May 14, 2020: Three people I knew have been lost to COVID-19

By Michael Regenstreif

The past two months have been difficult on all of us. Our regular day-to-day lives have blurred to memory as we endure social distance and isolation – what I’ve come to call “house arrest” – in our necessary efforts defeat, or at least flatten the curve” of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So many of my regular activities – like going to work at the office, exercising in the Soloway Jewish Community Centre gym, seeing friends, attending concerts at the National Arts Centre, eating out at favourite restaurants, etc. – have been on hold these last 63 days with who-knows-how-long-still-to go.

As I mentioned in my April 24 column, it has been particularly hard for me not being able to visit my mother in Montreal. Aside from regular visits, we’ve already missed being with her on several special days – including Passover seder nights and Mother’s Day – and we’ll miss being with her next week to celebrate her 92nd birthday.

The sheer numbers of people we have lost to the pandemic have been devastating and nothing personalizes it more than learning of the death of someone you know. In my last column, I mentioned that three people I knew in the U.S. had died of the virus. These were vital, brilliant people who I knew through my lifelong involvement in the folk music scene. All were people I first met in the 1970s. I’d like to tell you a little bit about them.

I met Hal Willner, the son of a Holocaust survivor, backstage at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1977. We knew a lot of the same people and quickly became friends over shared musical interests. Hal was just beginning his career as a record producer and he would eventually earn a well-deserved reputation for conceiving and producing a series of brilliant multi-artist concept albums as “Stay Awake,” featuring artists like Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt and Ringo Starr performing sometimes strange but wonderful versions of songs from old Walt Disney movies; “Rogues Gallery,” featuring equally strange but wonderful versions of traditional sea chanteys by famous and obscure rock stars and folk singers; and wonderful tribute albums to the likes of Fellini film composer Nino Rota, jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, folk music collector Harry Smith, and Leonard Cohen, among others.

Hal also worked at Saturday Night Live producing the background music used on the show’s comedy sketches, a job he’s had since 1980. Hal died on April 7 in New York City, the day after he turned 64.

As some may know, I host a folk music program once every four weeks on CKCU, the community radio station based at Carleton University. For many years, before I moved to Ottawa, I hosted a similar weekly show in Montreal on CKUT, the community station at McGill. It was on visits to Gene Shay’s folk radio program in Philadelphia in the 1970s that the seeds of my wanting to do my own show were planted.

I spent quite a bit of time in Philadelphia between 1977 and 1982 and one of the first people I met there was Ivan Shaner – better known as Gene Shay – an advertising executive who had begun hosting a weekly folk music show on Philadelphia radio in the early-1960s. Also, in the early-‘60s, he co-founded the Philadelphia Folk Festival, still one of the most important folk festivals in the U.S., and was its main-stage MC.

I became reacquainted with Gene in the 1990s. By then I was also hosting folk music radio programs and we would see each other often at folk music conferences. In fact, Gene and I were on several panels together at conferences and also kept in touch via email. Until he retired in 2015, Gene was one of the deans of folk music radio in North America and a mentor to me and to many other folk music radio hosts around the world.

“Everybody focuses on Gene Shay, but I would love it if somebody would focus on Ivan Shaner, the man. Because he was the most wonderful, supporting, loving father who was always, always there for me,” one of his daughters told the Jewish Exponent, Philadelphia’s Jewish newspaper. Gene was 85 when he died on April 17.

Finally, there was John Prine, a legendary singer-songwriter who began performing in Chicago folk clubs while still working as a mailman in the late-1960s.

I only met John a few times over the years. I got to hang out with him a couple of times and saw him do a few concerts. I also interviewed him a couple of times – once for radio and once for the Montreal Gazette.

I was introduced to John backstage when he came to perform in Montreal for the first time in 2001 and mentioned that we’d met once before, about 25 years earlier. John looked me up and down and said something like, “Oh yeah, Steve Goodman introduced us at Mariposa.” He was absolutely correct. (I already knew Steve, another legendary folk singer from Chicago, who was John’s closest friend. Steve died of leukemia at age 36 in 1984.)

When my wife Sylvie and I were on vacation in Florida in December, John was doing a concert nearby at Ruth Ekerd Hall in Clearwater and we went to see him. It was a fabulous show but I didn’t try and go backstage to say hello because I knew that John was scheduled to be at the National Arts Centre here in Ottawa this coming July, that it would be easier to connect then. But that was before this horrible pandemic hit. John – who had survived two bouts with cancer – was 73 when he died on April 7.

Many thousands of people have been lost to COVID-19 – but knowing even just one of them personalizes the terrible toll this disease has taken. Condolences to all who have lost family or friends.

