She served him jasmine tea and little mandarin oranges from nearby Chinatown, and the pair of them would walk along the river past Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours where sailors went to be blessed before heading out to sea. The pair never became lovers, but Cohen was among the friends that Verdal would invite to her cheap apartment in one of the abandoned warehouses on the St Lawrence waterfront. The first vivid expression of that impulse came a few months after he made that library speech when he met the young avant-garde dancer Suzanne Verdal. Cohen himself resolved to go “into exile” from his faith, to think up other possibilities for spiritual life like “love and sex and drugs and song”, for which there was little room in the synagogue.Ĭohen in 1967, ‘when he had trouble finding a record deal’. His maternal grandfather had written A Treasury of Rabbinic Interpretations. His speech, part of a symposium on the future of Judaism, carried weight in part because he was a son of one of the most notable Jewish families in Canada – his paternal grandfather was the founder of the Canadian Jewish Times, whose uncle had been unofficial chief rabbi. He had published two narrowly acclaimed volumes of poetry and a experimental novel.
“I consider it one of my duties to expose the platitude which we have created.” Cohen had come to imagine himself as part of an underground “catacomb religion” of poets, a new kind of “cantor”, “one of the creators of the liturgy that will create the church”.Īt that time, Cohen had never sung on a record or a stage. I n 1963, when he was 29, Leonard Cohen gave a speech in Montreal’s Jewish Public Library: “I believe that the God worshipped in our synagogues is a hideous distortion of a supreme idea – and deserves to be attacked and destroyed,” he said.
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