Re: Leonard Cohen (was: Recordings: do they exist?)

[Hayyim Feldman <hf...>]

On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Martin Grossman wrote:

>Leonard used to open concerts on is European tour of 10 or 15 years ago
>with a familiar Yiddish song, "Und As Der Rebbe Zingt (or something close
>to that).
>
>Marty Grossman

Thanks for this info!  I checked it out on The Leonard Cohen File website
(http://nebula.simplenet.com/cohen).  He performed Un Az Der Rebbe Zingt
at 10 concerts, all in the 1970s, mostly in Germany and Austria, all in
Europe except one in Philadelphia in 1975 at which he also sang Un Az Der
Rebbe Elimelech.  I never knew about any of that! 

However, re LC's connection with Yiddish, an excerpt from Les Histoire
Sans Morale - Cohen entre Ciel et Terre (Story With No Moral - Cohen
Between Earth and Sky), a 1995 article by Gilles Tordjman (translated by
Keith Campbell) from the French publication Inrockuptible: 

 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.

On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, robert wiener wrote:

>I'm glad that Marty sent this post because, on second thought, I believe
>that the unusual Leonard Cohen recording I heard in that Canadian museum
>a number of years ago was not in French, but in Yiddish.  I may have its
>name jotted down somewhere, but I never found a recorded copy and would
>have to dig deep in my files to even find the name of the museum.  I
>imagine that the recording was private and never released commercially. 

I couldn't find any reference to a Yiddish-language recording, or to a
recording held only by a museum.  Bob, if you do come up with the name of
the museum, we could likely find out about what you heard there.

-Hayyim

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Ring the bells that still can ring
   forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything -
   that's how the light gets in.

                 -Leonard Cohen, "Anthem" (1992)
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