November 28, 2016: An appreciation of Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016

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.

October 10, 2016: The most inspiring leader I’ve ever encountered

By Michael Regenstreif

I’ve encountered a lot of political leaders over the years, including prime ministers, premiers, mayors and legislators at every level of government. Most of them have been Canadian, of course, but there have also been many from other countries – particularly from Israel, because I work in the arena of Jewish community journalism.

And, of all the leaders I have ever encountered, the most inspirational figure was Shimon Peres, Israel’s former president, prime minister, foreign minister, defence minister, finance minister and the longest-serving member of the Knesset in history.

Since Peres died on September 28, at age 93, he has been referred to as the last of Israel’s founding fathers. And, indeed, he was.

From the birth of the modern State of Israel in 1948 until his retirement from the presidency in 2014, just nine days before his 91st birthday, there was not a time that he was not serving the state at the highest levels. And, even over the past two years, until suffering a massive stroke last month, he remained remarkably vital and tirelessly active as Israel’s elder statesman. Peres never gave up working to make this a better world. Peres never gave up on his dream of Israel thriving in a peaceful Middle East.

As an aide and adviser to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, Peres played an important behind-the-scenes role during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and would go on to even more important roles in the country’s defence. In the 1950s, he was director-general of the defence department and later served as minister of defence in both the 1970s and the ‘90s.

So, when foreign minister Peres and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – one of Israel’s greatest generals – became Israel’s leading champions of peace with the Palestinians, they were acting from a deep understanding of defence and a deep understanding of the futility and waste of endless war. They envisioned a better world that, sadly, neither lived to see.

I’ll never forget watching Peres and Rabin on the White House lawn with U.S. president Bill Clinton and PLO leader Yasser Arafat in 1993 and the hopeful feelings so many us felt then.

Peres never gave up on the dreams of that day and he continued to work for peace the rest of his life.

My most vivid memories of Peres were of the two days in May of 2012 when I got watch to Peres in action as Israeli president on a state visit to Ottawa.

At age 88 then, Peres was the oldest head of state in the world. But he maintained an incredibly busy schedule and showed no signs of fatigue whenever I heard him speak.

I particularly remember his riveting speech at the National Gallery during a reception hosted by then-Israeli ambassador Miriam Ziv. Speaking to an audience of international diplomats, cabinet ministers and MPs, Supreme Court justices, at least one former prime minister of Canada, academics, journalists, military officials and Jewish community leaders, Peres gave a long compelling speech.

Holding the microphone in his hand, Peres spoke, without a script or notes, about the State of Israel in both historical and contemporary terms, about Israel’s enduring friendship with Canada and about his past visits here. He spoke about science and technology, noting that Israel had become such an important centre for scientific, medical and technological breakthroughs, and he made predictions about unimaginable breakthroughs to come in the years and decades ahead.

He discussed the rapidly changing Middle East and expressed optimism about a future that would finally include peace with the Palestinians.

Despite having been part of history for so many decades, this 88-year-old man was excited about the future. He even cracked a couple of jokes with the timing of a seasoned comedian. It was a remarkable performance that earned sustained ovations from the high-powered audience.

I was right near the front of the audience as Peres spoke and recognized the man beside me applauding enthusiastically for Peres was an opposition member of Parliament from Montreal.

“That was quite the speech,” I said to him.

“He was absolutely amazing,” future prime minister Justin Trudeau responded.

Shimon Peres, the last of Israel’s founding fathers, never stopped believing in his dream of Israel thriving in peace. And he never stopped working to make that dream come true. Now it is up to the sons, daughters and grandchildren to fulfil that dream.

Leonard Cohen’s new song

Leonard Cohen – poet, novelist, singer and songwriter – is another inspiring figure who has continued to do remarkable work late in life.

The Montreal-born artist has an album of new songs coming out on October 21. While I haven’t yet heard most of them, he did release the title track, “You Want It Darker,” on the Internet last month.

Much was made of the fact that Cohen released the song on September 21, his 82nd birthday. It is a song that only an older man could have written; a song from perspective of someone who has lived long and is prepared for death.

I think, though, what’s possibly more significant than his birthday is that Cohen released the song in the Jewish month of Elul, as we prepare for the High Holidays.

It is a song he sings directly to God. “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready my lord,” he sings in the chorus.

The melody seems like it comes directly from the synagogue music Cohen heard growing up at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal. And, indeed, he turned to Cantor Gideon Zelermyer and the Shaar choir to sing with him on the song. 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 Cantor Zelermyer repeatedly, and seemingly distantly, singing the word “hineni.”

A stunning performance from Cohen, the choir and the cantor.