What is it With Ashkenazi Apostate Leonard Cohen and The Tikvah Fund? Bari Weiss, Matti Friedman, and Liel Leibovitz Explain the Neo-Con NIGGEN

[David Shasha]

The Israeli War That Made Leonard Cohen

By: Matti Friedman

This week on Honestly we put out a really special episode about a forgotten concert tour that transformed the musician Leonard Cohen—and still echoes in the state of Israel. It’s the subject of a new book by our friend Matti Friedman called “Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.”

On one level, the book is about the unlikely meeting of young Israeli soldiers unprepared for the battle ahead with one of the great voices of the age. On another, it is about how this surprise war changed Israeli music, culture and its sense of self. If, in the aftermath of the Six Day War of 1967, Israel felt like it was on top of the world, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 shattered that confidence.

Given the horrible news out of Israel over the past few weeks—a spate of terrorist attacks, most recently in Tel Aviv—we find our hearts are in the East. Maybe yours are, too.

So it felt like a good time to share an excerpt from Matti’s wonderful book. And, if you haven’t listened to the podcast, which features tons of Cohen’s songs, you can do so here:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5BkqDTxGUx50JYI70bZQ9Y?go=1&sp_cid=0e0667d48dbeb6fb76debcde9ea7e1f2&utm_source=embed_player_p&utm_medium=desktop

Some of the men on the sand look up at the visitor with his guitar. Others look down at their dirty knees and boots. Cigarettes glow in the dark. The heat has broken and the desert is still for now. They’ve been fighting for fourteen days and no one knows how many days are left, or how many of them will be left when it’s over. There aren’t any generals or heroes here. It’s just a small unit getting smaller. In the wastelands around them, thousands of Egyptians and Israelis are dead.

The visitor, dressed in khaki, is Leonard Cohen. This makes little sense to anyone at the outer extremity of the Sinai front in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Not long ago he was playing for a half million people at the Isle of Wight festival, which was bigger than Woodstock. Here it’s a few dozen. None of the soldiers know how Leonard Cohen came to be here with them, or why.

Cohen is thirty-nine. He’s been brought low and thinks he’s finished. News of his retirement has appeared in the music press. “I just feel like I want to shut up. Just shut up,” he told an interviewer. He might have come to this country and this war looking for some desperate way out of his dead end, a way to transcend everything and sing again. If that’s what he was looking for, he seems to have found it, as we’ll see. Five decades later, on Spotify and in synagogue, you can still hear the echo of this trip. Anyone reading these lines remembers the elderly gentleman grinning out from under a fedora at packed concert halls around the world, and knows that in 1973 his greatest acts are yet to come. But right now this isn’t clear to him or to anyone else.

Cohen addresses the soldiers in solemn English. A reporter who is there describes the scene in a dispatch for a Hebrew music magazine. In the yellowing newsprint you can tell the reporter is a cynic. He mocks the star as “the great pacifist” come from abroad, a glorified tourist. A reader has the impression that the reporter doesn’t want to be moved but is.

When the soldiers join Cohen for the chorus of “So Long, Marianne,” their voices are the only sound in the desert. He introduces the next number. “This song is one that should be heard at home, in a warm room with a drink and a woman you love,” he says. “I hope you all find yourselves in that situation soon.” He plays “Suzanne.” The men are quiet. They hear about a place that doesn’t have blackened tanks and figures lying still in charred coveralls. It’s a city by a river, a perfect body, tea and oranges all the way from China. “They’re listening to his music,” writes the reporter, “but who knows where their thoughts are wandering.”

Sometimes an artist and an event interact to generate a spark far bigger than both: art that isn’t a mere memorial to whatever inspired it, but an assertion of human creativity in the face of all inhuman events. It isn’t necessary to know the convoluted course of Spain’s civil war to grasp Picasso’s Guernica. A listener can wonder at Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, composed amid the Napoleonic Wars, without recognizing the bars of a French revolutionary song hidden in one of the movements. It’s possible to appreciate the beauty of a shard of glass without knowing how the window looked before it was smashed, or what the moment of shattering was like. But it seems to me that if we can know, our understanding is enriched—not just our understanding of a momentous occurrence or of the personality of an artist, but of the nature of inspiration, and of art’s supernatural ability to fly through years and places and lodge in distant minds, helping us rise beyond ourselves.

The moment, in this case, was a concert tour, maybe one of the greatest, certainly one of the strangest. The tour might have produced a celebrated rock documentary or live album—but no one thought to film it and hardly any recordings survive. It happened in the midst of an Israeli war but isn’t documented in the country’s military records. The account you just read is the only description of any of the concerts to appear in print at the time, and even that magazine, a local version of Rolling Stone, has been defunct for years. The tour has lived on as underground history—in word of mouth, in photographs snapped by soldiers, in notebooks filed in an office on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, in a box of papers in Hamilton, Ontario, and recorded between the lines of a few great songs. Reconstructing what happened has meant piecing together these scraps over many years.

While no detailed account has appeared before, and while this cultural moment is known even to Cohen’s fans as a footnote, if at all, its importance keeps growing in a curious way. Here in Israel, for example, before the anniversary of the war every fall, more and more articles appear in the press, as if the story must be told and retold each year. Some of the descriptions are repetitive or inaccurate. But all are genuine expressions of the fact that the memory of that terrible month, October 1973, has somehow become linked to the strange appearance of Leonard Cohen.

If Cohen’s tour is now part of the Yom Kippur War, the war itself is inseparable from a date in the Jewish calendar. The fighting began with a surprise attack by Syria and Egypt at two p.m. on the Day of Atonement, when Jewish tradition demands introspection and tells us that our fates are decided for the coming year—who will die, and how. The symbolism here is so clumsy that it seems to beg an apology.

The war’s timing has lent a kind of awful grandeur to the grim proceedings. In fact, the war is sometimes called the War of Atonement, as if it were itself a penance for the pride and blindness that preceded it, for the failures of leadership that left Israeli soldiers exposed on October 6, 1973, when the Syrian army attacked though the basalt outcroppings of the Golan Heights and the Egyptians across the sand embankments of the Suez Canal. Israel’s judgment had been clouded by victory in the Six-Day War, six years earlier, and the country had allowed itself to sink into arrogance and complacency. The borders were defended by a handful of ill-fated infantrymen and tank crews. 

For a few desperate days on the Golan plateau there were nearly no Israeli troops left between the Syrians and Israel’s heartland beneath the heights, in Galilee. On the southern front, the one of interest to us here, the Egyptians captured the Israeli outposts along the Suez Canal, drove into Sinai, and shredded the defenders’ frantic counterattacks. Israel’s air force, which was supposed to win the war, was instead crippled by new Soviet missiles, and within days the defense minister, the one-eyed war hero Moshe Dayan, was heard despairing that the “Third Temple is in danger,” meaning Israel itself. Only with extraordinary exertion, and at the cost of more than 2,600 fatalities, did the soldiers in the field turn the war around and, by the end of the month, deliver a victory that still felt like a defeat.

When the battles ended, the prestige of Israel’s generals and political leaders, the icons of the founding generation, was shattered. The country became less confident, less united, and more introspective; after the war this was, in many ways, a different country. The mistakes would be picked apart in hundreds of anguished memoirs and critical histories whose publication began at the end of the war and continues to this day. When I served in an Israeli infantry unit twenty-five years later, our training involved imaginary battles against columns of enemy tanks invading through the desert, a scenario that had little to do with the actual warfare of the late 1990s—it was recognizably Yom Kippur, the war the army was still fighting in its mind.

For people in Israel, the ancient fast day and the dark anniversary of the war are so intertwined that they can no longer be detached. And so Leonard Cohen—whom many considered a poet of cigarettes and sex and quiet human desperation, who’d dismissed the Jewish community that raised him as a vessel of empty ritual, who despised violence and thought little of states—made himself not only part of this Israeli war but of the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar. How this all came to pass has never been explained: the meeting of young soldiers at a moment of extreme peril with one of the great voices of the age. That’s the subject of this book.

One of the oddest aspects of this episode is that Cohen almost never mentioned it afterward. This fact seemed stranger and stranger to me the more I discovered about how deep he went into the war, and how significant the experience was for the people who saw him. There are a few comments to the music magazine ZigZag in London a few months later, when he was asked explicitly, but not much more. The same seems to have been true in private: people who were close to Cohen don’t remember ever hearing the details. Cohen’s concern wasn’t history but the soul. He might have felt that a link to real events would reduce his work to mere journalism. “For me, poetry is the evidence of a life, and not the life itself. It’s the ashes of something that’s burning well,” Cohen once said. “Sometimes you confuse yourself and try to create ashes instead of fire.” In this case, the war was just the fire. It wasn’t his business to explain how many logs went in and how hot it burned, or how close he was standing. Some beautiful ashes came of it, and that’s enough.

From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, April 10, 2022

 

Farewell to Leonard Cohen

By: Liel Leibovitz

In the years I’ve spent closely listening to him, Leonard Cohen has taught me many things: how to think about history, how to read a poem, how to chase God. But the greatest gift he gave me, maybe, is showing me how to be kind.

I caught my first glimpse of it some years ago, having just finished writing a book about him. Leonard had read it, and he invited me to join him and his band at an intimate gathering at his hotel in New York following one of his concerts here. I said I’d be there and, light-headed, rushed to my closet to figure out what one wore to a night out with Leonard Cohen. I wanted to impress him, and so I put on what I thought was my most discerning outfit and spent an hour circling the block and practicing the clever speech I’d give when I first met my hero.

