Johnny with Theo and Nathan, 2012. "Lighthouse" series painting in background.
Making
it to one hundred is always a rare achievement, but even more rare is to live
so well, with such lucidity and grace, as Johnny did for all that time. I count
it among the greatest gifts of my life to have had my grandfather a close part
of it for so long. In particular, I think often about what the last dozen years
have meant. If Johnny had left us at eighty-eight, he would have still had an
exceptionally long art career, a fifty-plus-year marriage, a loving family that
included four adult grandchildren who could converse intelligently about his
love for Japan, or his dislike of Schopenhauer; who could mix him a decent
martini and try again at his insistence to read the pages of his adored Bô Yin Râ's philosophy.
I
would still have been able to cherish childhood memories of Johnny telling us
Bubbledog stories, teaching us to play checkers, gin, and even poker, and
making wry jokes just when you least expected him to. He was a unique
combination of European formality and an incredibly open sense of wonder. On
the one hand, his precise gestures at the dinner table: pressing a finger to
the wood-grain to pick up a stray crumb, always the napkin rings, tea cozy, rye
bread. On the other hand, finding beauty in the pattern of wet leaves on a
sidewalk, or a cast-off metal stencil of the number 5 that he turned into
abstracted patterns in his paintings, or lighting up with his conspiratorial
giggle. Once, waiting for the ferry to Victoria, when my brother Brian and I,
with cousins Taylor and Jason, were playing in a playhouse pile of
multi-colored balls, he took off his shoes and jumped in. Where there was joy
to be had, he claimed it.
All
of that stays with me. Yet the past decade or so has been a marvel. First of all, I saw him fall in love—exactly
like the proverbial lighting bolt or Cupid’s arrow—and I witnessed what an
incredible thing it was for him to find such compatibility and happiness with his second wife, Lisa. You could see that rediscovering love at this time in his life was an
unexpected revelation, and it was deeply moving to witness.
Secondly,
my own children came to know Johnny. Nathan flew kites with him on visits to
Vancouver and challenged him to a chess match during a stay in Palm Springs.
Most recently, my sons were able to not only celebrate Johnny’s 100th
birthday, but went around town making a movie called “Secrets of a
Centenarian”—interviewing family members and friends on their favorite memories
with him, and filming each other giving impromptu docent tours of Johnny’s
retrospective in Penticton. Even Theo, only 6, could without prompting tell you
that this canvas represented a kimono, but also looked like a gateway, and also
a harp. They heard what Johnny was saying in his light-filled paintings.
But
the most profound thing for me was that I came to a different understanding of
my grandfather in these last ten years—one that had eluded me. For a long time,
well into my twenties, part of my grandfather remained an enigma to me. For all
his openness and optimism, he remained resolutely evasive, inexpressive about
certain aspects of the past. When I was in graduate school, in 1998, I was
getting more and more involved in the Jewish community through friends and the
roommates I was then living with. On one phone call, I finally got up the
courage to ask Johnny, “What did it mean to you to be Jewish, to come from a
Jewish family?” Long silence on the line. Then he said quietly, “I will write
something about that for you.” That seemed understandable—he was always brief
on the phone, but was a wonderful letter writer. I have a bulky three-ring
binder of all the lengthy, lovely letters he has written me since I was two
years old. When the promised missive arrived several months later, however, it
was more than a letter—a fifty-page essay discoursing on memories of Prague and
coming to Canada—but less than I desired, remaining stubbornly silent on the
point I had most wanted to know about.
Two
years later, when at dinner at our favorite local Chinese restaurant in
Kerrisdale—just the two of us, as my grandmother Eileen was in hospital—I told him
that I had met my future husband Micah—a rabbi—and that I was converting to
Judaism. His eyebrows raised skyward in the middle of a bite of black bean
fish. He expressed surprise, but still revealed nothing about what his Jewish
family history meant to him.
