go on click it anyway!
Leonard Norman Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 in the Royal Victoria Hospital, a grey stone pile in Westmount, an affluent neighbourhood of Montreal, Canada. According to the records, it was at 6.45 on a Friday morning. According to history, it was halfway between the Great Depression and World War II. Counting backwards, Leonard was conceived between the end of Hannukah and Christmas Day during one of the subarctic winters his home town managed to deliver with both consistency and brio. He was raised in a house of suits. Nathan Cohen, Leonard’s father, was a prosperous Canadian Jew with a high-end clothing business. The Freedman Company was known for its formal wear, and Nathan liked to dress formally, even on informal occasions. In suits, as in houses, he favoured the formal English style, which he wore with spats, and tempered with a boutonniere and, when his bad health made it necessary, a silver cane. Masha Cohen, Leonard’s mother, was sixteen years younger than her husband, a Russian Jew, a rabbi’s daughter, and a recent immigrant to Canada. She and Nathan had married not long after her arrival in Montreal in 1927. Two years later she gave birth to the first of their two children, Leonard’s sister, Esther. Early photographs of Nathan and Masha show him to be a square-faced, square-shouldered, stocky man. Masha, slimmer and a head taller, is in contrast all circles and slopes. The expression on Masha’s face is both girlish and regal, while Nathan’s is rigid and taciturn. Even were this not the required camera pose for the head of a household at that time, Nathan was certainly more reserved, and more anglicised, than his warm, emotional, Russian wife. As a baby, Leonard, plump, compact and also square-faced, was the image of his father, but as he grew he took on his mother Masha’s heart-shaped face, thick wavy hair, and deep, dark, sloping eyes. From his father he acquired his height, his tidiness, his decency and his love of suits. From his mother he inherited his charisma, his melancholy and his music...
— #SylvieSimmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of #LeonardCohen
Chapter One: Born in a Suit
No comments:
Post a Comment