I ran into him as soon as my wife and I walked into the hotel’s lobby. I dipped into my act, but he interrupted me with his warm smile and took me by the hand, walking me around and introducing me to friends and bandmates, praising me and my writing with the earnest joy of a grandfather taking pleasure in a dear child. I was elated, of course, and more than a little bit awed. I didn’t really understand why this famous and desired man would spend so much time with me, a jittery stranger. It was only after I’d finished my last whisky and said my goodbyes that night that I understood: Leonard had bothered with me precisely because he knew I was jittery, because he understood that I was a stranger in this room thick with friends and colleagues, because he wanted to make me feel at ease and encourage me to abandon my attempts at impressing him and instead speak freely and enjoy the evening. Of his many and considerable talents, this gift for healing was, perhaps, his finest, and in the days and weeks and months that followed our meeting I found myself emulating him, opening my heart and inviting others to unburden theirs.

It’s a skill I’ll need more than ever now that Leonard has left us for prior engagements in more elevated realms. I’m so very fortunate to have known him, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be done singing his praises or trying to decipher the majestic and meaningful mysteries he’s left behind for us weary souls to ponder. This is not a eulogy, then, and no obituary could ever contain the multitudes of his spirit. This is an invitation, more pressing than ever, to do unto others as Leonard Cohen has done unto us and find an appetite for kindness that is only sated when everyone around us is feeling their best.

This, maybe, is what he had in mind when he sang that every heart to love will come but like a refugee, or that love was the only engine of survival. This is the distillation of his life’s work, his manual for living with defeat: we have only each other. Whatever light we bring to this world, whatever strength we find in the face of so much fragility and fear, we do only because we aren’t alone, only because we look out for each other, only because we are kind. This is our one path to redemption, our cold and broken Hallelujah that is sweeter and more true than any other song we know.

I had written to Leonard just last week to tell him I was running the New York City marathon and that, jauntier tunes be damned, I intended to listen to his most recent masterpiece, You Want It Darker, as I huffed my way through the five boroughs. For a short run you could pick whatever pop confection you’d like, I reasoned, but a long and improbable ordeal called for the prophet Cohen. A few hours later, Leonard wrote back with some kind words, urging me, as ever, to take care. He signed his email with the traditional blessing we recite every time we finish reading one of the books of the Torah: Chazak, Chazak, Ve’Nitchazek—be strong, be strong, and may we all be strengthened. Amen to that, Reb Eliezer, and farewell, my dear friend. We are truly fortunate to have basked in your warmth, and may we all spend a lifetime proving ourselves worthy students of your wisdom and your grace.

From Tablet magazine, November 11, 2016

 

Rediscovered: Leonard Cohen lyrics of fighting with ‘brothers’ in Yom Kippur War

By: TOI staff

When the Yom Kippur War broke out in the fall of 1973, legendary Canadian singer Leonard Cohen was moved to come to Israel to try and help the Jewish state, which was facing the most serious threat to its short existence.

Convinced by Israeli artists to join them and come down to the Sinai desert where the battle was raging against the invading Egyptian forces, Cohen went from base to base, playing concerts for the weary soldiers.

There, during a break between performances, he penned and performed what would become one of his most famous hits: ‘Lover, Lover, Lover.”

One particular verse in the song grabbed the attention of those who heard it, moved by the solidarity of the Jewish singer-poet: “I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight…,” the verse began.

And yet when the song was released to the world, the lines had disappeared, leaving the soldiers to wonder what had become of that verse and, perhaps too, if something had changed regarding the manifest depth of Cohen’s attachment to Israel.

Engraved in my heart

Now, nearly five decades later, Canadian-born Israeli writer Matti Friedman has rediscovered Cohen’s original drafts while researching a book on Cohen’s trip to Israel in a book newly published in Hebrew.

“Who by Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen,” comes out in English next March.

Cohen, who died in 2016 at the age of 82, was living on the Greek island of Hydra when the war broke out and had been suffering from an emotional and creative crisis at the time, even announcing he was quitting the music business, Friedman told Channel 12 in an interview.

The musician had played concerts in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 1972, and now returned to Israel to show solidarity, but also to rediscover himself.

Israeli singer Oshik Levi said he met Cohen in Tel Aviv. Cohen had wanted to go and volunteer on a kibbutz, but Levi convinced him to join him, and other Israeli artists, in the Sinai entertaining troops.

It was then that Cohen wrote “Lover, Lover, Lover.”

“We were doing six to eight concerts a day,” said Levi. “He wrote it between two performances, he just took out a notepad and wrote the lyrics there and then.”

At the end of the song was a line that he wrote about the soldiers we performed for,” Levi said.

Another soldier,  Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Shlomi Groner, recalls being deeply affected by the lines Cohen wrote.

Groner, who had briefly met Cohen before the war while working as an El Al security guard, recalled leading a force he had been commanding into a tank parking lot and suddenly seeing the singer.

“We came in desperate for fuel, ammunition, food, something to drink,” he said. “Suddenly I heard the voice of God, Lennie himself,” Groner told Channel 12, recounting how unassuming the singer was.

“Aah, it’s you again,” Cohen greeted him.

“Here was this guy from overseas, who came to us without a microphone, without airs and graces. He ate rations with us and slept in a sleeping bag,” Groner said.

“And then I heard for the very first time  ‘Lover, lover lover come back to me.’ He wrote those lines about us, he called us ‘brothers,'” Groner recounted. “It was a wonderful verse, he repeated it a few times, made some small changes.”

“Those words became engraved in my heart,” Groner said.

Disappeared

But the bond Groner felt dissipated when he discovered those lines that had so touched him had been removed from the song.

“About a year after the war, I was driving along when I heard the chorus ‘Lover, Lover, Lover,’ and I turned up the volume and I heard the legendary song,” he said. “I was overwhelmed, I pulled over and listened, waiting for that line, waiting for ‘brothers.’ And the song ended without it; the lines had disappeared.”

“I was very disappointed because even when he tried to be cosmopolitan, his Jewishness would come out. Even as he tried to get away from it, it kept coming back,” Groner said.

Then out of the blue, he was contacted by Friedman, who was researching his book, and who asked him if he had any information on Cohen’s time in the Sinai.

“After 50 years, I felt like I had been shot in the heart with an arrow,” Groner said.

Groner told Friedman about the missing lines, Friedman recalled this week in the Channel 12 interview, one of several TV interviews marking the Hebrew publication of his book, timed to coincide with Yom Kippur. “I did not think there was much chance to find them; Cohen’s songs underwent all sorts of changes and incarnations, but I looked for it,” Friedman said.

And find them he did.

“When I went over his notebooks, I found the first draft of ‘Lover, Lover Lover,’ Friedman recalled. “I turned over the page; I was already excited because I had seen something amazing in seeing the first draft of the song. And there was another verse, under the heading ‘airbase.'”

The missing verse ran as follows:

“I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight

I knew that they weren’t wrong

I knew that they weren’t right

But bones must stand up straight and walk

And blood must move around

And men go making ugly lines

across the holy ground.”

“He asked me, ‘Is this what you were talking about?’ And I said yes,” said Groner of his subsequent conversation with Friedman.

Groner added that he still remains hurt by Cohen’s decision to remove the powerful lines from the full song. As a consequence, Groner said, he refused to go and see Cohen when the singer, now aged 75, performed again in Israel in 2009, his acclaimed final appearance in the Holy Land. (Cohen played “Lover, Lover, Lover” in Ramat Gan Stadium that night.)

Friedman said he also found corroboration that these were indeed the missing lyrics after discovering an article published by Yedioth Ahronoth during the war where the reporter described Cohen writing a new song in the middle of battle and quoted that specific verse.

“The verse that stood out to the Israelis was the verse that was cut,” Friedman said.

Blood on my hands

For Friedman, the discovery not only provided the proof that Cohen had penned the words but also clues as to why he later took them out.

“Maybe something in his connection with Israel broke. To be here during war is not simple,” suggested Friedman.

“He writes about an incident where he is evacuating wounded and he was very emotional, and then they say to him, ‘Don’t worry those are Egyptians,’ and he is relieved. And then he catches himself and says ‘Why am I relieved that it’s only Egyptians,’ and he later writes ‘This is blood on my hands,'” Friedman recounted, noting that Cohen hardly ever mentioned the war afterward.

Indeed, the notebook that Friedman examined revealed Cohen’s deliberations.

“Immediately after he wrote [that verse], he apparently frightened himself and crossed out the word ‘my brothers.’ You can see the line in the notebook, and he replaced it with the words “the children.”

“‘I went down to the desert to see the children fighting’ — he distances himself one step. It’s no longer my brothers, but the children,” Friedman said. “And then he apparently deleted the whole verse.”

 From The Times of Israel, September 15, 2021

 

West Bank cancels Leonard Cohen concert in protest against Israel

By: Rachel Shabi

A Leonard Cohen concert planned in Ramallah on the West Bank in September has been cancelled after the artist became embroiled in a campaign to boycott Israel.

The 74-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter announced he would perform in Tel Aviv as part of his world tour. The Ramallah date was added later, allegedly in response to pro-Palestinian campaigners who had tried to dissuade Cohen from appearing in Israel.

Now his Palestinian hosts have cancelled the West Bank concert, amid claims that the planned gig was a hollow attempt to "balance" performances.

"Ramallah will not receive Cohen as long as he is intent on whitewashing Israel's colonial apartheid regime by performing in Israel," the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) said in a statement.

The campaign was launched in Ramallah in 2004 and calls for an international academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

Cohen, who is not believed to have a large fanbase in the West Bank, was scheduled to play at the 736-seat Ramallah Cultural Palace, a day after appearing at the 55,000 capacity Ramat Gan stadium, near Tel Aviv.

The Ramallah event was to be hosted by the Palestinian prisoners' club and attended by families of some of the 11,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails of detention centres.

Israeli fans are concerned that the sale of tickets for Cohen's performance in Ramat Gan has been postponed three times and the concert date does not appear on his official website.

Some campaigners have expressed criticism at the cancellation of the West Bank gig, describing it as a "missed opportunity" for the high-profile singer to bring awareness to the Palestinian cause.

