Various Positions (2 page)

Until 1950, Cohen had the small back bedroom that faced the park. When Cohen’s mother Masha remarried in 1950 and a stepdaughter joined the family, Cohen gave up his small room and moved into what had once been the library. The room still contains his bed, dresser, two walls of crammed bookcases, and a desk facing the side window.

On the walls are a portrait of his father and photographs of Cohen and his sister Esther in their graduation robes from McGill. There is also one of Cohen praying in
tallit
(prayer shawl) and
tefillin
(symbolic representations of the commandments, actually leather straps attached to two small boxes containing portions of the Torah and worn at daily prayer) at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Leather sets of Chaucer, Milton, Byron, Scott, Longfellow, Wordsworth, and Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury
sit on the bookshelves. The books were given to his father for his bar mitzvah and inherited by the son. The
Daily Prayer Book
of the United Hebrew Congregations, given to his mother, rests on the top shelf of one bookcase, alongside
Ozar Taamei Hazal, Thesaurus of Talmudical Interpretations
, a seven-hundred-page volume compiled by Cohen’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein.

There are poems by A.M. Klein,
Canadian Constitutional Law
by Bora Laskin, the
Writers Market 1957, The Criminal Code of Canada, 1953–54
, the collected poems of Marianne Moore,
Harmonium
by Wallace Stevens, the collected shorter poems of Auden,
A History of Sexual Customs
by Richard Lewinsohn, and
Torture of the Christian Martyrs
by A.R. Allinson, as well as Matthew Arnold’s poems, Scott’s
The Lady of the Lake
, Whitman’s
Poems, Poems
by Robert Louis Stevenson,
Memoirs of Napoleon
, and, in white leather, Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. Some of Cohen’s diverse influences and budding ambitions are glimpsed, including his early interest in becoming a lawyer.

There is also a portrait of Cohen’s father Nathan that reveals a well-dressed, serious looking man with slicked-back hair, a groomed moustache, and large, penetrating eyes. Known in the family as Nat, he affected Edwardian attire and in the picture wears an English suit with “
all the English reticence that can be woven into the cloth.” The portrait suggests nothing of his disability or poor health, the result of the war. He looks solid and middle class. But he had high blood pressure and would
become flushed when angry, which was often. His sense of foreboding was great, and Edgar Cohen, Leonard Cohen’s second cousin, twenty years his senior, recalled that once in synagogue, Nathan Cohen turned around and said to him, “
My son, Leonard, I’ll never see his bar mitzvah.” He was right. Another time, when the youthful Cohen mistakenly recited the
Kaddish
, the prayer for the dead, instead of the
Kiddush
, the blessing over wine at the dinner table, his father did not interrupt him but with resignation murmured, “
Let him go on; he will have to say it soon enough.”

Nathan Cohen was trained as an engineer, but played an important role in the family’s clothing manufacturing business. Cohen admired him, but within the Cohen family, Nathan was, in Cohen’s words, “
the persecuted brother, the near-poet, the innocent of machine toys, the sighing judge who listens but does not sentence.” When he died, he threw the stable life of the family into turmoil: “
He died ripe for myths and revenge, survived by a son who already believed in destiny-election. He died spitting blood, wondering why he wasn’t president of the synagogue. One of the last things he said to his wife was: ‘You should have married an Ambassador.’”

A photograph of Cohen’s mother and father in a garden shows a smiling woman in an elegant dress, slightly taller than her husband. Husband and wife stare proudly at the camera, the mother with an inquisitive, suspicious glance, the father with a more imposing, slightly rigid demeanor. Nathan looks dapper with a cigar, boutonniere, and spats. They were married in 1927.

Cohen’s mother was of Russian descent and exemplified the national character: by turns melancholic, emotional, romantic, and vital. Suzanne Elrod, the mother of Cohen’s two children, remembers her as Cohen’s “
most dreamy spiritual influence.” According to Masha’s stepdaughter Roz Van Zaig, Masha “
had the flair to be bohemian.” She was quite musical and often sang European folksongs in Russian and Yiddish around the house. When her son learned to play the guitar, she sang with him in a magnificent contralto voice. She was dramatic and heavyset, with a flair for cooking. Masha’s personality initially clashed with the quiet formality of the Cohens. Her English was poor and she always spoke in a deep voice with a Russian accent; some Cohens thought that
Nathan had married beneath him. She had trained as a nurse and her caring manner, essential for her physically ailing husband, soon made her acceptable to the larger family. Her zestful behavior, however, unsettled some of the more demure aunts and uncles.

