Various Positions
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Lazarus was intensely involved in the Jewish community and in 1893 visited Palestine on behalf of a Jewish settlement group, the first direct contact by Canadian Jews with their homeland. He also became chairman of the Jewish Colonisation Committee of the Baron de Hirsch Institute, which had been organized to settle Jewish immigrants in Western Canada. In 1896 he became president of Shaar Hashomayim Congregation, a post he held until 1902. He wore a flowing white beard, favored cultured English to Yiddish, and spoke with a slight Scottish brogue, since he had first settled in the county of Glengarry before coming to Canada. He died on November 29, 1914, at age seventy, two weeks after he had been re-elected president of his synagogue. He was eulogized for being conversant with both the Talmud and English literature and for harmonizing the ancient traditions with modern culture.
In 1891 Lyon Cohen, eldest son of Lazarus, married Rachel Friedman and they had four children: Nathan, Horace, Lawrence, and Sylvia. Like his father, Lyon contributed to the foundation of Canadian Jewish life in Montreal. With Samuel William Jacobs, he began the first Jewish paper in Canada, The Jewish Times. In 1904, at only age thirty-five, he was elected president of Shaar Hashomayim, the largest and most prominent congregation in Canada. He was also a member of the Board of Governors of the Baron de Hirsch Institute of Montreal and became president of the institute in 1908. He transformed its building into the first active Jewish Community Centre of Montreal and established the first Hebrew Free Loan Society and the Mount Sinai Sanatorium in Ste-Agathe. In 1922 he became chairman of the Montreal Jewish Community Council, which he had helped to found. He was an “uptown” English-speaking Jew from Westmount, a stark contrast to the Yiddish-speaking “downtown Jews” of St-Lawrence and St-Urbain streets.
In 1900, Montreal was populated mostly by francophones but controlled largely by anglophones. Two thirds of the population was French, concentrated east of St. Lawrence Boulevard or “The Main,” as it is called. The English lived on the west side of the city, in the mansions of the Golden Square Mile, in Westmount, and in the working class Irish ghetto, Griffintown. Jewish settlement was concentrated along The Main, the dividing line between English and French, the conciliatory geographic division of the two solitudes. St-Urbain was the enclave’s western border, and it ran east to St. Denis, south to Craig and north to Duluth. Jewish immigration became significant only near the end of the nineteenth century; the number of Jews in Montreal more than quadrupled from roughly 16,400 in 1901 to 74,564 in 1911. Most remained traders, commission agents, or manufacturers.
Lazarus Cohen eschewed the traditional demographics and eventually settled in Westmount. The stone houses reflected those of Mayfair or Belgravia, incorporating Tudor, Gothic, and Rennaisance designs on the same block, occasionally in the same house. It was architecturally, geographically, and spiritually removed from francophone Montreal, from what would later be termed the French Fact.
In The Favorite Game, Cohen underscores the insularity of Westmount by contrasting it with the immigrant character of Montreal and the way the city constantly reminded its inhabitants of their past. The city he writes, perpetuates a “past that happened somewhere else”:
This past is not preserved in the buildings or monuments, which fall easily to profit, but in the minds of her citizens. The clothes they wear, the jobs they perform are only the disguises of fashion. Each man speaks with his father’s tongue.
Just as there are no Canadians, there are no Montrealers. Ask a man who he is and he names a race … In Montreal there is no present tense, there is only the past claiming victories.
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LYON COHEN strongly believed that a knowledge of Jewish history was necessary for self-respect, a belief passed on to his son Nathan and grandson Leonard. Knowledge of the Torah was indispensable, and performing mitzvot (good deeds) was essential. Aristocratic and urbane, conciliatory yet pragmatic, Lyon Cohen was a formidable presence in local Jewish life, particularly in the war effort.
