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