Bravo!TV, on Knowledge Network and other venues.
It was in Vancouver in 1965 that she made her first association with a gallery--the small Danish Art Gallery run by Peder Bertelsen. There, at the age of thirty, she made her debut exhibition. A year later, a second exhibition was scheduled in Victoria at a small gallery on Pandora Street. This brought her into contact with the artists who in 1971 formed The Limners Group-Pat Martin Bates, Herbert Siebner, Karl Spreitz, Myfanwy Pavelic and others. She was honoured that Maxwell Bates bought one of her woodblock prints. Granirer's paintings express her belief that "beauty has always existed side by side with violence, cruelty and war." In 1969, one of her monoprint drawings of her son, David, was selected for the cover of the UNICEF calendar. A triptych from the 1988 international exhibition Fear of Others -- Art Against Racism is now in the collection of the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem and a second painting is in the collection of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in New York.
A forty-year retrospective of 120 works at the Richmond Art Gallery in January of 1998 reflected the artistic development over her long career. Published in conjunction with a 40-year retrospective of her art at the Richmond Art Gallery, Ted Lindberg's lavishly illustrated Pnina Granirer: Portrait of an Artist was launched at the opening of the exhibition.
In 2005, a film about Granirer's work by Mehdi Ali was launched on Bravo! TV. In 2014, her work was included in the encyclopedia of international surrealism by Arturo Schwarz. In 2015, Granirer returned to her hometown of Braila and re-united with school friends and a close friend of her mother's, Marcela Dermer.
"Only now do I understand how lucky we had been to escape the camps and death trains." -- Pnina Granirer
BOOKS:
The Trials of Eve (Barbarian Press 1993)
Pnina Granirer: Portrait of an Artist by Ted Lindberg (Ronsdale Press 1998)
Light Within the Shadows: A Painter's Memoir (Granville Island 2017) $24.95
Duo: Marcela Dermer and Pnina Granirer, 2015
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Light Within the Shadows
Review 2017
REVIEW: Light Within the Shadows: A Painter's Memoir
by Pnina Granirer
Vancouver: Granville Island Publishing, 2017. $24.95 / 978-1-926991-83-2
Reviewed by Janet Mary Nicol
*
Pnina Granirer was creative from an early age, but she didn't come in to her own artistically until the "third act"; of her life journey. This memoir reveals why this is so as the author recounts her beginnings in Romania, followed by immigration to Israel when she was fifteen and then to North America in 1962.
When Granirer eventually settled on Vancouver's west side with her husband Edmond ("Eddy";) Granirer, a University of British Columbia math professor, she began exhibiting art and building an international reputation while raising two sons.
Granirer has spent most of her life in Canada, yet it is her "back story"; -- her life in Romania and Israel -- which informs these later experiences and consumes two-thirds of Light Within the Shadows.
Using a journal style format, with drawings and photographs accompanying short, thematic chapters, Granirer begins by relaying family histories entwined with accounts of Europe's shifting political landscape. Born in Braila, Romania in 1935 to Lascar and Carola Solomon, Granirer was an only child. Her Jewish-Romanian parents were a love match, defying their parental plans for an arranged marriage.
In another part of Europe, German leader Adolf Hitler had begun implementing anti-Semitic laws which would lead to the systematic mass-murder of European Jews.
"Houses are secret realms of fantasy and imagination for children,"; Granirer writes about the stately two-storey home her family rented in Braila when she was five years old. The house was designed by an Italian architect and owned by a Greek. She grew up alongside other relations, including a female cousin who was like a sister to her. An observant child, Granirer describes secrets within the extended family too. She felt protected and safe, especially trusting of her mother's strength. Within this atmosphere, Granirer developed a talent for drawing.
After the World War Two broke out, Romania formed an alliance with the Nazis and Granirer remembers her family scrambling into the basement as American bomber planes flew over the city, followed by occupation by Russian soldiers at war's end.
"A rare oasis in the eye of the hurricane, Braila was a city where most Jews would somehow survive the disasters of war,"; she writes. Granirer only learned the full impact of the holocaust on Romanian Jews years later while living in the United States, after reading of I.C. Butnaru's book, The Silent Holocaust: Romania and its Jews (Greenwood Press, 1992).
Life continued for the author and her family as Romania came under control of Russia's communist government. Israel was founded in 1948 and a short time later, the opportunistic Romanian regime accepted money from the young country's government in return for permitting Romanian Jews to emigrate there. Granirer's father had already escaped to Israel when the author and her mother followed in 1950 under this agreement.
The second phase of Granirer's life began as she attended high school while living with her parents in a suburb of Haifa. Granirer fulfilled compulsory military duty, married Eddy Granirer, and attended art college in Jerusalem. Her life was carefree and creative. Opportunities in academia for her husband were scarce, however. When the young couple reluctantly moved to the United States, they believed they would return one day.
Eventually settling in Vancouver, Granirer was 39 years old when she was inspired by her young son to create the Childhood Magic series of drawings. "I found my voice as an artist in the early 1970s,"; she writes, "after years of wandering through the jungle of artistic styles created by others."; Granirer discovered her finest talent was in drawing and writes that "lines flowed from my pen with a life of their own.";
Her sense of dislocation, the obligations of family life, and the challenges of being a female artist had perhaps slowed her career -- but Granirer did arrive. A strong feminist movement had emerged in this period and accounts, in part, for the remarkable success of her series of art pieces entitled "The Trials of Eve.";
Granirer studied the layers of ancient religions and mythologies, including those of the First Nations of the west coast, to illustrate ideas around the biblical story of Eve. The result is a rich visual narrative that has resonated widely and resulted in a book and a film.
More inspiration followed, including a depiction of the mystery and beauty of coastal stones in a series of drawings entitled The Carved Stones, a trio of panels with images based on the Holocaust entitled Out of the Flames, and a series of figure drawings called The Dancers Suite.
Granirer is co-founder of Artists in Our Midst, an annual event, now in its twentieth year, on Vancouver's west side. Artists open their homes and studios to the community over a weekend in June.
Although Granirer has achieved much since leaving Europe as a teenager, she provides a satisfactory conclusion to her memoir by recounting her 2015 visit to Romania. She succeeded in viewing her childhood home in Braila and found people who remembered her and her family. Returning to Vancouver, she reflects on her mortality and life's mysteries.
Granirer's writing -- and art work -- has undoubtedly helped her in this rumination. Readers are rewarded too, with an enlightening and insightful story of an artist's life.
*
Janet Mary Nicol is a secondary school history teacher in Vancouver and a freelance writer. She has written local histories about Vancouver and its people for BC History, Canada's History, and Labour/Le Travail. She also volunteers with the BC Labour Heritage Centre. Her writing blog is at http://janetnicol.wordpress.com/
*
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