————

THE ARRIVAL
of Lazarus Cohen to rural Ontario in 1869 followed the arc of nineteenth-century Jewish immigration to Canada. He established himself in Maberly and after two years sent for his family who were still living in what was then Lithuania. By 1883, he had moved to Montreal, where his son had been going for religious training and where Jewish settlement was expanding. Lazarus was from a devout and scholarly family, a rabbi who reinvented himself as a businessman in the new world. His younger brother Hirsch was also a rabbi and later became the Chief Rabbi of Canada, celebrated for his powerful, rumbling, resonant voice, perhaps the source of Cohen’s own unique sound. Lazarus proved to have a talent for business and in 1895, after he had moved to Montreal, became president of W.R. Cuthbert & Company, brass founders who, between 1896 and 1906, formed the first Jewish dredging firm in Canada. They had a fleet of dredges and a government contract to deepen almost every tributary of the St. Lawrence River between Lake Ontario and Quebec.

Lazarus was intensely involved in the Jewish community and in 1893 visited Palestine on behalf of a Jewish settlement group, the first direct contact by Canadian Jews with their homeland. He also became chairman of the Jewish Colonisation Committee of the Baron de Hirsch Institute, which had been organized to settle Jewish immigrants in Western Canada. In 1896 he became president of Shaar Hashomayim Congregation, a post he held until 1902. He wore a flowing white beard, favored cultured English to Yiddish, and spoke with a slight Scottish brogue, since he had first settled in the county of Glengarry before coming to Canada. He died on November 29, 1914, at age seventy, two weeks after he had been re-elected president of his synagogue. He was eulogized for being conversant with both the Talmud
and English literature and for harmonizing the ancient traditions with modern culture.

In 1891 Lyon Cohen, eldest son of Lazarus, married Rachel Friedman and they had four children: Nathan, Horace, Lawrence, and Sylvia. Like his father, Lyon contributed to the foundation of Canadian Jewish life in Montreal. With Samuel William Jacobs, he began the first Jewish paper in Canada,
The Jewish Times
. In 1904, at only age thirty-five, he was elected president of Shaar Hashomayim, the largest and most prominent congregation in Canada. He was also a member of the Board of Governors of the Baron de Hirsch Institute of Montreal and became president of the institute in 1908. He transformed its building into the first active Jewish Community Centre of Montreal and established the first Hebrew Free Loan Society and the Mount Sinai Sanatorium in Ste-Agathe. In 1922 he became chairman of the Montreal Jewish Community Council, which he had helped to found. He was an “uptown” English-speaking Jew from Westmount, a stark contrast to the Yiddish-speaking “downtown Jews” of St-Lawrence and St-Urbain streets.

In 1900, Montreal was populated mostly by francophones but controlled largely by anglophones. Two thirds of the population was French, concentrated east of St. Lawrence Boulevard or “The Main,” as it is called. The English lived on the west side of the city, in the mansions of the Golden Square Mile, in Westmount, and in the working class Irish ghetto, Griffintown. Jewish settlement was concentrated along The Main, the dividing line between English and French, the conciliatory geographic division of the two solitudes. St-Urbain was the enclave’s western border, and it ran east to St. Denis, south to Craig and north to Duluth. Jewish immigration became significant only near the end of the nineteenth century; the number of Jews in Montreal more than quadrupled from roughly 16,400 in 1901 to 74,564 in 1911. Most remained traders, commission agents, or manufacturers.

Lazarus Cohen eschewed the traditional demographics and eventually settled in Westmount. The stone houses reflected those of Mayfair or Belgravia, incorporating Tudor, Gothic, and Rennaisance designs on the same block, occasionally in the same house. It was architecturally, geographically, and spiritually removed from francophone Montreal, from what would later be termed the French Fact.

