Brief video: https://youtu.be/yMi56EzreL4

Leonard Norman Cohen was born into a prominent Orthodox Jewish family in Montreal in 1934. His Lithuanian Jewish mother, Marsha Klonitsky, immigrated to Canada in 1927. His paternal grandfather, Lyon Cohen, who had emigrated from Poland to Canada was the founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His father, Nathan, was a clothing store owner and died when Leonard was nine.

His parents gave him the Hebrew name Eliezer, which means “God helps”. He said “I had a very Messianic childhood. I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest.” His family were members of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, to which Cohen retained connections for the rest of his life.

During his high school years he taught himself to play the acoustic guitar and formed a country–folk group that he called the Buckskin Boys. He later switched to classical guitar. He has attributed his love of music to how moved he was by his mother’s singing.

Cohen attended McGill University, and his literary influences were Yeats, Whitman, Lorca, Henry Miller, the Beat Generation writers of the United States, and Irving Layton, who was Cohen’s mentor and friend. Lou Marinoff also attended poetry workshops given by Layton, and describes the Montreal ethos from which Cohen emerged:

“As an ex-Montrealer, let me take you back in time. Being Jewish in Montreal in Cohen’s day meant commuting between the “Two Solitudes” of Canada’s founding families, the French and the British. While they inhabited mutually exclusive worlds, Jewish people moved in both. It was two Solitudes to them, but one Diaspora to us. Jews hired French-Canadian workers for their urban businesses, while Roman Catholic priests defamed us from the pulpits as Christ-killers. The usual story. Jews were welcomed by tolerant WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), but we encountered hereditary anti-Semitisms among rougher social strata and upper-crust Anglicans alike. So what else is new? Well, maybe this: Cohen’s literary work was forged in the crucible of Quebec, and epitomizes yet a “Third Solitude”: Jewish Montrealers. We were simultaneously accepted and rejected by various segments of the other Two Solitudes, yet we amicably and symbiotically engaged with both in a complex ménage-à-trois. This unique ethos launched poets Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, author Mordecai Richler, with Star Trek Captain William Shatner at the helm, into stellar acclaim. They were not only our mentors, heroes and idols: they were also kids from next door, boys from the hood, lantzsmen who hit the big time. And Leonard Cohen was the “poet laureate” of our generation.”

Cohen began publishing poetry in small literary journals before releasing his first collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies at age 22. The poems invoke biblical stories, Greek myth, and contemporary anxieties combining religious imagery with eroticism, mythic allusions, and existential doubt.

Cohen then spent one term attending the McGill Faculty of Law and then a year at Columbia University. He abandoned graduate school and returned to Montreal in 1957 where he worked at various odd jobs and focused on writing fiction and poetry.

Cohen’s second poetry collection, The Spice-Box of Earth from 1961, solidified his reputation as one of Canada’s emerging young poets. The spice box is a Jewish ritual object used in Havdalah, the ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath, but Cohen also uses it as a metaphor for erotic fragrance and memory. The poems are both mystical and grounded, tender and ironic. They convey Cohen’s lifelong preoccupation with how physical desire and spiritual yearning overlap. The poems address love and relationships with reverence and cynicism, delving into themes of betrayal, isolation, and the weight of history. His poetry is immersed in the human condition, finding beauty in brokenness and light in the shadows.

It helped expand the audience for Cohen’s poetry and helped him gain critical recognition as an important new voice among Canadian poets, mixing personal confession with biblical myth.

Cohen continued to write poetry and fiction throughout the 1960s and lived a quiet life after buying a house on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960. While there he published the semi-autobiographical novel The Favorite Game in 1963 and a collection of poems entitled Flowers for Hitler in 1964, which deal with the aftermath of World War II, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the disturbing reality of human cruelty. Cohen confronted the devastations of history while attempting to find beauty in the wreckage. The poetry including its title was a provocative statement, showing Cohen unafraid to explore the uncomfortable truths of his time.

In 1965 Cohen was the subject of a 44-minute documentary called “Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen.”

His second novel, “Beautiful Losers” from 1966 is a milestone of Canadian avant-garde literature. It is a far more ambitious and experimental work, exploring spiritual decay and the search for transcendent experience. It’s about Canadian history, colonialism, religious mysticism, and sexual obsession. It attracted a lot of press because of a number of sexually graphic passages. The novel’s audacious look at human frailty alienated some readers and earned Cohen a cult following.

It is sexually explicit and politically provocative. It takes on historical figures, myth, sexuality, mysticism, and politics. Some critics dismissed it as incoherent excess while others hailed it as groundbreaking. The novel explores how erotic energy, religious devotion, and historical trauma intersect. It displayed Cohen at his most fearless, unconcerned with commercial accessibility.

