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.
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