Lyon devoted himself to the recruitment of Jewish men for the armed services and saw two of his own sons, Nathan and Horace, go off to fight in the Royal Montreal Regiment (the third, Lawrence, did not). He was president of a new, national relief body which sent aid to European Jews who had been victimized by the pogroms and he became chairman of the National Executive Committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress, inaugurated in March 1919 in Montreal. His home on Rose-mount Avenue contained books of Jewish learning and proudly displayed a Star of David on the front. He frequently entertained Jewish leaders like Chaim Weizmann, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and Solomon Schecter. In addition to being scholarly, Lyon was a bit of a dandy; he used an expensive cane, always dressed in the finest suits, and lived comfortably with the assistance of servants.
In 1906 he organized the Freedman Company, a wholesale clothing manufacturer, and it became the major business of his sons Nathan and Horace (Lawrence would operate W.R. Cuthbert, a brass and plumbing foundry, taking over from their uncle, Abraham Cohen, who died prematurely at fifty-seven). In the late fifties, Lyon’s grandson Leonard briefly worked at the foundry and in the shipping department of the Freedman Company. In 1919, Lyon organized and became president of the Canadian Export Clothiers Ltd.; later he became president of the Clothing Manufacturers Association of Montreal and a director of the Montreal Life Insurance Company. He was to be presented to the Pope during a European trip in 1924, but the day before the scheduled meeting he had a heart attack. He was taken to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where he recovered. He died on August 15, 1937 and one of the pall bearers at the funeral was liquor magnate Samuel Bronfman. Leonard Cohen was three years old.
Leonard’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein, was a rabbinic scholar. He was known as Sar ha Dikdook, the Prince of Grammarians, for writing an encyclopedic guidebook to talmudic interpretations, A Treasury of Rabbinic Interpretations, and a dictionary of synonyms and homonyms, Lexicon of Hebrew Homonyms, praised by the poet A.M. Klein. Rabbi Klein was something of a confrontational teacher, noted for his disputations.
A disciple of Yitzhak Elchanan, a great rabbinic teacher, Rabbi Klein was born in Lithuania, and became the principal of a yeshiva in Kovno. He and his family escaped the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, fleeing first to England and then emigrating to Canada in 1923. He first stayed in Halifax, and then moved to Montreal, where he had been corresponding with Lyon Cohen about resettlement. A friendship with the Cohen family led to the marriage in 1927 of his daughter Masha and Lyon’s son Nathan.
Rabbi Klein made lengthy visits to Atlanta, Georgia, to be with his other daughter Manya, who had married into the Alexander family of Georgia. He found the trips stressful because there were few Jews in the South to share life with, although the Alexander family retained its orthodox practices, to the point of having their black servants wear skullcaps. Their large ante-bellum mansion on Peachtree Street became an unusual expression of Conservative Jewish life in Atlanta. It was presided over by Manya, who spoke English with a Russian accent highlighted by a southern drawl.
Rabbi Klein finally settled in New York where he became part of the crowd of European Jewish intellectuals centered at The Forward, the leading Yiddish paper in America, with contributors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer. But grammatical and talmudic studies absorbed Rabbi Klein, and he spent most of his time in study at the synagogue or in the library. He often visited his daughter Masha in Montreal and came to live with the family for about a year in the early fifties. Young Cohen would often sit with the “rebbe” and study the Book of Isaiah. Already quite elderly, the rabbi would read a passage with Cohen, explain it in a combination of English and Yiddish, nod off, then suddenly awake and repeat himself. “He’d read it again with all the freshness of the first reading and he’d begin the explanation over again, so sometimes the whole evening would be spent on one or two lines,” Cohen recalled. “He swam in it so he could never leave it. He happened to be in a kind of confrontational, belligerent stance regarding the rabb
inical vision.”
Cohen sat and studied not because he was a devoted biblical scholar but “because I wanted the company of my grandfather. [And] I was interested in Isaiah for the poetry in English more than the poetry in Hebrew.” The Book of Isaiah, with its combination of poetry and prose, punishment and redemption, remained a lasting influence on Cohen’s work and forms one of several core texts for his literary and theological development. His reliance on images of fire for judgment and the metaphor of the path as the way to redemption derive from this central text. The prophetic tone of destruction in Isaiah, “the Lord is going to lay waste the earth / and devastate it” (24: 1), manifests itself repeatedly throughout Cohen’s work in personal and political terms. Isaiah also sets out an edict Cohen has followed: dispense with illusions, reject oppression, eliminate deceit.