After Beautiful Losers, Cohen returned to poetry.

Many of his songs are about the tension between the sacred and the profane, love and betrayal, despair and hope. It is impossible to separate Cohen the poet/novelist from Cohen the songwriter; each feeds into the other.

In 1966 he wrote “Suzanne”, which was recorded by Judy Collins on her album In My Life. It became a hit for Judy Collins, who subsequently recorded a number of Cohen’s other songs.  For many years “Suzanne” was his most recorded song. Collins recalls that when she first met him, he said he could not sing or play the guitar, nor did he think “Suzanne” was even a song: “People think Leonard is dark, but actually his sense of humour and his edge on the world is extremely light.”

Cohen stated that he was tricked into giving up the rights for Suzanne, but was glad it happened because “it would be wrong to write a song that was so well loved and to get rich for it also.” In 1967, disappointed with his lack of success as a writer, Cohen moved to the United States to pursue a career as a folk music singer–songwriter. In Cohen’s transition from literature to music he began to see his poems as lyrics and realized he could reach a wider audience. Like “Suzanne”, many of his most famous songs were originally poems. For example, in the tearful yet hopeful farewell to a former lover, titled “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”.

Cohen’s first album was Songs of Leonard Cohen. The album was released in the US in late 1967 to generally dismissive reviews, but became an immediate success among avid listeners to Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and other 1960s icons.

Cohen lived on Hydra with Marianne Ihlen, with whom he was in a relationship for most of the 1960s. The song “So Long, Marianne” was written to and about her. He would never stop singing it during decades of performances.

Cohen’s prodigious love affairs engendered both poetry and progeny. The song Chelsea Hotel was inspired by a brief relationship Cohen had with Janis Joplin while staying at the hotel in 1968. Cohen also had well-known relationships with Joni Mitchell and  actress Rebecca De Mornay. In the 1970s, Cohen was in a relationship with the photographic artist Suzanne Elrod. Their relationship produced two children: a son, Adam, and a daughter, Lorca, named after the Spanish poet. Adam is a singer–songwriter and the lead singer of pop-rock band Low Millions, and Lorca is a photographer. Cohen also had three grandchildren.

In the 1980s Cohen was in a relationship with French photographer Dominique Issermann.

His second album was Songs from a Room in 1969, featuring the often-recorded “Bird on the Wire”, Songs of Love and Hate in 1971, and New Skin for the Old Ceremony from 1974.

In 1971, film director Robert Altman featured the songs “The Stranger Song”, “Winter Lady”, and “Sisters of Mercy”, in the movie McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

In the poetry collection The Energy of Slaves from 1972 he reflected on disillusionment and the constraints of freedom. A film about his 1972 tour of Europe and Israel is also entitled ‘Bird on a Wire’.

In 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, Cohen arrived in Israel. He went to Sinai to sing for Israeli soldiers. Even though he reportedly voiced “pro-Arab political views” before the war, he said after the war, “I am joining my brothers fighting in the desert. I don’t care if their war is just or not. I know only that war is cruel, that it leaves bones, blood and ugly stains on the holy soil.” In Sinai, Cohen was introduced to the Major General Ariel Sharon, future Prime Minister of Israel. Cohen later described the improvised concerts:

“We would just drop into little places, like a rocket site and they would shine their flashlights at us and we would sing a few songs. Or they would give us a jeep and we would go down the road towards the front and wherever we saw a few soldiers waiting for a helicopter we would sing a few songs. And maybe back at the airbase we would do a little concert. It was very intense.”

Deeply moved by encounters with Israeli and Arab soldiers, he left the country to write “Lover Lover Lover”. This song has been interpreted as a personal renunciation of armed conflict, and ends with the hope his song will serve the listener as a shield against the enemy. “‘Lover, Lover, Lover’ was born over there; the whole world has its eyes riveted on this tragic and complex conflict.”

In April 2022, author and journalist Matti Friedman published Who By Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen. It’s about Cohen’s 1973 tour to the front lines of the Yom Kippur War, and has inspired a TV miniseries.

In 1974, Cohen released a new album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, with songs inspired by the war. “Lover Lover Lover” was written and performed in Sinai.” Who By Fire”, reflecting on the war, takes its name from the Yom Kippur prayer the Unetaneh Tokef, Let us proclaim the awesome sanctity of this day. Other songs inspired by the war are “Field Commander Cohen” and “There is a War”.