But one poster to an internet discussion described the cancellation as good news for Palestine because Cohen's music is "dreary and dreadful".

Cohen, whose singing career spans four decades, performed in Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when he flew in to play for Israeli soldiers fighting in the Sinai desert.

In 2006, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, responding to pressure from campaigners, moved a performance from Tel Aviv to the Arab-Jewish peace village, Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam. A few weeks ago, documentary filmmakers, the Yes Men, pulled their latest release from the Jerusalem film festival, "in solidarity with the boycott".

From The Guardian (UK), July 14, 2009

 

“Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything” at the Jewish Museum: A Review

By: Ronnie Perelis

The first time I heard Leonard Cohen was from a scratchy cassette tape.^[1] My dear friend and havruta offered to play me a song during a late Thursday night colloquium inspired by some duty-free Crown Royal. The song was “Suzanne” and I never heard anything like it- it was simple and direct and mesmerizing. I loved its mysticism and imagery. I was moved by the song’s sensuality and yearning after God.

It was a few years later when I found him again. At a Shabbat meal at another friend’s house I saw a copy of Cohen’s Book of Mercy. Again I was reminded of his music but I saw something else there; in this little book – my friend’s edition had the signature heart-magen david insignia that Cohen himself crafted- I sensed that these sorts of words were not written down by a contemporary. The lines felt like ancient Hebrew, like Biblical images and ideas transposed into modern English. It was also striking that here was a contemporary book that read like a collection of jagged, earthly prayers.

In the years since, I and many others have re-encountered several new iterations of Cohen’s art, spirituality, and music. When after many years of semi-seclusion Cohen went out on tour in 2009 at age 74, releasing new albums that mined the depth of his experience, he shared the shards of broken light with new audiences around the world. By the time of his passing in the fall of 2016 Leonard Cohen left behind a varied and unique body of work, as well as his own low key self-mythology that left fans yearning for more of the man and his art. The exhibition, Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything, that debuted at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) and is now at the Jewish Museum in New York, can provide devoted fans and newcomers access to a sort of Leonard Cohen afterlife. The exhibition is premised on Leonard Cohen’s multitudinal and capacious life and work. It approaches its subject not like a biographer or a critic. Rather, it is interested in the reverberations of his music and the interplay of artists and art and audience.

Even the most documentary-like space at the exhibit—the 56 minute video installation Passing Through created by George Fok—is not a passive viewing experience. Using multiple screens arranged around a rectangular space the film traces Cohen’s career, both his art and his life, as a sort of time machine. It begins with the performance of one of his early songs, sometimes cutting back into the background of the period in which it was written using some gems of archival material from around the world—and then side by side with the earlier performance of the song we see a screen of Leonard singing the same song decades later—sometimes there are three performances running simultaneously—from the sixties, late eighties, and his final years of touring in 2000’s—all side by side. At one point he intones, “I dedicate this song to a talented American singer”, and then goes on to tell a by-now famous story^[2] of his encounter with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel. The screens light up with Cohen telling the same story, the same punch lines but through several decades—it’s the same and it is transformed as he ages, and the audiences change, and the world changes.

In another space, “Heard there was a Secret Chord” dedicated to Cohen’s most overdone song, “Halleluyah,” we see a dimly lit space with microphones hanging from the ceiling, snaking around an odd octagonal bench of white wood. Up in a corner is a small digital sign with numbers that keep on changing. The sound piped into the room is a hummed, acapella version of that broken, pathos-drenched anthem; the volume of the song increases or decreases depending on the amount of people worldwide at that moment who are listening to the song—the digital sign is keeping track of those global listeners. The microphones invite you to hum along. And hum people did. The day I was there most of the mikes were taken by people of different ages humming along to the tune, adding their voice to this global choral of heartbreak and longing.

In another room we encounter “The Poetry Machine”. In this installation, conceived of by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, we find a 1950’s Wurlitzer organ with an array of vintage speakers carefully set up around it, with a simple and elegant oriental rug to set the stage. The rug is reminiscent of the stage set of Cohen’s last years of touring, with his exquisite band, all dressed in black suits and fedoras and the floor of the stage draped in lush rugs upon which Leonard, at once a monk and an entertainer, would kneel, and bow in the heat of a song. The wood of the speakers reminded me of the simple, elegant, and warm décor of his sparse Montreal apartment where he did so much of his writing throughout the years. You are invited to sit down at the keyboard and play. Each key sets off a recording of Cohen reading a poem from his Book of Longing. You can play several poems at once, creating a strange song of words and pauses, rising and falling, jamming into each other and resolving at times in harmony. Or just let a poem go to the end. It was awfully fun and disorienting to be in the room, either listening or “playing”. When I left I felt my hands buzzing, like I was tapping into some portal. I wanted to return and spend more time there, playing around with the endless variations of words and pauses, of the undulations and raspiness of his voice and the anger, humor, and beauty of these earthy poems.

On the third floor of the exhibition we walk into a darkened room and before us is a large rectangular screen featuring the members of the Shaar HaShomayim Synagogue Choir. This choir sings regularly at the synagogue that Leonard Cohen’s family helped found in the upscale Westmount suburb of Montreal. These singers along with the synagogue’s cantor, Gideon Zelermyer, sang backup on Cohen’s last album, most famously on his channeling of the Kaddish, the haunting and very personal “You want it darker”. Here, however, they are singing back up to the songs from what is considered by most of Cohen’s biographers as his first comeback album, I’m your man from 1988, as part of Candice Breitz’ installation by that same title. To the right and left of the screen are two arrows pointing toward the second part of the installation, a long room lined with 18 screens, each featuring a different middle-aged or elderly Leonard Cohen fan singing the entire album, song after song. One gentleman decided to evoke the master by wearing a fedora, a grey dress shirt and tie and black suit jacket, another is wearing a Cohen concert t-shirt, one older bearded man is wearing a dress. Most did not seem to get dressed up in any particular way for the occasion. As you walk around and hear their 18 man version of the album, backed up with the acapella humming of the chorus, you can hear how each person makes each song their own.

I felt drawn in, as if the singers were reaching beyond the screen with their eyes and hands, their swaying and reverie. They were inhabiting the song, and wanted to share it. I looped through the room twice and then went back to the first room with the chorus, the singers were keeping time with the song playing in the main room, waiting for the right moment to enter and offer the deep amber of their harmony to the uneven collection of 18 men pleading with their lovers, assuring them that they are “your man” or reminding their unknown audience about what “everybody knows.”

The exhibition wants you to engage with Leonard Cohen, not necessarily to “learn about him” or appreciate his work. It celebrates the way his art has inspired others to create and to live more deeply. And it is here that I think Leonard Cohen’s life work, and this exhibition, is useful for Modern Orthodox Jews. It is not the Judaism that finds its way into his art or is refracted in any of these artistic engagements at the exhibition that is relevant here. I believe that there are certain sensibilities inherent in Cohen’s art and in his spiritual journey that can help Jews trying to live deeply with Torah while engaged in the world at large. I believe that the exhibit gives us access to some of those ways of being, in particular his humor, his vulnerability, and his co-mingling of the earthly and the transcendent.

The exhibit spends surprisingly little time and space on Cohen’s religiosity. You see scenes from his childhood synagogue, you see Cohen in Israel during the Yom Kippur war, and a stirring, trancelike rendition he gives of a Yiddish song—“Un As Der Rebbe Singt” (“As the Rebbe Sings”). There are also poignant references to the Shoah and its lingering shadow on much of his life and work. It is clear that he owns his Jewishness and carries it with dignity. It is rather stirring to see his easy pride and the way he was able to be so rooted in his particulars- his Judaism, his Montreal roots, and at the same time be such a man of the world. But there is no installation that engages Cohen’s deep, wide ranging, and creative engagement with Judaism or other religions, such as his years as a Zen monk at the monastery on Mount Baldy, California.^[3] Perhaps this points to the difficulty and unease of the art establishment with religion.

This lacuna surprised me but did not diminish my enjoyment of this often revelatory exhibition. I was reminded of so many of the gifts that Cohen brings his listeners. I was struck again and again throughout by his humor. He had impeccable timing, leading his audience into the story and then trapping them in the joke. He was decorous and suave but could make fun of that pose at the same time. We can see this in pitch-perfect display in a scene from his performance of “Tower of Song.” It comes from a recording of a live performance in London in 2008. “Tower of Song” is about death and memory and art and loneliness, but here he plays it with such easy, bizarre humor. Around five minutes into the song Cohen stops singing, allowing the back-up singers, the Webb Sisters and his longtime collaborator Sharon Robinson, to sing the “doo-dah-dum, doo-dah-dum.” They sing this sweetly and their voices are hypnotic. After a few rounds of their singing he addresses the audience and tells them that: “Tonight the great mysteries have been unravelled. And tonight I’ve penetrated to the core of things. and I have stumbled on the answer.” He assures his audience that he has the answer to the mysteries of the universe and that he is ready to reveal that secret. And then he listens ever more closely to their singing; the rhythm which has not stopped throughout his monologue, and with a mischievous smile, he points to the singers- “doo-dah-dum, doo-dah-dum”— that’s the secret he has come to reveal!

For a moment, when watching the performance, perhaps we may think (or want to think) that he will reveal that secret but Cohen makes sure to kill the Buddha and any easy answers he may offer. Cohen, of course, spent his entire life seeking these answers and it is precisely for this reason that his listeners will listen to what he has to say; this is precisely why he wants to disabuse them of any easy answers to life’s big questions. He also has so much fun and invites his listeners in on the joke and the joy, but also makes the harder edge of the song easier to absorb. Humor is disarming, it opens us up. Perhaps that is why Rabbah the Talmudic sage would always begin his teaching with a joke (Shabbat 30b). The hasidic masters explain that humor can take us out of our place of psychological constraints—from the mohin d-katnut (the small mindedness) to an expansive consciousness of mohin d- gadlut. We need to remember to laugh, especially at ourselves and the things we cherish. Laughter is an antidote against fundamentalism. Der mentch tracht und Got lacht—Man tries (or plans) and God laughs.^[4] Our plans, our great intellectual and ideological constructs, are all variations on a theme as we stumble towards the light. Living a life of faith does not give us the answers, it inspires us to search and grow and to give. If we approach that path without humor and humility we set ourselves up for disappointment or worse.