In
The Favorite Game
, Cohen underscores the insularity of Westmount by contrasting it with the immigrant character of Montreal and the way the city constantly reminded its inhabitants of their past. The city he writes, perpetuates a “
past that happened somewhere else”:

————

LYON COHEN
strongly believed that a knowledge of Jewish history was necessary for self-respect, a belief passed on to his son Nathan and grandson Leonard. Knowledge of the Torah was indispensable, and performing
mitzvot
(good deeds) was essential. Aristocratic and urbane, conciliatory yet pragmatic, Lyon Cohen was a formidable presence in local Jewish life, particularly in the war effort.

Lyon devoted himself to the recruitment of Jewish men for the armed services and saw two of his own sons, Nathan and Horace, go off to fight in the Royal Montreal Regiment (the third, Lawrence, did not). He was president of a new, national relief body which sent aid to European Jews who had been victimized by the pogroms and he became chairman of the National Executive Committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress, inaugurated in March 1919 in Montreal. His home on Rose-mount Avenue contained books of Jewish learning and proudly displayed a Star of David on the front. He frequently entertained Jewish leaders like Chaim Weizmann, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and Solomon Schecter. In addition to being scholarly, Lyon was a bit of a dandy; he used an expensive cane, always dressed in the finest suits, and lived comfortably with the assistance of servants.

In 1906 he organized the Freedman Company, a wholesale clothing
manufacturer, and it became the major business of his sons Nathan and Horace (Lawrence would operate W.R. Cuthbert, a brass and plumbing foundry, taking over from their uncle, Abraham Cohen, who died prematurely at fifty-seven). In the late fifties, Lyon’s grandson Leonard briefly worked at the foundry and in the shipping department of the Freedman Company. In 1919, Lyon organized and became president of the Canadian Export Clothiers Ltd.; later he became president of the Clothing Manufacturers Association of Montreal and a director of the Montreal Life Insurance Company. He was to be presented to the Pope during a European trip in 1924, but the day before the scheduled meeting he had a heart attack. He was taken to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where he recovered. He died on August 15, 1937 and one of the pall bearers at the funeral was liquor magnate Samuel Bronfman. Leonard Cohen was three years old.

Leonard’s maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein, was a rabbinic scholar. He was known as
Sar ha Dikdook
, the Prince of Grammarians, for writing an encyclopedic guidebook to talmudic interpretations,
A Treasury of Rabbinic Interpretations
, and a dictionary of synonyms and homonyms,
Lexicon of Hebrew Homonyms
, praised by the poet A.M. Klein. Rabbi Klein was something of a confrontational teacher, noted for his disputations.

A disciple of Yitzhak Elchanan, a great rabbinic teacher, Rabbi Klein was born in Lithuania, and became the principal of a yeshiva in Kovno. He and his family escaped the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, fleeing first to England and then emigrating to Canada in 1923. He first stayed in Halifax, and then moved to Montreal, where he had been corresponding with Lyon Cohen about resettlement. A friendship with the Cohen family led to the marriage in 1927 of his daughter Masha and Lyon’s son Nathan.

Rabbi Klein made lengthy visits to Atlanta, Georgia, to be with his other daughter Manya, who had married into the Alexander family of Georgia. He found the trips stressful because there were few Jews in the South to share life with, although the Alexander family retained its orthodox practices, to the point of having their black servants wear skullcaps. Their large ante-bellum mansion on Peachtree Street became an unusual expression of Conservative Jewish life in Atlanta. It was
presided over by Manya, who spoke English with a Russian accent highlighted by a southern drawl.

Rabbi Klein finally settled in New York where he became part of the crowd of European Jewish intellectuals centered at
The Forward
, the leading Yiddish paper in America, with contributors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer. But grammatical and talmudic studies absorbed Rabbi Klein, and he spent most of his time in study at the synagogue or in the library. He often visited his daughter Masha in Montreal and came to live with the family for about a year in the early fifties. Young Cohen would often sit with the “rebbe” and study the Book of Isaiah. Already quite elderly, the rabbi would read a passage with Cohen, explain it in a combination of English and Yiddish, nod off, then suddenly awake and repeat himself. “
He’d read it again with all the freshness of the first reading and he’d begin the explanation over again, so sometimes the whole evening would be spent on one or two lines,” Cohen recalled. “
He swam in it so he could never leave it. He happened to be in a kind of confrontational, belligerent stance regarding the rabbinical vision.”