Salomon had a loving home in Weimar Germany with her father and step-mother, but she was keenly aware of the absence of her birth-mother. She wanted to study art, but her Jewish heritage made it difficult. Eventually, her parents sent her to live with grandparents in the south of France, but her grandfather was difficult to deal with, because her mother’s suicide had emotionally damaged him.
Nevertheless, she managed during this time to form a lifelong friendship with the American heiress Ottilie Moore and fall in love with refugee Alexander Nagler. Unfortunately, her grandfather tries to separate her from both, due to his stern (and cruel) notions of propriety.
Frankly, Charlotte gets a bit sidetracked with the bitter melodrama surrounding her nasty grandfather. In contrast, Salomon’s romance with Nagler is achingly beautiful, precisely because it is so tragic. Arguably, screenwriters Erik Rutherford and David Bezmozgis have the biographical emphasis slightly off, but Salomon’s story is still well worth telling.