Cohen also sets out on a path of spiritual striving and searching which embraces the brokenness of that very search. Shlomo Carlebach would often say that God is closest to the broken-hearted (Psalms 34:19) because they are most capable of letting Him in. This idea, rooted in the words of the Psalm and in the hard-won wisdom of the religious life is wrapped up in Cohen’s aptly titled “Anthem”:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

Perfection, especially in matters of the spirit, can trap us. By accepting our flaws and nonetheless never giving up on the struggle towards the light we insure that we are continually engaged with the divine, that God is at the center of our lives. Embracing our vulnerability opens us up to empathy for others and a deeper hunger for the Transcendent.

The ideals of Torah u-Maddah call on the Modern Orthodox Jew to live a dialectical life. Walt Whitman reminds us that we “contain multitudes” and we are enjoined to use these varied gifts to enhance and deepen our Avodat Hashem. But it is hard to know how to balance often opposing drives and values. Living with this tension is at the heart of a modern religious life and again Cohen’s sensibility may be of use here. Cohen is a master of juxtapositions. A trademark of his art from its earliest moments is the play between the spiritual and the carnal, between darkness and light, the transcendent and the everyday. Being able to live with multiple, opposing ideas and feelings and commitments is an essential feature of modern life, but specifically of Modern Orthodox life. If we as individuals and a community are to transcend a bifurcated life—where our modernity and our orthodoxy operate in separate spheres, or where modernity is only seen as a utilitarian tool, aiding our spirituality in technical or financial ways, we must learn to live with ambiguity and contradictions and create something beautiful, luminous, and holy out of the confusion and brokenness.

Cohen’s sensuality is always tinged with the spiritual, the existential, and often enough with deep pain. Cohen says that one of his great love songs, “Dance me to the End of Love,” began as a meditation on the origins of evil; he wrote it while visiting Berlin and the Shoah was on his mind. It turned in a different direction but his grappling with horror found its way in:

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

He calls to his lover, seeks out her beauty but also her comfort. On the surface the burning violin evokes passion; but in an interview, Cohen says that the image was inspired by the prisoners in the death camps who were ordered to play music “while the Nazis did their killing work.” Love, lust, chaos, cruelty, and hope all wrapped together in a dance. Cohen’s ease with the full range of human experience and its messiness is another portal for us to enter through. From the Bible to Hazal to the great medieval poets and mystics, our tradition embraces the fullness of the human experience. However, the shock of modernity with its radical assault on religion along with the dislocations of the 20^th century have pushed much of our orthodox culture to react by containing these opposing spheres, of normalizing and categorizing our passions instead of celebrating and channeling them. Rav Kook z’l looked forward to when the Jewish body—degraded through 2 millennia of exile from its full physicality—will join with the Jewish soul.^[5] Perhaps an embodied spirituality is easier in the Land of Israel. Jewish soldiers, and farmers, and engineers and doctors, Jewish poets crafting songs out of the layers of Hebrew, hewn out of the lived experience, can create art that is deeply spiritual and sensual, transcendent and quotidian. Evayatar Banai’s “Yafa keLevana/Beautiful like the Moon” is a striking example of a pious musician taking the fullness of his life into his music and creating songs of tenderness and passion. In Israel there is a blossoming of music and art and film that is going in this direction from Etti Ankari’s interpretations of the poems of Yehuda Ha-Levi or the Breslov-inspired songs of Shuli Rand and so many more. But in English I can’t think of a better place to start this project of spiritual-sensual revitalization than Leonard Cohen’s work.

In 2011 Cohen received Spain’s^[6] highest honor, the Premios Principe de Asturias. A small clip of Cohen’s acceptance speech played towards the end of the video installation Passing Through. We see a wizened, elegant man address the Spanish Royal Family with humility and grace but also with a piercing insight into the power of art:

Now, you know of my deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico García Lorca. I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice. It was only when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice, that is to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence. As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.

Cohen does not sound like Lorca, but Lorca’s voice could be a model for his own. In a similar way I would never call on our intimate community to sound like Leonard Cohen or to live their lives along the lines of his own. However, I believe that his art and life can offer us new ways to live our Torah lives, or perhaps it can serve as a reminder of the things we already know but need help accessing or articulating.

Notes

^[1] The Lehrhaus has already featured well-written and insightful pieces on Cohen’s work. These saw his poetry as Torah, or at least as engaged with Torah. This is right and good and I look forward to seeing more such engagements with his work. After all, he saw his poetry as inspired by and functioning as liturgy and of course it is Leonard Cohen himself who confessed to being “the little Jew who wrote the Bible.” I come to this material as a reverent, love-struck listener and reader of Leonard Cohen’s music and poetry. I am a fan; I will admit it. But I wanted to write a review, specifically for the Lehrhaus, because I wanted to think about what Cohen can mean for Modern Orthodox Jews.

^[2] This piece from Rolling Stone offers some useful background to Cohen’s encounter with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel.

^[3] When Cohen embarked on his major comeback tour in the 2000’s the New York Times published a small article and included an audio recording of Cohen describing a Hanukkah encounter he had while living in the monastery. One cold night he met some young Habad Hasidim who were lost, he invited them into his spare cabin, took out a bottle of Crown Royal and they lit Hanukkah candles. Cohen never let go of Judaism even as he lived the life of a Zen monk. The audio recording where Cohen retells this story does not appear on the story’s current digital version. But these line might be useful:

Mr. Cohen is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath even while on tour and performed for Israeli troops during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. So how does he square that faith with his continued practice of Zen?

“Allen Ginsberg asked me the same question many years ago,” he said. “Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief.”

Zen has also helped him to learn to “stop whining,” Mr. Cohen said, and to worry less about the choices he has made. “All these things have their own destiny; one has one’s own destiny. The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.” Larry Rohter, “On the Road for Reasons Practical and Spiritual”

In an early interview included in the exhibition, Cohen mentions that he sometimes would like to be invisible. The interviewer asks if he would like to change his name—he said- yes, I thought of changing my name to September.

Leonard September? – no September Cohen.

The interviewer seems to assume that he would like to lose his deeply Jewish name, but that was not ever a question for Leonard Cohen.

^[4] On this point see Milan Kundera’s meditation on the novel as a recording of God’s laughter in his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize published in his collection of essays, The Art of the Novel.

^[5] Orot, “Orot ha-Tehiyah“, ch. 33, 80.

^[6] For much of his career, Cohen was more popular in Europe than he was in North America. This may explain why Spain would give its highest cultural prize to Cohen. His speech explains the deep debt he felt toward Spain, down to the very guitar he used to write his greatest songs. Cohen named his daughter Lorca, an homage to his muse and phantom mentor.

Ronnie Perelis a professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University where he loves exploring the complexity and dynamism of Sephardic history with his students. His Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith (Indiana University Press) investigates the nature of family and identity in the Sephardic Atlantic world. He is currently working on the re-discovered religious writings of Luis de Carvajal, a sixteenth century Mexican crypto-Jewish thinker. This is his first piece for the Lehrhaus. To learn more about his scholarship and cultural explorations see:

https://yeshiva.academia.edu/ronnieperelis

http://sephardiphilia.blogspot.com/

 

From The Lehrhaus, June 24, 2019, re-posted to SHU 910, September 4, 2019

 

Leonard Cohen, With a New Album, ‘Old Ideas,’ Was Never Popular But Always Profound

By: Liel Leibovitz

Leonard Cohen releases his 12th studio album, the profoundly moving Old Ideas, today. None of his records has ever cracked the top 50, and his last album, 2004’s Dear Heather, peaked at No. 131 on the Billboard charts. Those few of his songs that are well-known—particularly the ubiquitous “Hallelujah”—are well-known for being covered by other musicians. He is 77 years old, and his peers are either nostalgia acts or four decades dead, icons of a church that’s fallen into sad disrepair.

But not Cohen: He’s featured on the album’s cover, dressed in a suit and a tie, donning his trademark fedora and wearing dark shades, sitting on a blue wooden chair in a Los Angeles backyard, grinning slightly, and reading a book. It’s a fitting pose for the man he’s become, the kind and pensive dispenser of profound truths who earns in acclaim what he lacks in raw popularity; he’s the only entertainer around who looks as natural receiving Spain’s top literary award from Prince Felipe as he does sharing the dais with Madonna and John Mellencamp at the 2008 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony that honored all three. Even that almanac of cool,the Financial Times, recently saw fit to lionize St. Leonard, calling him “a sage for the post-crisis age.”

It wasn’t a role he was preordained to play. Throughout his life, it often seemed as if Cohen’s greatest talent was for falling out of step. In 1965, when Dylan plugged in and Jim Morrison spent the summer subsisting on LSD and baked beans and forming the Doors, Cohen, then still a poet, appeared on Canadian TV. “I wake up every morning and check if I am in a state of grace,” he told a television crew. “If not, I go back to bed.” He was in his mid-thirties when he first stepped out on stage with a guitar, an experience so traumatic that he fled after a few bars and only came back when Judy Collins, his friend and patron, soothed him and accompanied him back into the limelight. When his career finally took off, mainly in Europe, he realized that the musical milieu with which he most firmly belonged, the singer-songwriters, was rapidly becoming passé. Young fans now wanted their music loud and spirited; Cohen’s was sad and soulful.

