Leonard Cohen — singer with roots in the Russian Empire
Leonard Norman Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 in Westmount, Montreal, into a prominent Jewish family. His father, Nathan Cohen, ran the family clothing business and died when Leonard was nine; his mother, Masha Klonitsky, was the daughter of a rabbi and Talmudic scholar. His paternal grandfather, Lyon Cohen, had emigrated to Canada from Suwałki in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, and became a leader of the Montreal Jewish community and a founder of the Canadian Jewish Times. Masha Klonitsky came to Canada from Kaunas in 1927, when it was the capital of independent Lithuania; where she was born is not documented.
He studied at McGill University, where he published his first collection of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), and won the McGill Literary Award. In 1960 he bought a house on the Greek island of Hydra, where he lived for much of the decade and wrote the novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966).
He turned to songwriting in his thirties. Judy Collins recorded his "Suzanne" in 1966, and his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, followed in 1967, with "So Long, Marianne" and "Sisters of Mercy". Over five decades he released fourteen studio albums, among them Songs of Love and Hate (1971), I'm Your Man (1988) and The Future (1992). "Hallelujah", from Various Positions (1984), became one of the most widely covered songs of its time.
From 1994 to 1999 he lived at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California and was ordained a Buddhist monk, while continuing to describe himself as Jewish. In 2005 he discovered that his former manager had taken most of his savings; he returned to touring in 2008, at seventy-three, and performed hundreds of concerts around the world over the next five years.
He was inducted into the Canadian and American Rock and Roll Halls of Fame, received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2011 and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. His last album, You Want It Darker, was released in October 2016. He died in Los Angeles on 7 November 2016, aged eighty-two, and was buried in the family plot in Montreal.
Tracing the roots — Suwałki (Poland)
His paternal grandfather emigrated to Canada from Suwałki in Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. His mother, Masha Klonitsky, immigrated to Canada from Kaunas in 1927, when Kaunas was in independent Lithuania; her birthplace is not documented.
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Suwałki (Poland). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."