In 1976, Cohen made a European tour giving 55 performances, including his first appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

In 1978, he published a book of poetry titled Death of a Lady’s Man and in 1984 Cohen published Book of Mercy, for which he won the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Poetry. The book contains 50 prose-poems, influenced by the Hebrew Bible and Zen writings. Cohen referred to the poems as “prayers” and are often likened to modern psalms: spiritual, intimate, and explicit about longing, doubt, and redemption.

In 1979, Cohen’s album Recent Songs was released, which blended his acoustic style with jazz and East Asian and Mediterranean influences featuring instruments like the oud, the Gypsy violin, and the mandolin. An album of performances from this tour is entitled Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979.

In the early 1980s, Cohen co-wrote the rock musical film Night Magic filmed in Montreal.

The song ‘Hallelujah’ was first released in 1984 on Cohen’s album Various Positions and he sang it during his European tour in 1985. At first it had limited success but it became more popular through a 1991 cover by John Cale, and a later cover by Jeff Buckley. “Hallelujah” has been performed by almost 200 artists in various languages. The song is the subject of the 2012 book The Holy or the Broken and the documentary Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song. Cohen spent years struggling with it and it eventually became “one of the most haunting, and often performed songs in American musical history”. We’re saving it for our “grand finale.”

In 1985 he gave a series of highly emotional and politically controversial concerts in Poland, including the song “The Partisan”, regarded as the hymn of the Polish Solidarity movement.

In 1985 the song “Everybody Knows” from I’m Your Man and “If It Be Your Will” in the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume helped expose Cohen’s music to a wider audience. The song “Everybody Knows” also featured prominently in the 1994 film Exotica.

In 1992, Cohen released The Future, which urges perseverance, reformation, and hope.  Three tracks from the album were featured in the movie Natural Born Killers, which promoted Cohen’s work to younger generations. It is influenced by political and social unrest, the title track being a response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The title track of The Future includes the line: “I’ve seen the nations rise and fall/ … / But love’s the only engine of survival.”

His most enigmatic excursion into politics is titled “First We Take Manhattan”. Cohen emphasized that it was not an endorsement of physical violence but rather an “artistic provocation”, exploring the mindset of someone with an unyielding and uncompromising view of the world that reveals Cohen’s mixture of politics with psychedelics.

In 1993 Cohen published Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, and in 2006, after 10 years of delays, additions, and rewritings, he published Book of Longing, dedicated to the poet Irving Layton. It reveals Cohen’s mythic, erotic, spiritual, and self-scrutinizing voice through meditations on aging, mortality, and memory.

Perhaps his most powerful poem of 1993 was “Dance Me to the End of Love”. At first blush a romantic song, it was a response to the Holocaust, specifically to the stories of Jews being forced to play classical music in the camps as they marched to their deaths. The “burning violin” in the lyrics is a reference to the immense suffering and destruction of the time. Its “official video” has received more than 197 million views!

In 1994, Cohen retreated to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles for five years of seclusion and in 1996 was ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk. Cohen was a Sabbath-observing Jew. When asked how he squared that faith with Zen, he replied ‘In the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship to a deity. So theologically there is no challenge to any Jewish belief.'”

Cohen showed an interest in Jesus as a universal figure, saying, “I’m very fond of Jesus Christ. He may be the most beautiful guy who walked the face of this earth. Any guy who says ‘Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek’ has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness, a man who declared himself to stand among the thieves, the prostitutes and the homeless. His position cannot be comprehended. It is an inhuman generosity. I’m not trying to alter the Jewish view of Jesus Christ. But to me, in spite of what I know about the history of Christianity, the figure of the man has touched me. I very much feel part of the tradition of Judaism and I practice that and my children practice it, so that was never in question. The investigations that I’ve done into other spiritual systems have certainly illuminated and enriched my understanding of my own tradition.”

In addition to Mount Baldy, Cohen went back and forth to and from India several times, where he became immersed in the Advaita (or non-duality) tradition of meditation.

The release in 2001 of his album Ten New Songs, was a major hit in Canada and Europe and won Cohen four Canadian Juno Awards.

In October 2004, Cohen released Dear Heather, largely a musical collaboration with his romantic partner Anjani Thomas. He said in a number of interviews that his depression had lifted in recent years, which he attributed to Zen Buddhism. His kindness shone through his demons, and psychedelics helped transform his depression into creativity.

Cohen contributed to other artists’ albums including those of U2, Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, and Judy Collins

Kelley Lynch was Cohen’s longtime business manager and was a close family friend. In 2005 Cohen discovered that she had sold his publishing rights and had stolen most of the money in his accounts including money from his retirement accounts and charitable trust funds. Cohen unsuccessfully sued Lynch, though she was jailed for 18 months and given five years’ probation for harassing Cohen after he dismissed her.

