A Westmount childhood
Leonard Norman Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 in Westmount, the English-speaking enclave of Montreal, into a prosperous and observant Jewish family. His paternal grandfather, Lyon Cohen, had been the founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress; his mother, Masha Klonitsky, had emigrated from Kaunas in Lithuania and was the daughter of Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline, a Talmudic scholar and grammarian. The family belonged to Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, the synagogue to which Cohen stayed connected all his life. His Hebrew name was Eliezer, and as a kohen, a descendant of the priestly line of Aaron, he later said he had a very Messianic childhood.
His father, Nathan, who ran the family clothing business, died when Leonard was nine. His mother sang around the house, and he credited her with his love of melody. At Westmount High School he studied music and poetry, discovered the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, taught himself guitar and formed a country-folk trio called the Buckskin Boys. A young Spanish guitarist taught him a few flamenco chords, and he switched to classical guitar.
A poet first
Cohen entered McGill University in 1951, where he became president of the debating union and fell under the influence of the poets Louis Dudek and Irving Layton, who became his mentor and lifelong friend. His first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956, the first title in the McGill Poetry Series, and was dedicated to his late father. After brief stints at McGill’s law faculty and Columbia University in New York, he returned to Montreal to write.
The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) won him wide recognition in Canada; one critic called him probably the best young poet in English Canada. In 1960, with a small inheritance from his grandmother, he bought a house on the Greek island of Hydra, where he lived for much of the decade with the Norwegian Marianne Ihlen. There he wrote the poems of Flowers for Hitler (1964) and two novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), the latter so experimental and sexually explicit that it caused a scandal. In 1968 he was awarded the Governor General’s Award for his Selected Poems, and declined it.
From poems to songs
The books won praise but little money, and in 1966 Cohen decided to become a songwriter. That year the folk singer Judy Collins recorded his song “Suzanne”, and it became a hit; she also coaxed the nervous poet into singing before a large audience for the first time. The Columbia Records producer John Hammond signed him, and Songs of Leonard Cohen appeared at the end of 1967. Dismissed by many American reviewers, it was a sensation in Britain, where it stayed on the charts for over a year.
Songs from a Room (1969), with “Bird on the Wire”, and Songs of Love and Hate (1971) followed. Cohen’s voice was limited and his arrangements spare, but his lyrics, unhurried, exact, sardonic and full of longing, were unlike anything else in popular music. Robert Altman built his 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller around three of his songs. Cohen also lived the restless life of a 1960s artist in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, and his relationships, from Marianne Ihlen to the artist Suzanne Elrod, the mother of his children Adam and Lorca, became the raw material of his songs.
Singing for soldiers in the Sinai
When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur in October 1973, Cohen flew to Israel with a vague plan to volunteer on a kibbutz. In a Tel Aviv café he was recognised by the Israeli singers Oshik Levi, Ilana Rovina and Matti Caspi, who invited him to perform for the troops. For weeks he toured the Sinai front, playing for small groups of soldiers at rocket sites, airbases and roadsides, informal, intense concerts he never forgot. There he began writing the song “Lover Lover Lover”.
The war fed directly into New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). Its song “Who By Fire” is modelled on Unetaneh Tokef, the solemn prayer of the High Holy Days that asks who shall live and who shall die in the year to come, a rare case of a Jewish liturgical text becoming a staple of the rock concert. Later in life Cohen was reluctant to take sides publicly in the Arab–Israeli conflict, saying he preferred not to speak of wars or sides, and at a 1976 concert he said the song was for the Egyptians and the Israelis.
“Hallelujah” and the long road back
The 1980s began badly. Columbia declined to release his 1984 album Various Positions in the United States, though it contained a song he had laboured over for years: “Hallelujah”, which joins the biblical stories of King David and Samson to a meditation on love, sex and praise. It made little impression at first. Then John Cale recorded it in 1991, and Jeff Buckley’s version based on Cale’s made it one of the most performed songs of modern times, recorded by hundreds of artists.
