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October 31, 2008
Adjusting to Vancouver life
Writer talks about her childhood, as well as her Jewish identity.
OLGA LIVSHIN
The meeting room of the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia was packed on Sunday. People came to listen to a presentation by Claudia Cornwall called Discovering My Family History: Affirming My Family's Heritage.
The lecture was supposed to be a follow up to the exhibition dedicated to Cornwall's mother, Lore Maria Wiener, Fashioning Lives: Questions of Identity, which opened at the museum in September. Everyone expected Cornwall to talk about the events behind her award-winning memoir Letter from Vienna. (The book is currently for sale at the museum and it tells a story of the writer discovering her Jewish heritage.) However, Cornwall surprised her audience. Instead of talking about her search for her Jewish identity, she told her rapt listeners about her "fashionable" childhood in Kerrisdale. For decades, Cornwall's mother was a well-known Vancouver designer, a reigning queen of the Vancouver fashion scene.
Cornwall called her parents' high-fashion business enterprise, which they launched in Vancouver in 1949, a "quixotic venture" and a novelty. Vancouver 50 years ago was very different from Vancouver now. It was mostly white Anglo-Saxon, said Cornwall, an "unsophisticated backwater," where the idea of dancing in a nightclub seemed outrageous. "As far as fashion went, Vancouver was pretty well off the map," she said.
After escaping from the communist China, Wiener would have preferred to open a couturier shop in Montreal, with its French ambience, but the family didn't have enough money to travel there. They landed on the West Coast, and that was where they built their new lives.
Cornwall's reminiscences entertained and educated her listeners. She admitted that despite her mother being a first-grade fashion designer, she herself didn't have as many unique, custom-designed clothes as she wanted. She cited two reasons: first, paying customers always had priority; second, her mother didn't believe in one-of-a-kind creations. "I learned a lot from my mother about the esthetics and the morality of design," Cornwall said. "She wanted to make things that not only were a pleasure to wear but also a pleasure to make.... She eschewed unnecessary decorations and fussiness." Simplicity and elegance were the staples of Wiener's designs.
Growing up in her mother's workroom, surrounded by mannequins in pretty dresses, rolls of silk and boxes of accessories, Cornwall played with buttons and ribbons, elastics and fashion magazines when she was young. Her friends used cardboard fabric rolls as "secret weapons" in their childhood war games. And of course, her mother incorporated some of Cornwall's ideas into her designs.
"I remember that, as a teenager, I really liked what Henri Matisse did with blue and with patterns. I liked his blue nudes and the blue silk screen "Femmes et Singes." My mother responded to my enthusiasm by making summer dresses out of blue and white Indian bedspreads. I had one, too. I loved it and wore it completely out." Sometimes, Cornwall even served as her mother's model.
Full of humor, Cornwall's talk was suffused with love for her mother, who sat in the front row, beaming proudly at her smart and successful daughter. After the lecture, attendees dived wholeheartedly into a question-and-answer session. And of course, the topic reverted from clothes back to Judaism. The predominantly Jewish audience wasn't going to let Cornwall off the hook with just a fashion chat.
Many of the questions were about Shanghai, where Cornwall was born, and about the wartime Jewish ghetto there. Cornwall told her listeners about the research for her book and how she first discovered that she had Jewish relatives. She was 40 at the time and "vaguely Christian," so the discovery was quite a shock.
Later, she learned that her father, having gone through the terrors of the Nazi persecution, wanted to shield his daughter from the past and insulate her from the fear and despair that accosted many European Jews after the war.
In the late 1980s, the situation had changed. Many of the grownup children of displaced Jews began searching for their roots. With the help of her mother, Cornwall translated her grandparents' letters and read numerous books and documents on the Second World War witnesses. She travelled to Germany and Austria to work in the archives, until she could reconstruct the events leading to her parents' immigration to Shanghai.
"I haven't become a Jew," she said, "not really, but my investigation had given me a feeling of connection to the past. Some events that happened during my childhood started to make sense." Although the quest to uncover her family's Jewish ancestry started as a personal endeavor, for Cornwall, a professional journalist, it soon transformed into the desire to write about it.
When the book was first published in 1995, it created a stir. Newspaper, television and radio interviews followed, and Cornwall also gave multiple talks and presentations. That was when she found out that she wasn't alone in her predicament. Time and again she heard the same response from different people: "This happened to me, too."
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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