At
my wedding, he wore a yarmulke to the synagogue service, danced gallantly with
my husband’s gorgeous cousin, and afterwards, still euphoric from the
celebration, went swimming late at night with my cousin Taylor who recounted to
me later that Johnny had told him he’d had a vision that night of Hebrew text
called up from long ago.
Finally,
after the birth of my second child, since I am a researcher by both nature and
training, I determined that I could uncover much of the Koerner story in other
ways. I researched online, hired a genealogist in the Czech Republic, and consulted
Walter and Leon’s papers at the UBC archive; finally, Micah and I made a trip
to Prague, and to the towns in Moravia where Johnny and his parents Theodore
and Bertha were born. During the trip, expecting little in the way of material
evidence, instead I uncovered traces of the Körner family going back several
centuries: paintings of a mill in Hodonin from the 18th century,
from which the Körner name, meaning grain-trader, derived. A plaque in a Prague
synagogue thanking Ignatz Körner—a great-uncle of Johnny’s—for having helped restore
the building in 1894. Visiting the town archives of Novy Jicin, where Johnny
was born and where his grandfather had founded the lumber company that made the
family’s fortunes, I found out that Johnny’s grandfather Isidore Körner had
been President of the Jewish community there and uncle Leon had served as
representative to several Zionist Congresses in Prague through the 1920s. I
discovered that the Körner family had been among the founders of the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem—and when I later visited Israel, was able to see their
names on the walls there. All of this was a complete revelation to me.
I
didn’t know how Johnny would react to me turning up all this history. This part
of the past was something he’d discarded in transit to North America. He was
deeply spiritual, but had fashioned his own beliefs at a young age from the readings
of the Christian mystic Bô Yin Râ. He turned always towards the Pacific, not
back across the Atlantic.
But
instead, Johnny was curious, interested to know what I’d found, and downright
tickled by the family photos I’d uncovered in Leon’s archive, including dozens
from before the war: postcards of his family on vacation in Switzerland or
Italy; portraits of he and Fred in matching sailor suits, or holding ice
skates. He listened rapt to my stories of the places I’d visited on my trip. He
began asking me questions about why this or that was not kosher, how I felt
about Israel, what my observance meant to me.
I
came to realize he wasn’t hiding or suppressing something; his life truly had
simply taken him in a different direction.
Three
years ago, Johnny had a retrospective of six decades of his work at the Elliott
Louis Gallery and I volunteered to write wall texts for the show, and
ultimately for the catalogue that was produced. We had long conversations on
the phone discussing the many themes his work returned to over and over again
in his long career: the lighthouse, the coastlines, cosmos and celebration. In
our collaboration, we produced something more than just text: a mutual
understanding. He knew I got what he had been expressing in his work, and to me
he wasn’t an enigma anymore.
John Koerner, "Garden of Eden, Opus 37," 1987
One
of his favored series was that of the Garden of Eden—in a credo
he wrote just weeks ago, he expressed that the garden stood for the rapturous plenitude
from which we come, and to which we return. In the Jewish tradition, there is a
beautiful, mournful prayer called “El Maleh Rachamim” that is sung not only at
one’s funeral but at times during the year when we pause to remember those who
have passed. At its center lies the same notion—that of a soul’s return to
Eden. I would like to end not by singing it in Hebrew, as I could not do it
justice, but by reading my and my husband Micah’s translation of it.
El
Maleh Rachamim
Source
of Tender Compassion,
Dwelling
in the highest realms,
Grant
complete rest under the wings of your Divine Presence,
In
the realm of the holy and pure,
Resplendent
as the shimmering firmament,
To
the soul of John son of Theodore and Bertl
Who
has gone to his world of light.
The
Garden of Eden will be his resting place.
Master
of mercy, envelop this soul in your radiance for eternity.
And
may his legacy firmly be rooted within the world of the living.
May
he rest in peace. Amen.
Amen. How wonderful that just as he had a great influence on you, your choices caused something to flower in him. May his memory be for a blessing.
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