By Michael Regenstreif
Leonard Cohen, the legendary Canadian poet, novelist and
singer-songwriter, died November 7, at age 82.
Although the cause of death was not announced, he was known
to have been in poor health recently.
Cohen was born in Montreal to a prominent Jewish family. In
1934, the year he was born, his paternal grandfather, Lyon Cohen, ended his
15-year tenure as founding president of Canadian Jewish Congress. His maternal
grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein, was a Talmudic scholar. His father,
Nathan Cohen, a clothing manufacturer, died when the boy was just nine years
old. Masha Cohen, his mother, from whom he inherited a love for songs and
poetry, died in 1978.
Growing up, Cohen studied extensively with his rabbinic
grandfather and was profoundly influenced by him on several levels. In much the
same way that he and the rabbi would spend many hours discussing the meaning of
a single sentence, Cohen said he often devoted similar amounts of time,
sometimes more, to a turn of phrase in a poem or song. As well, there are the
biblical and Judaic themes in much of his work.
As a McGill student in the early-1950s, Cohen began to make
his mark as a poet. His first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies,
was published in 1956, and Cohen quickly became one of the Montreal’s major
English-language literary figures. In 1957, along with mentors Irving Layton,
Louis Dudek, Frank Scott and A.M. Klein, he was recorded for “Six Montreal
Poets,” a Folkways record album. Other acclaimed books of poetry soon followed.
In 1963, Cohen’s first novel, The Favorite Game, was
published. Cohen’s protagonist, Lawrence Breavman, the son of a prominent
Jewish family from Westmount who loses his father early and achieves literary
fame as a university student, was clearly based on himself. The book vividly
describes Breavman’s coming of age, his move from beyond the parochial world of
his upbringing into bohemian circles and the conflicts of a Jewish man falling
in love with a gentile woman.
A second novel, the abstract and somewhat difficult Beautiful
Losers, followed in 1966. That book was an experimental, post-modern novel
about the obsessions of a love triangle that seemingly drew its inspiration
from the conflicts between the French, English and indigenous peoples in
colonial times and in the contemporary world of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.
In his youth, Cohen had learned to play guitar and dabbled
with traditional folk songs. As a McGill student, he played in the Buckskin
Boys, an amateur country and western trio. Eventually, Cohen’s interest in
music and poetry would intertwine in song. Around the time that Beautiful
Losers was published, Cohen turned his attention to songwriting.
The 1960s were an exciting time for innovative songwriters.
Another Jewish songwriter, Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman), had combined the
musical influences of Woody Guthrie and traditional American folksongs with the
literary influences of beat poets and novelists like Allan Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac, thereby redefining what could be accomplished in a song. Cohen was
drawn to that creative challenge and it was as a singer-songwriter that Cohen
would attain his most enduring fame.
In 1966, Cohen met folksinger Judy Collins and sang two of
his earliest songs for her: “Suzanne,” filled with images evoking Old Montreal,
probably the great Montreal song; and the harrowing, Brecht-like, “Dress
Rehearsal Rag.” Collins quickly recorded both songs for her album “In My Life,”
and Cohen’s career as a major songwriter was launched. In late-1967, his own first
LP, “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” was released to critical acclaim.
Jewish and Jewish-influenced themes were evident in many of
Cohen’s songs. One of the key songs on his first album was “The Stranger Song.”
Although Cohen voiced the song as an observer singing in the third person, the
listener is left with the impression that Cohen himself is, indeed, the
stranger. Cohen’s imagery of the stranger in this song is highly influenced by
the thesis of Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig that the Jewish people are,
by definition, strangers in the Diaspora countries in which they live. Another
early example of Jewish themes in Cohen’s songwriting can be found in “Story of
Isaac,” based on the biblical story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son,
from his second album, “Songs from a Room.” Here Cohen sang in the first
person, from Isaac’s perspective, of being led to the sacrifice. Ultimately,
Cohen turned the song into a rabbinic-style morality lesson on the ethics of
one generation sacrificing the lives of the next – and on the choices that both
sides in a conflict must make. (For more on this song, see my “From the Editor”
column in the September 22, 2014 issue.)
Cohen’s song “Who By Fire,” from the 1974 album, “New Skin
for the Old Ceremony,” was based on “Unetaneh Tokef,” a prayer from the Yom
Kippur liturgy; and his most famous song, “Hallelujah,” which he first recorded
in 1984 on “Various Positions,” and which, ultimately, became his most-covered
song by other artists, invokes images of King David composing his own
“Hallelujah” and praising God just as he’s tempted by Bathsheba, and of Samson
and Delilah.
Cohen was in Greece when the Yom Kippur War broke out in
1973. Immediately, he flew to Israel with his guitar and performed concerts for
the soldiers at the front lines, an episode that he would invoke many years
later when his commitment to Judaism was called into question.