Many also found it depressing. In one of his songs, “Field Commander Cohen,” he poked fun at his public image, calling himself “the patron saint of envy/ and the grocer of despair.” An attempt to market him as a mainstream singer led to a collaboration with Phil Spector that ended with Spector holding a gun to Cohen’s head, hijacking the master tape, and releasing his version without Cohen’s consent. Spector’s arrangements took Cohen’s music from folk to funk; the singer, enraged, called the album “a catastrophe,” and the public and the critics agreed. This was in 1977; Cohen released another album, the largely forgotten Recent Songs, two years later, but by 1984 he felt ready for a breakthrough. He submitted nine new songs to his label, Columbia Records, including “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “If It Be Your Will,” and a biblically themed anthem he had hoped would catch on, “Hallelujah.” The label’s boss, the notoriously abrasive Walter Yetnikoff, listened to the tracks, took a long look at his 50-year-old artist, and said, “Look, Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.” He seemed to be speaking for the music industry in general; the album was shelved and eventually picked up by a much smaller label.

How, then, to explain Leonard Cohen’s unlikely third act, and the accolades he now enjoys from the same people who had once dismissed him as too grim for public consumption? Working on a book about Cohen, I asked myself this question frequently, and the best answer I found is right there in the title of his new album, Old Ideas. Although he’s rightfully celebrated for his grace with notes and his dexterity with lyrics, his ideas are the true engine of Cohen’s survival. In a pursuit like rock ’n’ roll, which is entirely devoted to redemption, Cohen’s ideas were not only old but radical. His peers all insisted that salvation was at hand. To go to a Doors concert was to stare at the lithe messiah undressing on stage and believe that it was entirely possible to break on through to the other side. To see Cohen play was to gawk at an aging Jew telling you that life was hard and laced with sorrow but that if we love each other and fuck one another and have the mad courage to laugh even when the sun is clearly setting, we’ll be just all right. To borrow a metaphor from a field never too far from Cohen’s heart, theology, Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, and the rest were all good Christians, and they set themselves up as the redeemers who had to die for the sins of their fans. Cohen was a Jew, and like Jews he believed that salvation was nothing more than a lot of hard work and a small but sustainable reward.

The Jewish messiah, it turned out, was a gaunt poet with a guitar who promised not to whisk us away to some other, better world but to teach us how to come to terms with this one. Cohen’s peers all generated heat, but it was Cohen we’d always turned to for light, sometimes literally, like in the summer of 1970, in the English Isle of Wight, the former home of Queen Victoria and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and a favored retirement spot for naval officers and other assorted Empire types. The island, with its salt-stricken limestone cliffs, looks like the footprint of some enormous animal long extinct, and a few cool cats from London thought the primordial spot could be the British equivalent of Yasgur’s farm. They obtained the necessary permissions and invited the usual suspects. One day, late in August, they arrived: Hendrix and the Doors, Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, Jethro Tull and the Who all set up in trailers just behind the enormous makeshift stage and awaited their turn to play.

The audience arrived, too, and at first, they all looked like decent kids. They had long hair and big smiles, and most of them lived on the dole, the generous unemployment payment the British government handed out to anyone who applied. They bought their ticket for three pounds sterling and rushed into the festival’s fenced-in area to catch a good spot on the grass in front of the stage. They swayed dreamily to the progressive rock band Judas Jump and cheered warmly for the California folk singer Kathy Smith and her two-hour-long set of mellow tunes. A clean-shaven Kris Kristofferson was there, too, but the sound system stuttered, and his set was soon inaudible. The crowd was kind, protesting mildly, clapping when appropriate. The organizers apologized profusely, promising Kristofferson he could play a second set in a day or two. On its first day, the festival looked like it would live up to expectations and become England’s Woodstock.

And then came the troublemakers.

They were there on command, dispatched by a militia of pranksters that called themselves the White Panthers and saw the festival, with its order and neatness and paid admission, as the triumph of oppressive capitalism over the rowdy spirit of the 1960s. They were determined to make the festival their Alamo; they would fight to the end for music’s right to be free.

The festival’s campground, with its makeshift fences and rows of wooden commodes, was designed with a maximum of 200,000 concert-goers in mind. The White Panthers spread the word in London and elsewhere, promising a chance to see rock’s royalty without paying a penny. By the morning of the festival’s second day, its organizers began to notice rows of unpaying spectators gathering on the hill just outside the campground, overlooking the stage; it was named, after Dylan’s anthem to chaos and disillusion, Desolation Hill. By noontime, the throngs on Desolation Hill numbered in the tens of thousands. By nightfall, they made their way downhill toward the fences, demanding to be let in.

In the spirit of peace, love, and understanding, the organizers tried to catch their bees with honey and hired a few dozen men they reckoned were the freeloaders’ ringleaders to mend and paint the campground’s fences, battered by the invaders from Desolation Hill. The following morning, the organizers woke up and realized what they had done: In bright colors, in big letters, were slogans and symbols, covering every inch of the fence. Entrance is everywhere. Don’t buy. Fuck the guards. Commune Free. The organizers’ names next to swastikas. The festival was in free fall. By midday, there were half a million souls surrounding the stage.

Or storming it. Joni Mitchell took the stage around noon, and she barely finished her third song when a shirtless gentleman leaped on stage, wrested the microphone away from the stunned singer, introduced himself as Yogi Joe, and began his speech.

“Power to the people, motherfuckers!” he shouted. “I’ve been to Woodstock, and I dug it very much. I’ve been to about 10 fucking festivals, and I love music. I just think one thing: This festival business is becoming a psychedelic concentration camp, where people are being exploited! And there’s enough of that! What is all that peace and love shit when you have police dogs out there! What about that? That reminds me of a lot of bad things, you know? I don’t like police dogs!”

Security guards leapt on stage and seized Yogi Joe. Mitchell looked shocked. “Listen a minute, will you?” she pleaded. “Now listen! A lot of people who get up here and sing, I know it’s fun, it’s a lot of fun, it’s fun for me, I get my feelings off through my music, but listen, you got your life wrapped up in it, and it’s very difficult to come out here and lay something down when people … .”She was greeted by thunderous boos.

Backstage, the organizers were panicking. Less than 10 percent of those in attendance paid for their tickets. At this rate, there would be no way to recover expenses and pay the artists. Even worse, the crowd was getting unruly: With all the trashcans overflowing and all the toilets clogged, they started hurling rubbish at the stage. Kris Kristofferson was the first hit. Immediately after taking the stage for his promised repeat performance, a bottle came whirring by, hitting him in the shoulder. He stopped for a moment, then started again. Some cans rained down on his band. And the shouting. And the smell of burning garbage. “We’re going to do two more in spite of everything except rifle fire,” Kristofferson said, not trying to hide the disdain in his voice. “I think they’re going to shoot us.” He decided to try his most famous song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Maybe that would soothe the mob. “Busted flat in Baton Rouge,” he sang, “headin’ for the train, feelin’ nearly faded as my jeans.” By the time he got to the part about freedom being just another word for nothing left to lose, the boos were too loud to ignore. Kristofferson stopped playing, gave the crowd the finger, and stormed off stage. One organizer took the stage, enraged.

“That was Kris Kristofferson,” he said when the music finally died down. “Now, I just want you to hang on one minute. I want you to hear something, and I want you to hear it fucking good! There are some good people out here, and you are insulting their intelligence! And if you come to this country at our invitation, and we have to charge you, through no choice of our own, three pounds, if you don’t want to pay it, don’t fucking well come!”

That only made the Desolation Hill crew angrier. They assailed one artist after another. Sly and the Family Stone tried appealing to reason and failed. Mungo Jerry canceled his set. The Doors insisted that all of the lights be turned off; they played in the dark for nearly two hours, and their sepulchral music, emanating from the black emptiness on stage, drove the mob into a frenzy. The audience wanted to see Jim Morrison, so they tried to burn down the stage.

By the time Jimi Hendrix came on, they succeeded. It was after midnight, and Hendrix was wearing tight orange pants and a pink-and-yellow tie-dye shirt, looking like a flame himself. Something, probably a makeshift Molotov cocktail, had hit the scaffold above his head, and soon it caught on fire. This seemed to amuse Hendrix. He held his Stratocaster guitar as if it were a machine gun, pointed it at the crowd, and fretted fast. The riffs were high-pitched, difficult to take. A few security guards rushed onto the stage to try and put out the fire, and their walkie-talkies interfered with the amplifier’s frequency. The howling of Hendrix’s guitar flickered, sounding otherworldly. In three weeks’ time, the musician—ravaged by stress and sleeping pills—would asphyxiate on his own vomit in the basement of a posh London hotel, but that night on Wight he seemed more exuberant than he’d been in months. He played faster and faster, and anyone in the audience who was in possession of a lighter flicked his thumb on the flint and went searching for something to burn.

Watching the campground catch fire, most artists scrambled for safety and talked feverishly about getting off the island as soon as was possible. Standing not far from the stage, Leonard Cohen turned to Bob Johnston, his producer, and with what Johnston thought was the beginning of a smile said, “Wake me up when it’s time, Bob. I’m going to take a nap over there, by the fire.” A few hours later, one of the festival’s organizers woke him up and asked him to take the stage. Unless someone plays, he said hurriedly, blood will be spilled.

Watching Cohen get dressed, Johnston felt a pulsating fear thudding inside him. He peeked out of the trailer and saw Kristofferson, Joan Baez, and Judy Collins lounging backstage, waiting for their friend to play his set. Cohen, Johnston thought, was nowhere near as tough as Kristofferson, not as determined as Baez, not as well-respected as Collins, and if the three of them were pelted with bottles and booed off stage, what chance did Cohen have? He was 36, nearly a decade older than most of the other performers. With a black T-shirt and a safari jacket, unshaved and unkempt, he looked more like Jim Morrison’s accountant than his peer. He took the stage. It was 2:00 in the morning. His face was blank.