Rabbi Klein had a sharp, Talmudic mind, the kind that could put a pin through the pages of a book and know every letter that it touched, Cohen recalled. Even when elderly and living with Masha and her family during a second period in the late fifties, Rabbi Klein exhibited a powerful, although not always concentrated, knowledge. He knew that he had published books in the past, and that Cohen had also published a work: Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956). But occasionally, when the rabbi met Cohen in the upstairs hall of the house, he would become confused and ask his grandson if he was the writer or not. When Cohen published the Spice-Box of Earth in 1961, he dedicated it to the memory of his grandfather and paternal grandmother. At the time of his death in Atlanta, Rabbi Klein was writing a dictionary without the use of reference books. Cohen inherited his tefillin as well as a reverence for prophetic Judaism. His grandfather became the first of a series of powerful teachers in his life who filled the role of his absent father.
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LEONARD NORMAN COHEN was born on September 21, 1934, a Friday. In the Jewish religion it is said that those born on a Friday are marked for special piety. His chosen names reflected a family tradition of L’s, in Hebrew, the “Lamed,” beginning with Lazarus and Lyon and continuing with Cohen’s daughter Lorca. He was also thought to look more like his grandfather Lyon than his father Nathan. His Hebrew name, Eliezer, means “God is my help.” Norman is the anglicized form of Nehemiah, the rebuilder. The names were significant because in Hebrew, words embody divine attributes.
Born in the year 5695 in the month of Tishri, according to the Hebrew calendar, Cohen entered a family that retained its Jewish traditions. His place in the synagogue was prominent (the family had the third row) as the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents, and early in his youth he participated in the daily prayers and weekly celebrations. Each Friday night the family observed Shabbat. “Religion structured our life,” Cohen has remarked.
Nathan Cohen, with his brother Horace, ran the Freedman Company, by now a successful mid-priced men’s clothing manufacturer. The company specialized in suits and topcoats, which were distributed throughout the country. At one time it was considered to be the largest men’s clothing manufacturer in Canada. Most of the workers were French Canadian or Italian; the managers were mostly Jewish. Nathan, known as N.B., dealt with the factory, the workers, the machinery, and the suppliers. Horace, or H.R., ran the front office. He was the principal contact for the buyers and store owners and had all the qualities of a front man: charming, articulate, lazy, and pompous. He eventually received an O.B.E., Order of the British Empire. Although Nathan’s semi-invalid state limited his participation, he remained active in the company. But he resented being second-in-command to his younger brother, a resentment that may have been passed on to Cohen who later questioned his relationship with the family.
Beauty at Close Quarters, the title of the first-draft of The Favorite Game, elaborates this disenfranchisement. The hero’s father was “a fat man who laughed easily with everybody but his brothers,” the narrator writes, but explains that the “others” all “walked ahead of his father into public glory.”
Nathan wasn’t given to ostentation but the family had the perquisites of the upper-middle class, employing a maid, a chauffeur-gardener, and an Irish-Catholic nanny named Ann who was devoted to Cohen and had a special influence. She often took him to church, and Cohen grew up respecting rather than fearing the dominating presence of the Catholic church in Montreal. He would often go to her home to celebrate Christmas and recalled that he was brought up “part Catholic in a certain way.” The church represented romance to Cohen and he saw “Christianity as the great missionary arm of Judaism. So I felt a certain patronizing interest in this version of the thing. I didn’t have to believe in it.”
The Cohen household reflected his father’s formality rather than his mother’s earthy personality. Nathan always dressed in a suit and occasionally wore a monocle and spats. Cohen rarely saw him without a suit jacket on. In Tarpon Springs, Florida, where his father vacationed, he was photographed in a suit against informal backdrops of fishing boats and sponge fishermen. Cohen, too, was expected to wear a suit to dinner, or at the very least, a sports jacket. His sister Esther would argue with her father about her habit of only partially unfolding her napkin; Nathan insisted that it be completely unfolded. He also became upset when the family’s shoes and slippers were not carefully arranged under their respective beds. Decorum dictated the family, business, and communal life of the Cohens.
