3.11 Lucky Girl by Deborah Addison Coburn

Coburn’s family story continues a few generations closer to the present with “Lucky Girl,” depicting the artist’s mother, Anne Clemens Addison—born Chana Yitta Klamkova, in Lipno, Poland in 1927. So the artist’s family crossed Jewish immigrant lines: one branch arrived in the New World with the first substantial Ashkenazi migration and another from Eastern Europe. Her mother’s family, however, didn’t arrive with the millions who came to America between 1881 and 1924; born after that immigration door was mostly closed, and coming into childhood with the rise of Nazism, she was indeed a lucky girl—arriving with her parents to Montreal, Canada age 4. She met her future husband on the ski slopes of the Laurentian Mountains west of Montreal; soon after their wedding they moved to the U.S. She worked thereafter as a French teacher in Baltimore County, MD and now lives in Towson, MD. In Coburn’s image, the drawing of her mother presents a little girl all bundled up—we can imagine the context: her new arrival into Canada—with swatches of floral-decorated wallpaper behind her. The earnest stare straight into the viewer’s eyes suggests questions regarding what at that time must have seemed a very uncertain future. She was the lucky girl, though, who, as a refugee from a horror that, at the time she could not have imagined, found a new life that reached new levels of warmth in the cold snowy world of Canada.