Leonard Cohen’s Childhood Home

Leonard Cohen grew up at 599 Belmont Avenue in Westmount, an affluent anglophone enclave within Montreal's broader francophone fabric. Born in 1934 into a prosperous Jewish family -- his grandfather was a founder of the Canadian Jewish Congress -- Cohen had a materially comfortable childhood in this tree-lined residential neighbourhood. His father Nathan died when Leonard was nine, an event that cast a long shadow over his life and work; his mother Masha, a Russian immigrant of warm and musical temperament, raised him with his sister Esther in the Belmont Avenue house thereafter.

Westmount shaped Cohen in ways that his later reputation as an ascetic wanderer might not suggest. He was educated at Roslyn Elementary School and Westmount High School, attended McGill University, and published his first poetry collection at 22 while still living in Montreal. The particular Anglo-Jewish Montreal of his childhood -- formal, educated, haunted by memory -- is the world his earliest poems describe, a world of synagogues and tennis courts and families who had arrived from Europe with old-world culture and new-world ambition. He left Montreal for London, New York, and the Greek island of Hydra in the early 1960s, but Montreal remained his emotional home.

The house at 599 Belmont Avenue is a private residence in a neighbourhood that remains much as it was in Cohen's childhood -- quiet, well-maintained, prosperous. There is no plaque. The address is documented by Cohen scholars and fans and is a stop on informal Cohen heritage tours of Montreal. Westmount itself, with its Victorian and Edwardian houses and its proximity to Mount Royal, is evocative of the world that produced him.