“Greetings,” Cohen said into the microphone, “greetings.” His tone was casual, his voice soft. He continued. “When I was 7 years old,” he said in that same mellow way, “my father used to take me to the circus. He had a black mustache, and a great vest, and a pansy in his lapel, and he liked the circus better than I did.”

Sitting a few feet behind Cohen, Charlie Daniels, a young fiddler Bob Johnston had brought along from Nashville, was amused. Years later, recalling how he felt at that moment, he said he just couldn’t believe Cohen was trying to tell 600,000 people a goddamned bedtime story. But in a near-monotone, Cohen continued.

“There was one thing at the circus that happened that I always used to wait for,” he said. “I don’t want to impose on you, this isn’t like a sing-along … but there was one moment when a man would stand up and say, would everybody light a match so we can locate one another? And could I ask you each person to light a match, so that I could see where you all are? Could each of you light a match, so that you’ll sparkle like fireflies, each at your different heights? I would love to see those matches flare.”

The audience obeyed. For five days, the men and women on stage—organizers, artists, or anarchists—were talking at them. Cohen was talking to them. He seemed like one of them. He seemed to care. Slowly, they took out matchbooks and lighters, and instead of setting things on fire they waved their arms in the air, emitting heat and light. Cohen smiled. “Oh, yeah!” he said softly. “Oh, yeah. Now I know that you know why you’re lighting them.” He strummed a few chords on the guitar and continued his speech, half-singing. “It’s good to be here alone in front of 600,000 people. It’s a large nation but it’s still weak. Still very weak. It needs to get a lot stronger before it can claim a right to land.”

These were heavy words for 2:00 in the morning, but they seemed to permeate. Cohen wasn’t just telling the audience to stop rioting; he was about to give them an alternative. Playing as slowly as he could, Cohen began with one of his most famous songs: “Like … a … bird … on … a … wire …” Whoever was still standing now sat down on the grass and listened.

When the song ended, the audience clapped. Not thunderously, but still. A handful, still hopped up on the adrenaline of the afternoon, booed, but they were soon subdued. The 600,000 wanted to hear what Cohen had to say.

What he had to say was poetry. He had started out as a poet, and his first public performances consisted of reciting verse in smoky, small Montreal coffee houses. He might as well have been in one when he stared into the distance in the way that poets sometimes do when they’re reading out loud and began his soliloquy.

“I wrote this in a peeling room in the Chelsea Hotel, before I was rich and famous and they gave me well-painted rooms,” he said. “I was coming off of amphetamines, and I was pursuing a blonde lady whom I met in a Nazi poster. And I was doing many things to attract her attention. I was lighting wax candles in the form of men and women. I was marrying the smoke of two cones of sandalwood.” Then, he started playing another of his songs, “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.”

To Murray Lerner, a middle-aged filmmaker from New York whose camera crews had documented every moment of the festival, the effect was hypnotic. Throughout five days of performances, he’d been too busy shouting out orders to stop and listen to the music. But Cohen’s words made him put down his camera and look up at the man on stage. Two hours earlier, Lerner was packing up his equipment, certain that the fires and the violence would lead to a massive stampede. He was ready to run for shelter. But now everything was still, and Lerner had no idea how Leonard Cohen had pulled it off. Standing beside Lerner, Joan Baez was equally baffled. “People say that a song needs to make sense,” she told the filmmaker. “Leonard proves otherwise. It doesn’t necessarily make sense at all, it just comes from so deep inside of him, it somehow touches deep down inside other people. I’m not sure how it works, but I know that it works.” Lerner nodded in agreement as he listened. It reminded him of something he’d once read T.S. Eliot say of Dante—that the genius of poetry was that it communicated before it was understood.

On stage, Cohen was done with the ephemera. He was smiling. He turned to his band mates frequently now, nodding his head encouragingly or saying a kind word or two. In his confidence, he decided it was time to speak honestly. He played a few basic chords and delivered a short speech-song.

“They gave me some money, for my sad and famous song,” he sang. “They said the crowd is waiting, hurry up or they’ll be gone. But I could not change my style, and I guess I never will. So I sing this for the poison snakes on Devastation Hill.” And then came a noisy, joyous rendition of “Diamonds in the Mine,” with Charlie Daniels singeing the strings and Bob Johnston, playing piano, pounding happily on the keys.

“He’s taking them on,” said Kristofferson, standing a few feet away with Lerner and Baez. “He’s taking the fuckers right on.”

Cohen was. He renamed Desolation Hill “Devastation Hill,” and called its occupants poison snakes. As he did, however, the poison snakes—the ones who crawled in through the mud or slung themselves at the fences, the ones who slithered on to the stage to spit out venomous messages, the ones who set the evil fires—they just huddled together and listened. Kristofferson felt something like elation. He clapped along madly.

It was nearly 4:00 in the morning by the time Cohen was ready to end his set. He had played all of his hits and launched into a few more bits of poetry. Someone in the crowd screamed a request, asking Cohen to sing “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy.” Cohen signaled to his band that he’d like to play that one by himself. “It was in 1961,” he introduced the woman about whom the song was written. “She went into the bathroom and blew her head off with her brother’s shotgun.” He pointed at the audience, now lying down, cuddled on top of each other on the grass. “In those days,” he continued, “there wasn’t that kind of horizontal support. She was right where you are now but there was no one else around to light their matches.” He played the song, and when he was finished he put down his guitar.

“I know it’s been cold, and I know it’s been damp,” he said. “I know you’ve been sick all night long. But let’s renew ourselves now. Let’s renew ourselves now. Let’s renew ourselves now. Goodnight.” And off the stage he went. It’s so good to have him back.

Liel Leibovitz is at work on a book about Leonard Cohen, to be published next year by W.W. Norton.

Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.

From Tablet magazine, January 31, 2012

 

Leon Wieseltier Remembers Leonard Cohen

By: Leon Wieseltier

Remarks written for Leonard Cohen’s memorial service at Ohr HaTorah Synagogue in Mar Vista, California on Dec. 11, 2016.

In a fragment of a journal that he kept on the island of Hydra in 1983, Leonard amusingly recalled a kind of philosophical disputation that resulted from his attempt to write what he called “a metaphysical song.” Wryly mocking his own spiritual ambition, he writes that the song “attempted to exaggerate the maturity of my own religious experience and invalidate everyone else’s.” It was to be called “Letter to the Christians.” Leonard was never more Jewish than in his lifelong engagement with the figure of Jesus: has there ever been a more Jewish, or more damning, or more compassionate, characterization of Jesus than “almost human,” which is what Leonard called him in “Suzanne”?

After a few days Leonard had four stanzas for his new song, and judging by the lines that he reproduces in his journal he was right not to proceed with this one. The subject of the verses was God and the Galilee and the Crucifixion. Leonard sang the lyrics to a friend as they waded in the Aegean, and a few minutes later his friend composed a wicked reply. It went like this: “I really hope you stumble on/ The Great Red Whore of Babylon/ Forget the Grace/ Enjoy the Lace/ Have some fun and carry on.” It appears that Leonard appreciated his friend’s retort. He notes immediately that “the beach was full of beautiful young women whom I desired uniformly at a very low intensity.” He spots a lovely “new-born Christian” sitting on a rock and “hurries off” to charm her with some smooth talk about Grace. After the Grace, I presume, came the Lace.

In the weeks since Leonard’s death, he has been portrayed as a sage, a rebbe, a kabbalist, an exegete, a kind of troubadour theologian. There is some truth to these descriptions: he was devoted to the cosmological speculations of his own tradition and others, he had an erotic relationship with big ideas, and in his way he never quit the theistic universe. But as I mourn him I want to remember him accurately, and so I want to insist that Leonard was not so much a wise man as a man in search of wisdom. He found it, he lost it, he found it again, he tested it, he lost it, he found it again. The seeking was his calling. He was never certain, never done, never daunted, never saved.

And so, against those other descriptions of him, I wish to recall that my brother was also, and more primarily, a poet, a lover, a voluptuary, a worshipper of beauty, a man who lived as much for women as for God, a man who lived for women because he lived for God, a man who lived for God because he lived for women, a servant of the senses, a student of pleasure and pain, an explorer whose only avenue of access to the invisible was the visible, a sinner and a singer about sin, a body and a soul preternaturally aware of the explosive implications of the duality.

Leonard was a good man with desires, and he had the courage of his desires. The man who seeks forgiveness even as he seeks experience: he is the hero, or the anti-hero, of all of Leonard’s work. The power of Leonard’s graciousness was owed to the history of his turbulence. His songs are the songs of a wounded and wounding man. I have almost never known a humbler person—what other star of popular music filled stadiums to sing on bended knee?—but it was the humility of one who was also impertinent and defiant. His was the modesty that succeeds temerity.

Leonard cherished the rules because he recognized his inclination to break them. He was bored by innocence, by the calm before the storm, by stormlessness. But the calm after the storm—that was his ideal. His poise was his triumph, his method of self-mastery, the profoundly moving evidence of his sovereignty over his rioting appetites. But the appetites accounted for as much of Leonard’s flavor as the poise.

And now it’s come to distances and only we can try. I wish to testify that my own existence has been permanently and irreversibly desolated by Leonard’s departure from the world. There were inflections of my soul for which he was my only comrade, states of fragility and perplexity for which he furnished my only solidarity. He taught me a great deal about the conditions of gratitude and gladness. Most of all, he taught me that it is by our longings that we are most truly known. And now I will long for him, and for his genius for longing.

If, as Leonard wrote in Book of Mercy, “holy is that which is unredeemed,” then an aspect of holiness attached to my ravishing friend, and will forever attach to his memory. Te’hay nishmato tse’rurah be’tsror ha’chaim. May his soul be bound up in the bundle of life.