Meanwhile Jennifer Warnes’s 1987 album of his songs, Famous Blue Raincoat, revived his American career, and I’m Your Man (1988) reinvented him with synthesisers and a voice that had deepened into a growl. The Future (1992) brought dark, prophetic songs about political collapse. His poetry also took a devotional turn: Book of Mercy (1984), a collection of fifty prose prayers influenced by the Hebrew Bible and Zen, won the Canadian Authors Association award.
Mount Baldy and two faiths
From the 1970s Cohen studied with the Japanese Zen master Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, and in 1994 he withdrew to the Mount Baldy Zen Center above Los Angeles, where he lived for five years as Sasaki’s personal assistant. In 1996 he was ordained a Rinzai Zen monk with the name Jikan, meaning “silence”. He insisted this did not make him any less Jewish. He kept the Sabbath, even on tour, and explained that the Zen he practised involved no worship of a deity and so posed no challenge to Jewish belief.
His work was saturated with the Hebrew Bible, Abraham and Isaac, David, Samson, and with the language of prayer. In a 2007 BBC interview he said he very much felt part of the Jewish tradition and practised it, as did his children, and that his study of other spiritual paths had enriched his understanding of his own. When he played Ramat Gan Stadium near Tel Aviv in 2009, he opened with words from the prayer Ma Tovu and closed by reciting, in Hebrew, the priestly blessing that a kohen gives to the congregation.
Betrayal and a triumphant last act
In 2005 Cohen discovered that his longtime manager had taken most of his savings, including his retirement funds, and had sold off his publishing rights. He won a civil judgment of about $9 million in 2006, though it was unlikely ever to be collected. At seventy-three, nearly broke, he went back on the road. The world tour that opened in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in May 2008 grew into tours that continued, with breaks, until the end of 2013, three-hour shows performed with old-world courtesy, and his sunset performance of “Hallelujah” at the 2008 Glastonbury Festival became legendary. That year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Lou Reed.
The late albums were the most successful of his career. Old Ideas (2012) reached number one in Canada and across much of Europe; Popular Problems followed in 2014. For his final album, You Want It Darker (2016), he invited Cantor Gideon Zelermyer and the choir of Shaar Hashomayim, his childhood synagogue, to sing with him. The title song echoes the Kaddish and turns on the Hebrew word hineni, “here I am”, Abraham’s answer to God. It won a posthumous Grammy Award.
The tours took him back to places that mattered to him. In 1985 he had played emotionally charged concerts in Poland, only two years after martial law, singing “The Partisan”, which audiences there embraced as a hymn of the Solidarity movement. In September 2009 he played to some 47,000 people at Ramat Gan Stadium near Tel Aviv, his first concert in Israel since 1980. Proceeds were pledged to a fund for Israeli and Palestinian peace groups; Amnesty International withdrew from the partnership, and a planned concert in Ramallah was cancelled after Palestinian boycott activists objected.
Death and legacy
Cohen died at his home in Los Angeles on 7 November 2016, aged 82, after a fall at night; he had been suffering from leukaemia. Three months earlier he had written a farewell to Marianne Ihlen as she lay dying in Norway. As he had wished, he was buried with a Jewish rite, in a simple pine coffin, in the family plot of the Shaar Hashomayim cemetery on Mount Royal in Montreal.
He had been made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2003 and received Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for literature in 2011. Montreal painted his face across the sides of buildings, and the exhibition A Crack in Everything broke attendance records before travelling to the Jewish Museum in New York. Bob Dylan called him the number one songwriter of their generation. Cohen showed that a popular song could carry the weight of scripture and the precision of poetry, and that a Jew from Westmount, in a fedora and a dark suit, could make the language of the Psalms speak to millions who had never opened them.
Sources & further reading
Leonard Cohen, Wikipedia · Leonard Cohen, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame · Five of Leonard Cohen’s most Jewish songs, The Times of Israel · A Grammy for Leonard Cohen … and Montreal’s Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, The CJN · 1968 Governor General’s Awards, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.