Although not a man of letters, Nathan recognized the value of books and gave his son an uncut set of leatherbound English poetry. His mother was not a great reader either, and Cohen recalls only a Russian volume of Gogol on her shelf. Nathan read aloud to his children, although he didn’t have a gift for it. Cohen thought his father was reticent, withdrawn, and introspective. His enthusiasms were concert hall music—Sir Harry Lauder was a favorite, as well as Gilbert and Sullivan—and photography. An amateur filmmaker, Nathan Cohen documented the lives of his children on film. Some of the footage was excerpted in Ladies and Gentlemen, … Mr. Leonard Cohen, a 1965 National Film Board documentary on Cohen. The father’s interest instilled in his son an early fascination with photography and the pleasure of being photographed. In the 1951 Westmount High School Yearbook, Cohen lists photography as his hobby, an interest represented in The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers.
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AS A CHILD, Cohen had a small Scottish terrier, nicknamed Tinkie for the tinkle of his license and identification tags. His parents surprised him with the dog as a gift, the scene described in Beauty at Close Quarters. His mother had actually named the dog Tovarishch, but his father disliked the reminder of the site of the Russo-German treaties. Tinkie disappeared in a snowstorm fifteen years later and was found dead under a neighbor’s porch the next spring. The dog had been one of Cohen’s closest childhood companions; Cohen still keeps a picture of Tinkie in his Los Angeles home. To this day he refuses to get another dog, although he had guppies, chicks, mice, turtles, and even a rescued pigeon during his childhood.
For his seventh birthday Cohen’s father bought him a Chemcraft chemistry set and built a laboratory in the basement. With an alcohol lamp and chemicals, Cohen produced dyes, invisible inks, and other concoctions. His friends would join him in the basement, creating new colors and liquids.
Cohen’s secure, comfortable childhood was unsettled by his father’s poor health and premature death. A poignant scene in Beauty at Close Quarters narrates the impact of the illness as the father climbs the stairs in his home, pausing a minute or so at each step. With his son often by his side, the father “would continue the story he was telling and never stop to complain how difficult the ascent was. Very soon, however, he could spare no breath at all and they would climb in silence.” In the funeral scene in The Favorite Game, Cohen recounts his anger at the loss of his father who died at the age of fifty-two, the solemnity of his uncles, the horror of an open coffin, and his mother’s inability to face the tragedy. For his part, Cohen later recalled that “there was repression … I did not discover my feelings until my late thirties. I had t
o adopt the aspect of receptivity. I was very receptive to the Bible, authority. … Having no father I tried to capitalize [on his absence], resolve the Oedipal struggle, [create] good feelings.”
Following his father’s death, Cohen won a significant dispute with his mother over custody of Nathan’s pistol, a military souvenir. Cohen had been fascinated by his father’s military exploits and at one time Nathan had spoken of sending Cohen to a military college, an idea Cohen eagerly accepted. The Favorite Game describes the dispute over the gun, presented as an important talisman: a “huge .38 in a thick leather case … Lethal, angular, precise, it smoldered in the dark drawer with dangerous potential. The metal was always cold.”
Cohen has always been fascinated by weapons, reflected in his novel Beautiful Losers. “I loved the magic of guns,” the character F. declares. For several years Cohen himself kept a gun. In her lyrics to “Rainy Night House,” Joni Mitchell describes how she and Cohen took a taxi to his mother’s house in Westmount during her absence: “she went to Florida and left you with your father’s gun alone.” In “The Night Comes On,” from Cohen’s album Various Positions (1985), a wounded father tells his son:
Try to go on
Take my books, take my gun
And remember, my son, how they lied
And the night comes on
And it’s very calm
I’d like to pretend that my father was wrong
But you don’t want to lie to the young.