Re: leonard cohen

[robert wiener <wiener...>]

Some information from internet sites that may be of interest:

...
Cohen stayed in Greece on and off for seven years.  He wrote another
collection of poetry, the controversial Flowers For Hitler (1964); and
two highly acclaimed novels, The Favorite Game (1963), his portrait of
the artist as a young Jew in Montreal, and beautiful Losers (1966),
described on its dust jacket as a disagreeable religious epic of
incomparable beauty."   Upon its publication, the Boston Globe
trumpeted, "James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under
the name of Cohen." To date, each book has sold more than 800,000
copies worldwide. ...

Various Positions (1984) was the full flowering of these
religious concerns. Songs like "Hallelujah," "The Law," Heart With No
Companion," and "If It Be Your Will" are contemporary psalms, born of
an undoubtedly long and difficult spiritual odyssey, so difficult that
its conclusion left Cohen literally "wiped out." ....
http://www.leonardcohen.com/
(has song clips)

"Dance Me to the End of Love" is on More Best of (1997), Live (1994),
and Various Position (1985).  Its text was also used for a book with
illustrations by Matisse.

By the way, "The Captain" from Various Positions has the following
Holocaust reference:

"Complain, complain, that's all you've done
               Ever since we lost
               If it's not the Crucifixion
               Then it's the Holocaust."
               "May Christ have mercy on your soul
               For making such a joke
               Amid these hearts that burn like coal
               And the flesh that rose like smoke."

There's also a Holocaust reference in "Death of a Ladies' Man".

A Leonard Cohen conference included in a session On the Novel: a
paper, Writing Around the Holocaust: Uncovering the Ethical Centre of
Beautiful Losers, by Norman Ravvin.

And from,
LES INROCKUPTIBLES, FRANCE, MARCH 15, 1995:
HISTOIRE SANS MORALE - COHEN ENTRE CIEL ET TERRE    Story With No
Moral - Cohen Between Earth And Sky
 by Gilles Tordjman                      Translated by Keith Campbell
comes the following:
Sidebar: Parasite of Heaven ("Le parasite du ciel")
                           by Marc Weitzmann

If one had to look for poetic affiliation for Cohen -- for his work is
as far away from the Beat poets as it is from traditional rock
lyrics -- it would undoubtedly be found partly in Ezra Pound and Walt
Whitman, partly in Elizabethan poetry, and partly in a particularly
Yiddish tradition that deserves closer study. One example: "I am with
the snow/Fallen in the sea/I am with the hunters/Hungry and tired/And
with the prey/tender and naked/..." "I am the sorcerer and I am the
spell/I am the enigma that kills itself to solve its own mystery".
These two poems, that could well have been written by the same person,
are signed by Leonard Cohen and Moshe-Lieb Halpern respectively.
Halpern was a Yiddish poet who died in New York in 1932.


In what is perhaps a promotional blurb for PROPHET OF THE HEART, by
Loranne S. Dorman & Clive L. Rawlins published in
1990 by Omnibus Press, 383 pages. ISBN 0-7119-1821-X
(hardback) and 0-7119-2774-X (paperback) was written, "He is a man of
great spiritual and mystical bent, whose Judaism led him from a deep
personal dissatisfaction created by the horrors of the Holocaust and
proctracted through many of the sub-cultures of our age: drugs,
alcohol, sensuality, eastern mysticism, dianetics, astrology and Zen
Buddhism."

You can find lots more for yourself, including over a dozen references
to "Jewish" at
http://nebula.simplenet.com/cohen/frame.html

Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Grossman <tgg (at) slip(dot)net>
To: World music from a Jewish slant <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
Date: Wednesday, August 18, 1999 2:07 AM
Subject: Re: leonard cohen


>Leonard says in an interview somewhere that the song is about the
Holocaust --
>and the persistence of love even under such unbearable circumstances.
I'm
>paraphrasing rather badly, but this is the gist of it.
>
>Marty Grossman
>
>MaxwellSt (at) aol(dot)com wrote:
>
>> We have twice been asked to play his song, "Dance Me To The End of
Love," as
>> a bridal dance.  I believe that is because, although the content is
>> non-specific, the melody is a Russian derivative with a Jewish
nuance.  (Our
>> Russian violinist thinks so, anyway).
>>
>> Lori
>> Maxwell St.
>>
>
>--
>Julia Becker Grossman
>841 Solano Avenue #2
>Albany, CA 94706
>
>
>----------------------
jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+
>