From Tablet magazine, December 13, 2016

 

A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, on His 82nd Birthday

By: Jim Knable

I used to hope in vain to be Bob Dylan, or the next Bob Dylan, or just Dylanesque. Then I realized it was pointless. Bob Dylan achieved his immortality in his early 20s and everything he did thereafter, while often spectacular, just built on the myth of his halcyon youth. And so, at the age of 40, I’ve curbed my dreams of becoming the next Bob Dylan. I still, though, find it entirely reasonable to hope to be the next Leonard Cohen, who turns 82 today.

In his rise from minor literary personality (in his late twenties), to underground poet-musician (early thirties) to arena-filling songwriter-legend (through the next five decades), he’s proved that youth is cute but that age brings authority and power: In the last 50 years, he’s written the kinds of songs that feel less like grains of mercurial sand and more like immortal mountains.

I first discovered Leonard Cohen in high school, as I became casually intrigued by the Eskimo who “never got warm.” In college I wallowed in the dark despair of “The Avalanche” as I shelved books in the work-study cave at Yale’s Mudd Library. I evaporated over the course of a summer listening to The Death of a Ladies’ Man while I practiced a life in which I “went for nothing, if [I] really want[ed] to go that far.” When I found myself moving from amateur to serious songwriter (in Dresden, Germany, no less), I covered “There is a War” from New Skin for the Old Ceremony and felt the power of performing Cohen’s words, which I know influenced my own words from then on.

As a 24-year-old singer-with-a-guitar in New York, a performance of my serious songs garnered audible whispers of “he’s like Leonard Cohen,” which thrilled me like nothing else. But Cohen didn’t just influence me as a writer or solo performer; when I listened to his 1979 concert album (released in 2000), I paid careful attention to the way he graciously introduced his individual band members in the middle of songs, after their solos or even just a particularly nice riff. “That was Roscoe Beck on fretless bass,” he’d say. I did the same when I got my band The Randy Bandits going (“That was Jay Buchanan on upright bass”).

I also paid homage to his look. I treasured my band photo in which I sat with a Cohenesque expression on my face, as I somehow captured his calm yet provocative persona in my gaze. I frequently wore suits like I pictured Leonard Cohen would wear and tried to hold myself as he would at the microphone, even as the front man of a band whose style was raucous, silly, sincere, and pleasantly unhinged—not exactly in the vein of Leonard Cohen.

While his influence was great through my band’s peak years, it wasn’t until we started slipping away from each other (as bands do) that I found myself truly needing the example of Leonard Cohen. The loss of my band coincided with the birth of my first son. My days were consumed with swapping adjunct teaching hours and childcare as my wife worked from home and swapped equally. The songs I wrote were meant for an audience of one—my infant son—who usually began crying the moment I started singing. One hopeless afternoon, I put on a DVD of Leonard Cohen’s 2009 London show and my son was miraculously transfixed.

I once again found myself studying the songs and performance style of a man now old enough to make jokes about having once been a 60-year-old “kid with a crazy dream.” My son took to wearing a hat like Cohen’s (inexplicably referred to as his “Drooka-Mamma” hat) and insisted on hearing a playlist of Cohen’s songs to ease him into night-night. I drew on the power of the Drooka-Mamma (really, don’t ask) when I asked a female friend to sing with me as I lined up some gigs to explore my more blatantly Cohenesque songs. This phase may or may not have passed, and now my son prefers Adele (to each their own), but I suddenly find myself in another singer-songwriter role as “The Jewbadour” for the Unorthodox podcast. Cohen, meanwhile, is releasing a new album this fall. The title track from You Want It Darker was also released today.

There, here, again I return to Leonard Cohen, the “little Jew who wrote the Bible.” “Hineni, Hineni, I’m ready, my Lord,” he sings now. As my aunt Debbie says, “You feel him in your kishkes.” And it’s true: Every time I hear him or even just read about him, I feel compelled to pick up my guitar. Mr. Cohen, I salute you and celebrate you. And if I may quote you from your most recent album Popular Problems, “You Got Me Singing!”

Jim Knable is a produced and published Off-Broadway playwright, a singer-songwriter and band leader of The Randy Bandits, and a writer of articles like these. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.

From Tablet magazine, September 21, 2016

 

All We Need Is Love—and Leonard Cohen

By: Liel Leibovitz

What does a man do? bears and dares;
and how does a little boy fare? He fares.

(“Mr. Pou & The Alphabet,” John Berryman)

I’m turning 40 in a few weeks. I wasn’t expecting it. Like most of us, I’ve spent a lifetime learning a vocabulary fit to describe only the thrusts and pleasures of youth. I have many words for hope. I have odes to future plans. And I have faith. But don’t ask me about my right knee—it creaks now like the floor of an old hotel—or about the dread I feel each night, watching my children sleep and knowing that I can’t protect them, not from everything, not forever. I’ve lived a hard and sobering life, but my failures still confound me, and, on certain cold nights, so do my desires. And my heart breaks too easily these days, weighed down by the darkness that creeps in from every crack in the culture. I don’t know the words to describe the path forward, mine and ours. Thank God my rabbi, Leonard Cohen, does.

He released a new album last week, his 14th. I won’t bother searching for the right adjectives to describe it; that would be dumb, like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the tallest mountain. It’s Cohen’s line, delivered in response to the news that his contemporary, Dylan, had just won the Nobel Prize. But Cohen could’ve easily been talking about himself: His new album is majestic, but its beauty gains nothing from description. Like a mountain, it is immediately and completely evident, inscrutable and inescapable. Like a mountain, it prompts a reckoning.

Which is not to suggest that the album is ominous. Its title may be You Want It Darker, but darkness has always found Cohen ambivalent; he may appreciate the purity of despair, but it has never been his drug. Unlike Dylan—for whom it’s never dark yet but always getting there—Cohen sees more layers to the night. His songbook is a manual for living with defeat, and its force has never been as moving or as clear as it is in the nine songs that make up his latest release.

Consider the following, from “Steer Your Way”:

Steer your path through the pain
that is far more real than you
That has smashed the Cosmic Model,
that has blinded every View
And please don’t make me go there,
though there be a God or not
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought

It’s about as elegant an expression of Jewish theology as we have ever received. In its infancy—as the late Rabbi Alan Lew notes in his wonderful book This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, a title of which Cohen, I imagine, would approve—the old religion had a rosy-eyed view of the world. Four things, the Babylonian Talmud teaches us, “will cause God to tear up the decree of judgment which has been issued against a person: acts of righteousness, fervent prayer, changing one’s name, and changing one’s behavior.” But if you’ve lived as long as Cohen has—he’s 82 now, just a kid with a crazy dream—you know that prayer and good deeds and all kinds of change aren’t enough and that sometimes the righteous, whatever their name may be, are struck down and suffer and die. Judaism realized this, too, eventually, which is why the liturgy came to offer an amended view of fate. The Unetaneh Tokef prayer, for example, which Cohen had translated into a transcendent song, tells us that “Teshuvah, prayer, and righteous deeds can transform the evil of the decree.”

Not, mind you, change it, let alone tear it up: Just transform it. Our best efforts at repentance and rebirth, Rabbi Lew wisely noted, “will not change what happens to us; rather, they will change us.” That is the essence—of Judaism, of growing older with grace, and of Cohen’s new album, an essential guide to both; it’s going to get darker, it always does, but that’s all the more reason to try harder, not an invitation to surrender.

There’s fight in every one of Cohen’s new songs, illuminated by the wisdom of his years but powered by a lust for life that is rare even in artists who are decades younger. “I was fighting with temptation / But I didn’t want to win,” he sings with an almost audible wink, “A man like me don’t like to see / Temptation caving in.” It’s an invigorating sentiment, reminding us that even our most glaring flaws are not without their secret joys, and that our missteps, too, eventually take us to where we need to be. We may love and lose, we may try and we may stumble, but we feel, and the more we do the more alive we are even as we slouch toward the great eternal rest. “I heard the snake was baffled by his sin,” he muses in one of the album’s finest expressions of this profound idea, “He shed his scales to find the snake within / but born again is born without a skin / The poison enters into everything.” Teshuvah, or return—to righteousness, to our true selves, to those we love—is often difficult, sometimes deadly, always essential. There’s simply no other way.

I have no idea if the Lord of Song consults the Hebrew calendar, but it can hardly be a coincidence that Cohen’s album was released during Sukkot, our most Cohenesque of holidays. Immediately following the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement, Sukkot instructs us in ritual, as Cohen does us in song, to rejoice in brokenness. We are commanded to leave our comfortable homes—a subtle reminder that they’re not as stable and sheltering as we’d like to think—and instead eat and sleep in a ramshackle structure that’s nothing if not a monument to impermanence. Having spent the Days of Awe in meditation and prayer, we begin the year with a physical reminder that all must and does pass, and that the best we can do with the time we are given is to knock down our walls and open our doors and our hearts.

It’s a radical notion for a culture like ours, so solipsistic and so sophomorically obsessed with unequivocal triumphs. But Cohen has always been there for us, our singing prophet, reminding us to bear and dare, asking us to steer our hearts not to higher ground, to some more perfect ideal, or even to God, but back into ourselves, and into the hearts of others, no matter how painful it may be. Like a magical mantra, his wisdom grows more powerful with each repetition, pulling us away from our distractions and into its light. With this perfect new album we may begin to transcend: All we need is love—and Leonard Cohen.

From Tablet magazine, October 28, 2016

 

Searching for Leonard Cohen

By: Frances Brent

“Tell us more about the gypsy pancake” has continued to be the refrain when I recount the story of finding Leonard Cohen in Vilnius, or rather, finding the recently completed life-size sculpture of Leonard Cohen standing under shoots of climbing vines in the cobblestoned courtyard of a Lithuanian restaurant in the old city quarter. The menu there includes selections with evocative names like “peasant’s dream”—a concoction of smoked sausage, potatoes, pickled vegetables, and ajika (an impossible-to-describe spicy sauce)—or “zeppelins,” blimp-shaped dumplings made with savory ground meat wrapped in pockets of shredded potatoes. We ordered the “gypsy pancake,” a plate-size potato pancake topped with sausages, sauerkraut, and a dollop of sour cream. It was a great success.