In 2006 Cohen published Book of Longing, a book of poetry and drawings, which quickly topped bestseller lists in Canada. Philip Glass composed music for Book of Longing. It was written during his years at a Zen monastery, and is tinged with self-deprecation, combining spiritual reflection with playfulness.

In 2008, to recoup the money his ex-manager had stolen, Cohen embarked on his first world tour in 15 years. Cohen said: “It was a most fortunate happenstance because I was able to connect with living musicians. And I think it warmed some part of my heart that had taken on a chill.”

In March 2009, Cohen released Live in London, his first official DVD, followed in 2010 by Songs from the Road, a live CD/DVD album from his 2008 and 2009 live performances.

At his concert in Ramat Gan in 2009, Cohen offered Jewish prayers and blessings to the audience in Hebrew. He opened the show with the first sentence of Ma Tovu, How good, in which the non-Jewish prophet Balaam is inspired to bless the Israelites instead of cursing them. At the middle, he used Baruch Hashem, Blessed is God, and he ended the concert reciting the blessing of Birkat Kohanim, the priestly blessing asking for God’s blessing, protection, grace, and peace upon the people.

His final concert was in 2013 in New Zealand.

Bob Dylan described Cohen as the ‘number one’ songwriter of their time. “When people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius. Even the counterpoint lines give a celestial character and melodic lift to his songs. No one else comes close to this in modern music. I like all of Leonard’s songs, early or late. They make you think & feel. I like some of his later songs even better than his early ones. Yet there’s a simplicity to his early ones that I like, too. He’s very much a descendant of Irving Berlin. Both of them just hear melodies that most of us can only strive for. Both Leonard & Berlin are incredibly crafty. Leonard particularly uses chord progressions that are classical in shape. He is a much more savvy musician than you’d think.”

Dylan was not the only mega-star to be enamored of Cohen. John Lennon traveled to Hydra to visit Cohen, and so did Donovan Leitch.

In the final years of his life he released three albums: Old Ideas from 2012, which became his highest charting album, Popular Problems in 2014, and You Want It Darker from 2016, the last of which was released three weeks before his death. His fifteenth studio album, Thanks for the Dance, was released 3 years later. And his poetry collection The Flame, which he had been working on at the time of his death, appeared posthumously in 2018.

Cohen died in his Los Angeles home in 2016 from leukemia at age 82. He had fallen that evening, and he subsequently died in his sleep. According to his wishes, Cohen was laid to rest in Montreal with a Jewish rite.

Within a month, the city of Montreal held a tribute concert to Cohen. Two murals were created in Montreal the following summer, and in 2017 an interactive exhibit was created, which toured internationally. There is a bronze statue of Cohen in Vilnius, Lithuania. A species of spiders from Iran and a species of weevils from South Africa are named after him.

A TV series So Long, Marianne, is based on Cohen’s relationship with Marianne Ihlen, and several documentaries have been made about him.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was named a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor. He was a recipient of the Glenn Gould Prize, received Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for literature, and was named a Companion of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor.

Cohen consistently explored the entanglement of physical desire with spiritual longing. A lifelong student of Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism, Cohen wove religious imagery into his work to grapple with human suffering and hope.

Yet there is also undying love. He continued to sing So Long Marianne into his last days. In 2016, Marianne Ihlen died of leukemia three months and nine days before Cohen. His farewell letter to her was read at her funeral:

“Dearest Marianne,

I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand. This old body has given up, just as yours has too.

I’ve never forgotten your love and your beauty. But you know that. I don’t have to say any more. Safe travels old friend. See you down the road. Endless love and gratitude.

— your Leonard”

In 2006, Lou Marinoff was invited to contribute the entry for Leonard Cohen in the Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature. Here is part of what he wrote:

“Leonard Cohen is best-known and most admired for his poems and songs. These are not strictly separable, since many of his songs—most famously Suzanne—are poems set to music. Like his novels, Cohen’s poetry is flush with the dialectic of love and the antics of sex. It also abounds with misplaced religious imagery, sadomasochistic allusion, and post-Holocaust defiance. Hence one encounters crucifixes without worship, razor blades without shaving, and Flowers for Hitler without condolences. Cohen has made his reputation first and last as a poet. While his novels are centered in Montreal, and are arguably best-understood by Montrealers, his poems are universal in their desire for desire, love of love, and musings on the Muse.”

For Cohen, literature was a form of prayer as much as artistic expression. Indeed, his lyrics and music fuse into a prayer that became his greatest hit: Hallelujah.

Brief video: https://youtu.be/yMi56EzreL4