Light Within the Shadows is a lively and moving memoir that chronicles Pnina Granirer’s life as an artist, wife and mother. Conceived as a play in three acts, it begins in her hometown in Romania, moves to its second act in Israel, and concludes with her life in North America. It encompasses her years in Israel, the USA, France and Canada, and her travels to Japan, Spain and Mexico, all of which inform her understanding of the world which is then reflected in her art.
Light within the Shadows was published in May 2017 and is available in better bookstores and on Amazon.
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Testimonials
(Light Within the Shadows) is a lively and touching act of memory and affirmation, as vivid, theatrical and perceptive as Granirer’s paintings themselves. It shows both an artist’s eye for the telling detail and a historian’s awareness of social and political context. Despite life’s vicissitudes, she retains a freshness and sense of wonder as we travel from her origins in a tumultuous Europe through army service in Israel to her eventual place of safety and fulfilment among like-minded friends in Canada.
– Max Wyman
Critic and cultural commentator
Light Within the Shadows is an artist’s triptych spanning three continents and a historical primer on Pnina Granirer’s life: her early years at the heart of Europe in Romania before, during, and after the Second World War under the Nazis and the Communists, where her family and Jewish community in Brăila were immunized by a Romanian concoction of kindness and corruption, and the connivings of a canny mother with an eye for recycling designer clothes and making deals with devils.
For me, the standouts of the book are its moments of graphic memory, some sensory, some sensationally sad and curious. After confiscating her father’s library of leather-bound books, a Nazi official has them stacked on the shelves in his office, not to be read, but to make them look good and him important. A fabulous black woman, Lulu Belle, staring at me out of a surreal drawing across the counter of her antique curio shop in Urbana, Illinois.
Although Pnina Granirer calls the book her “visual diary,” many fine, sensory turns of phrase lingered after I finished reading it . . . “the perfume of pencils,” for example. Anyone who can come up with that and revive my own memories of ink wells and my wooden desk and lead (graphite) in the pencil I held between my childish fingers has me involved with all five senses in her life story.
-George McWhirter
Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing, UBC Author of numerous works of fiction and poetry
Pnina Granirer offers a personal glimpse into the history of the 20th Century, from the fate of the Jews in her native Romania to her family’s move to a new and exciting Israel and finally, after three years in the USA, arriving and settling in Vancouver, Canada. We see her growth from humble beginnings as an illustrator in Israel into a prolific artist in Canada. The tug-of-war that family and career represent for women is vividly expressed in these pages. She shares her moments of doubt and uncertainty with the reader, as well as her decision to follow her own course, regardless of the cost. To our benefit, Granirer is an intelligent and creative artist and writer. The memoir comes full circle when she returns to Romania after an absence of 65 years, and her three wishes, common to most exiles, are fulfilled.
Pnina Granirer’s exhibition Legends will showcase the series Medea and The Cannibal Bird Suite at our museum in July 2017.
Natalia Fernández, Director
Museum Fundación Eugenio Granell
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Pnina Granirer’s memoir of her life from 1935 to the present describes a true artist’s odyssey conceived as a drama in three acts, starting with a perilous childhood as a Jewish girl in 1940s Romania, continuing with emigration to Israel in the early years of the state, and concluding with a long creative period in North America, mostly based in Vancouver. Granirer writes with a painter’s eye, vividly evoking cities from Jerusalem to Paris to Montreal, and landscapes from the coastal sand dunes of Israel to the far north of Canada.
Granirer shares her creative process and how it relates to her life experience in three very different cultures, with their different opportunities and limitationsThis thoughtful and fascinating memoir would appeal to anyone interested in the creative life, and how it was lived by one gifted and determined artist through the vicissitudes of the 20th century and into the 21st.
-Graham Good
Professor Emeritus of English, University of British Columbia
Author of The Observing Self and Humanism Betrayed
Pnina Granirer takes us deep within a child’s revelations of wonderment and beauty that have not deserted the artist almost a lifetime later. From our privileged vantage we experience through her remarkable journey the power of an artist’s ceaseless investigation of the world without and within. The reader is carried by the emotion of what is here a constant interplay of immediate perception, remembrance and the dream-like yearning that singularly marks the human consciousness.
– Salem Alaton
Humber College Professor of Journalism
Former Globe and Mail New York arts correspondent