My husband is director of the YIVO Institute, which was headquartered in Vilnius before the war, and he travels there a few times a year for work. When I learned we would be going to Vilnius in the fall, I did some Googling. I was hoping on this trip to find something new for us to do together. The restored town center is a small architectural gem with neoclassical and Baroque buildings, towers, spires, and red tile roofs interspersed against patches of greenery. Pastel-colored buildings are painted in sugary yellows, pinks, and blues with brick and stucco as well as some palazzo-styled facades. But the charm is overlaid with lingering reminiscences of the Soviet period and, further back, the German occupation, the Vilna ghetto and the massacre at Ponary, where approximately 100,000 Polish and Lithuanian Jews were shot in the killing pits in the magnificent pine forest. During the last few years my husband’s work has involved directing conservation, digitization, and ultimately curation of an enormous collection of books and documents smuggled out of the original YIVO building by Jewish slave laborers in defiance of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. Many of the materials are prized by bibliophiles, like the unbound Midrash Tilim, published in Constantinople in 1512 (the oldest catalogued so far), while some of the archival materials are cursory, sketches or doodles on lined paper, jottings from random meetings that might have happened sometime in the middle of WWI. Taken together, they carry the fingerprints of much beauty and many horrors.

What came up while I was searching the internet was a series of articles about the Aug. 31 unveiling of a bronze statue of Leonard Cohen, designed by the beloved and recently deceased Lithuanian artist Romualdas (Romas) Kvintas, known throughout the country for his wonderfully humane public sculpture. This statue is “said to be the first in the world” of Cohen and was commissioned by John Afseth, a businessman from Oslo whose wife, Aušrinė Baronaitė, is Lithuanian. Kvintas died before he was able to complete the project and it was finished by a gifted younger artist, Marynas Gaubas. For the past six years, Afseth has invited friends and family to celebrate his wife’s birthday at a restaurant in Vilnius, but this year the event also honored the inauguration of the statue that was situated there. The mayor of Vilnius and his wife spoke at the opening ceremony and 150 people took part in festivities where the Four Winds Quartet performed Cohen’s songs “in the Jewish tradition” and the Django Reinhardt Band played good dance music. News about the event included statements from city dignitaries like the head of the Old Town Renewal Agency who said, “What an amazing inspiration for us, for the city, for the capital of the country where the Cohen family originated! What an honor it is, for us.” Over the years, Cohen gave concerts throughout Eastern and Central Europe; although he was a Litvak, he didn‘t cross the border into Lithuania during his lifetime. His maternal grandfather had been a scholar-rabbi in Kovno before he emigrated in 1923, first to England and then to Canada and the United States. His great-grandfather on his father’s side had also come from Lithuania, arriving in the 1860s in Montreal, where he became head of a brass foundry and a dredging company, as well as president of the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in Canada.

For a long time, I associated Leonard Cohen with a place that seemed as far from Lithuania as any spot on the planet. I heard his first album in 1968 when I was a freshman at a women’s college in Baltimore. Though this wasn’t the Chelsea Hotel, we were staking out our claim to dreamy anguish in our doubles or singles where you could find beaded curtains and yards of Indian paisley draped over unmade beds. Incense mingled with the fetid, musty smells of the dorm rooms. With the hall doors open, we could hear one another’s stereos playing all hours of night or day. Interludes of Cohen’s tinny, slightly strained, and magnetically sensual voice seemed to run in a spool as “Suzanne,” “The Stranger Song,” “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” were markers of the narrative we were constructing for ourselves. This was the era of Vietnam and the Age of Aquarius and we thought we were unique, though we weren’t, in our difference. When Cohen sang, “For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind,” he was describing a kind of love we didn’t think our parents, who had married in the late 1940s, after the Depression and the war, could have imagined. This was the essential enterprise of our education and, four years later, an enigmatic and elegiac excerpt from Cohen’s Spice Box of Earth, served as the epigraph for our yearbook. As Cohen aged, it took time to adjust to changes in his music. He acquired a style that was neither folk rock nor Velvet Underground but more like an acid-laced Jacques Brel or Serge Gainsbourg. His voice became darker and lower and, to my mind, reminiscent of the Jewish Tin Pan Alley performers from my grandparents’ generation. I loved how he sang “Famous Blue Raincoat” where you could hear the hesitation as he reached for the higher notes and when he made a rumbling sound in the lowest register of “Bird on a Wire.” From internet images, I could see it was this later version of Cohen that the sculptor Romualdas Kvintas chose to honor, the old soul or aging troubadour in his low-brimmed fedora, wearing a slightly too-large jacket with stylish wide lapels. I was determined that we would find it, though none of the articles provided a precise address.

Much to my disappointment, when we got to Vilnius, I discovered that not even the concierge of our hotel knew the whereabouts of the statue of Leonard Cohen. He’d heard about it, he loved the music, of course, but had no idea how to find the restaurant with the garden. Nonetheless, Vilnius is a small city and I reassured myself that as we had plenty of appointments scheduled during the next few days, someone would be able to show us the way. As a matter of fact, after our first meeting on Basanavičiaus Street, we stopped to see the lovely little sculpture Kvintas made of the Jewish writer Romain Gary, who was born in Vilnius in 1914 and lived on Basanavičiaus for most of his childhood. The sculpture is a poetic homage to the lovesick little boy described in Promise at Dawn who boasted that he had eaten his rain-shoe to prove his devotion to a girl named Valentine. On the day we were there, someone had slipped a small bouquet of roses into an opening between the boy’s bronze tunic and the torn shoe he held at his heart, turning the sculpture into a shrine, honoring the equilibrium between tender vulnerability and swagger.

A pattern had developed as we visited several government ministries, libraries, as well as the University of Vilnius. I’d cautiously ask friends: Did anyone know about the statue of Leonard Cohen? Yes, they’d happily nod and, yes, they’d read about the unveiling. They loved Leonard Cohen’s music. They intended to see the statue themselves. No one knew how to find the restaurant with the courtyard though some of them added more information to the story: While the mayor of Vilnius was supportive of the project, he hadn’t secured a permanent spot for the statue at the time of the unveiling; that was why it was currently in the courtyard of a restaurant. Apparently, John Afseth had great plans for public monuments in Vilnius. When he commissioned the work, he was interested in adding Cohen to the city’s statues of rock stars Frank Zappa and John Lennon. Ultimately, he hoped to commission “up to 10 sculptures in different formats and art styles by different artists” with another prominent and easy-to-guess Litvak—Bob Dylan—on the list. That’s one of his “crazy ideas,” to make Vilnius the rock ’n’ roll capital of Europe.

At the Wroblewskis Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences there was a small exhibition of the YIVO documents that have only recently been discovered after 70 years in hiding. The vitrines contained a variety of papers including a handwritten letter about the charity and kindness of Dr. Tsemakh Shabad from one of his patients in 1915, and the ledger book from the Pediatric Department of the Vilnius Jewish Children’s and Women’s hospital which Shabad had helped to establish. Shabad, who was born in Vilnius in 1864, was one of the founders of YIVO and Korney Chukovsky used him as a model for Doctor Aibolit (Ouch!), who compassionately treats animals in his children’s stories. Kvintas designed a famous monument to the doctor not far from the library. Almost at ground level—down to earth—he has the doctor standing with a cane while he gently reaches to touch the shoulder of a little girl who’s brought him a cat to cure. It was Kvintas’ artistry to measure details of the mundane—the large circular buttons on Dr. Shabad’s double-breasted overcoat, the puckers of his trousers, and the crisscrossing of shoelaces—against an abstracted roundedness, softening the nature of his material, so the bronze is breathing.

One afternoon, with a little time on our hands, we meandered without a plan. Even though it was September and overcast, some of the city squares had been newly planted with garden pansies and colors popped against the pale coated plaster and brick of the exterior walls. When we got to the Old Town area and the winding streets narrowed, I couldn’t help thinking about the jagged cobblestones Chaim Grade describes in My Mother’s Sabbath Days or the wagonloads of apples and frozen geese that were carted past similar craggy rowhouses. Suddenly the spell broke and we saw, in large uppercase letters, the following words from Book of Longing: “You go your way, I’ll go your way, too—Leonard Cohen.” Karma or coincidence, we were staring at a chalkboard to the side of the wide-open doors of an English language bookstore and “So Long, Marianne” was playing on a soundtrack inside. Of course, we went in and asked our usual questions. Two women working the bookshop, Sisters of Mercy, as I think of them, directed us in inflected English toward St. Anne’s Church and then 6 Šv. Mykolo, the restaurant where the statue was being given sanctuary.

Underneath overhanging vines in the courtyard garden, the figure of Leonard Cohen stands a little more than life-size, 183 centimeters tall. Upright, reed-thin, eyes squinting, hands clenched, feet toed-in, the metalwork shows imperfections of skin surface, the rumples in the sleeve of his coat jacket, a man who knows everything and nothing, who struggled in the beginning with his “stone ear,” with breath, with carrying a tune, with intimacy, depression and madness and continued struggling to the end with detachment, pain, and emptiness. Book of Longing is a beautiful title. It seems that longing and mourning were continuously rearranging in Cohen’s mind and the unstable valence corresponds to the delicate and changeable nature of the city where his monument will reside, a place that was once home to so many Jews and now houses so few. I’ve been told there will be a second unveiling sometime during the next year, when it will find its place “more or less across the street from the synagogue.” Perhaps Cohen’s presence also mitigates against some of the sadness that permeates the place. We decided to think about it over a glass of wine, and that’s when we ordered the gypsy pancake.

Frances Brent’s most recent book is The Lost Cellos of Lev Aronson.

 

From Tablet magazine, December 10, 2019