In 1994, Cohen withdrew from public life and moved to the
Mount Baldy Zen Center in California. Zen is a branch of Buddhism that stresses
meditation and offers no discussion of God. In 1996, he became a Zen monk.
According to Cohen, his practice of Zen was not contradictory to being Jewish.
In “Not a Jew,” a 1997 poem, Cohen wrote:
“Anyone who says
I’m not a Jew
is not a Jew
I’m very sorry
but this is final
So says:
Eliezar, son of Nissan,
priest of Israel;
a.k.a. Nightingale of the Sinai,
Yom Kippur 1973;
a.k.a.
Jikan the Unconvincing
Zen monk,
a.k.a. Leonard Cohen…”
In 1999, Cohen left Mount Baldy and returned to his home in
Los Angeles. In 2002, he told an interviewer that the years he spent at the Zen
centre had strengthened his commitment to Judaism. “You just enter into that
4,000- year-old conversation with God and the sages,” he said.
Cohen continued to pursue Jewish themes in later songs.
One of the most striking songs on the 2001 album, “Ten New
Songs,” was “By the Rivers Dark,” a song inspired by Psalm 137, attributed to
the prophet Jeremiah, which laments the destruction of the first Temple and the
exile of the Jews to Babylon.
On “Dear Heather,” released in 2004, Cohen used three songs
to recall his roots in the Montreal literary scene and to pay tribute to Frank
Scott, Irving Layton and A.M. Klein, three of his poetry mentors. “To A
Teacher,” dedicated to Klein, is a musical setting of a poem with several
Judaic references that was written while the older poet was battling mental
illness. The poem was first published in Cohen’s 1961 book, The Spice-Box of
Earth.
In 2004, Cohen discovered that most of his life savings had
been embezzled by his manager and, in 2008 – unable to recover the funds
despite prevailing in a lawsuit against the former manager – he embarked on the
first of a series of concert tours over the next five years. With an ensemble
of world class musicians and back-up singers, Cohen performed hundreds of
masterful, meticulously planned and long concerts of songs drawn from across
his career. The energy, stamina and commitment to the material, and to the
audience, Cohen displayed on stage, despite being in his 70s, was remarkable.
Cohen released several live albums and DVDs from those tours
and continued to write new songs.
“Amen” from the 2012 album, “Old Ideas,” is a long,
prayer-like song, perhaps a conversation with God. Part of the song is inspired
by the Tashlich ceremony of the Jewish New Year, when the sins of the past year
are symbolically cast into the water, but many of the images suggest the song
is a deep rumination on the Holocaust; perhaps an attempt to address the most
difficult question of modern Jewish philosophy: How could God have allowed the
Holocaust to occur?
“Born in Chains,” from the 2014 album, “Popular Problems,”
is a prayer-like meditation on the biblical legend of the Jewish Exodus from
slavery in Egypt, and on faith lost and then found again. It is a song Cohen
said he worked on for 40 years – a statement that may have been an allusion to
the 40 years the Children of Israel spent wandering in the desert following the
Exodus.
“You Want It Darker,” the title song from Cohen’s new album,
released just last month, is another song Cohen seemed to sing directly to God.
“Hineni, hineni, I’m ready my lord,” he sang in the chorus, echoing the words
of the biblical patriarch Abraham as he prepared for the near-sacrifi ce of his
son Isaac. But, while Abraham was preparing to face the death of his son, Cohen
seemed to be confronting his own mortality. Cohen was joined on the song by
Cantor Gideon Zelermyer of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim – the Montreal
synagogue Cohen grew up attending – and the Shaar choir. The choir’s haunting
harmonies are heard from the beginning of the song, Cohen himself sounds like
he’s singing from the depths of his soul, and the final minute of the song is
devoted to Zelermyer repeatedly, and seemingly distantly, singing the word
“hineni”; a stunning performance from Cohen, the choir and the cantor.
Cohen also had a connection to one of this community’s most
enduring institutions, having spent the summer of 1956 as a counsellor at Camp
B’nai Brith of Ottawa.
I met Cohen several times over the years in Montreal, and he
was always very gracious. In 2004, I heard from his older sister, Esther Cohen,
who died in 2014, that he appreciated an article I’d written about him for the
Canadian Jewish News to mark his 70th birthday.
Cohen is survived by his son, Adam, also a singer-songwriter,
his daughter, Lorca, and two grandchildren. He was laid to rest with a private
graveside service at the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim Cemetery in Montreal on
November 10 attended by immediate family and a few close friends.
Note: Parts of this article are taken from, or based
on, earlier articles and reviews I’ve written over the years for the Canadian
Jewish News, the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, and the Folk Roots/Folk Branches blog.
