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VERA FRENKEL First Steps: Auntie Emily Lends a Hand When I arrived by sea as a child, my gateway into Canada was Quebec City, where it was announced to those on board that a wildcat plane and train strike required that we continue by water. And so the journey began that opened to me the astonishment of the St Lawrence River. What shocked me most, across the vast expanse of moving darkness, itself an unprecedented sight, were the massed trees on either shore, sombre even in morning sunshine. Only once since then, on another boat, waking suddenly to find hard by each porthole a towering wall of pale beige rock, have I experienced the dreamlike awe of that first journey into the continent. I had learned somewhere that trees and sharks were among the oldest living things on earth, much today as they were before human life. Full boat ofimmigrants and absence ofsharks notwithstanding, this world I was moving through for the first time seemed to trace another, earlier state of being. Much as I was to dash, decades later, from one porthole to another (to ascertain where I was, if I was, or forever locked in rock) before realizing suddenly that these walls were the Isthmus of Corinth, I ran from railing to railing on that earlier boat, trying to absorb that what I saw - the antithesis of imprisoning stone - could be real. The pains and pleasures of those first weeks in Canada·are a blur which comes into precise focus for the first time with a school visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, an exhibition of paintings by Emily Carr, and my first obligatory essay on art. The museum itself was a journey of another kind. Walking obediently the prescribed path through the building, I took it all in, sounds, surfaces, smells, eyes wide despite my homesick heart. And then suddenly the galleries opened out and on the walls all around me were paintings oftrees, totem poles, totems and trees, with sometimes a village. Here, in another form, were the awe and the astonishment I'd felt on the river. Except that in a curious inversion that I came to accept later as one of the tasks of art, these trees were more alive, more particular, than those massed and generalized forms that witnessed my first Canadian morning. I didn't like the paintings especially. I found them awkward and angry and I was unaccustomed to the raw marks of the brush, but I recognized in their ferocity something familiar and I wrote about them with respect. I UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1997 418 VERA FRENKEL Emily Carr, Canadian (187~-1945) Forest, undated (c 1937) oil on canvas, 111.8 x 68.58 em Victoria College, University of Toronto EMILY CARR 419 at a house in Toronto and in same and later still when I became aware of the inevitable narrowness and unattractjveness of some of her shiver of re(:o~~nltlOn But Forest remains threshold before I saw the B.C. the crees at the side of the continent on my way in. ...

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