“A million candles burning / For the love that never came / You want it darker / We kill the flame”. Leonard Cohen, You Want it Darker
“The invitation from Lviv offered me the possibility of exploring that history.” Philippe Sands, East-West Street
At six in the morning one day in 2015, Gideon Zelermyer, cantor at the main synagogue in Westmount, Montreal, checked his email in bed and saw that he had received an email from Leonard Cohen.
He read it immediately and could not restrain himself:
-Hallelujah!
He screamed even though his wife was still sleeping.
And he added:
-Amen!
The famous musician and poet wanted to collaborate with the choir of the Shaar Hashomayim congregation, the Ashkenazi community in the Westmount neighborhood, which his grandfather and father presided over, to which the three previous generations of the Cohens also belonged, and in which he educated, the one that keeps in a hallway the photograph of the class of 1945 in which the very young Leonard smiles to the right dressed in black, next to the girls from his class, dressed in white. And that he did. And that's what they did.
When the song You Want it Darker, with Cohen's voice in the foreground and a subtle, piercing male choir in the background, produced by his son Adam along with the rest of the songs on the album of the same name, won a Grammy the following year, the musician had just died. The award was received in his place by his daughter Lorca.
"He was, in addition to being a great artist, a great womanizer, who made his erotic pretensions clear in advance at a time when that type of courtesy on the part of famous artists was not common," Philippe Sands tells me when we say goodbye in the evening. , after three days together at the Blue Metropolis Festival in this city. A close friend of his told me, however, that Leonard never knew reciprocated love, that is, true love.
Before he goes to the taxi I tell him:
—Martín Caparrós, the Argentine writer, has seen a photo of us on social networks and asks me to remind you that you promised to organize a congress of grandchildren of survivors in Arequipa.
He hesitates for just a few seconds before responding, once again confident:
—Tell him that I remember it perfectly and that at this moment I renew my commitment.
He's not only a great writer, I think, he's also a great lawyer.
Today is April 30, 2023 and at noon the synagogue has welcomed one hundred and fifty people, a dozen of them wearing kippahs, due to an email subsequent to the one the cantor received at dawn signed by Leonard Cohen.
The email Sands sent to Gideon Zelermyer. “Another fan,” he thought to the tray saturated with messages. But when he searched for “Philippe Sands” on Google he discovered that he was a British jurist of international prestige, specialized in human rights, author of two very influential books on the Shoah, East-West Street and Escape Route, and that his grandfather had been murdered. in Treblinka. So he responded that same day; they chatted about Cohen over Zoom during the pandemic; and they met this morning in person at the great synagogue in the Anglophone aristocracy neighborhood of Montreal.
We have all perceived the emotion that that meeting has emitted like seismic waves and we have applauded it after the choir sang three songs by the most famous singer-songwriter in the world, with the permission of Bob Dylan. Three songs from You Want It Darker, that album that desperately seeks light.
The concert was the epilogue of an hour-long conversation in which the singer evoked the details of Cohen's return, in the final stretch of his life, to the spirit of this community, that of his childhood, to leave us as a legacy some songs that resonate as much in our consciences as in the series I may destroy You, Billions or Game of Thrones; and the writer has explained why it was so important for him to know this synagogue, this neighborhood where a collective of urban artists has painted an enormous thousand-square-meter portrait of the musician on the side of a nearby building, this city whose illustrious son abandoned and recovered again and again.
—My relationship with Leonard began when I was fifteen, on the day in 1975 when my mother began playing the album Songs of Love and Hate on a loop, as if it were a reflection of the collapse of her marriage to my father. In that way, her music and her poetry entered my DNA and have not stopped accompanying me for a moment since then.
There are many echoes of Cohen that have resonated in the background of Sands's life. One day he discovered that, in the eighties, the singer lived on the same street in London where he had also lived, and a few years later his wife and he bought a house in France, a few meters from where the musician had lived in the nineties. Coincidences seem like a shadow chase.
—One day, listening to the ninth song on the Live in London album, I heard some voices and realized that it was a friend and I, who had been there, at the concert, excited, at the A2 Arena in London. Some time later, I shared one of the most extraordinary days of my life with Leonard and I met his sound technician and I asked him if it could be true and he told me that, in fact, the microphone was very close to a part of the audience and that those unknown voices had entered the recording and they had decided to leave them on the album.
That day he also learned that Cohen studied law for a few months at McGill University, in this same city, and then he understood why the importance that both religious and judicial expressions have in the lyrics of his songs.
But above all, value the light that is in them. Although he is accustomed to visiting dark places due to his work, the day he and his children visited Treblinka, the extermination camp where his great-grandmother Malke was murdered along with Sigmund Freud's sisters, he felt the crushing weight of a particularly dense darkness. They left the museum. They looked for a restaurant in the nearby town. And, just when they entered, the song Anthem played, with those verses: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
—For me it is essential to travel, to visit places, they help you understand, there is an energy, certain sensations, that are only revealed in the place of the events.
In Calle Este-Oeste he tries to get to know his protagonists through classical music. While Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, the Jewish professors who forged the legal terms “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” are linked to Beethoven; Hans Frank, the cultured and sophisticated German who contributed to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people and was tried for it in Nuremberg, listens to Bach's St. Matthew Passion in his cell. That fact led Sands to attend several performances “both in London and New York, and even one at the Church of St. Thomas in Leipzig, where Bach had written the work,” because he wanted to “understand what parts of it he might have had.” Frank in mind, how he had found solace in his jail cell.”
I arrived ten minutes late to the synagogue because I detoured a couple of streets to photograph the mural with the thousand square meters of the singer-songwriter's physiognomy and, before that, I stopped at the McCord Stewart Museum to visit the Indigenous Voices of Today. Divided into three sections - knowledge, trauma and resilience - it takes you on a journey through ancestral wisdom, the biological and cultural massacre that represented especially the residential schools, in which indigenous children were stripped of their hair, their name and its culture, and current policies and strategies for reparation and justice. Rewind three hundred years of history to understand what is happening today.
Three hours before, while I was having my first coffee of the day in bed, very early due to jet lag, I was watching videos on YouTube of the Coro a la Escucha, that group of Colombians exiled in Montreal who sing compositions in traditional genres of their country, while sharing memories of the violence they suffered. A project from the Acts of Listening Lab, whose objective is to create acoustic spaces that favor the transmission of testimony and mourning, thanks to the tools of performance and music.
While I was listening to stories of death and migration, counterpointed with joropos and happy music, in room 233, Philippe Sands was reading in his room at the same hotel the e-mail confirming that his next book, in which he narrates Walter's escape Rauff, the S.S. officer. that exterminated half a million people in Europe, his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in Quito, his life in Chile and the arrest of the former dictator in London, will become a series co-produced by HBO and the BBC.
Coastal GasLink is a gas pipeline that runs 670 kilometers across Canada from the East to the West. The project website highlights, with an almost pornographic emphasis, the commitment to the environment and respect for the indigenous communities of the territory crossed. The truth is that they are protesting what they consider an attack against the rivers and against their ancestors. In the documentary Invasion, which can be seen on the Unist'ot'en Camp website, an indigenous reoccupation of Wet'suwet'en land in the north of the country, one of the leaders tells a police officer: “Your law can bend the rules, let someone come and destroy our land.” Legally. I close that window and open, before closing it too, the one that shows an aerial image of the gas pipeline. It's the last thing I see before falling asleep: the map and the photograph of that line that looks like a very solid scar, but with a gaseous soul.
Lawyer Nancy Tapias spoke to me about this macro-project and its contradictions during a very pleasant dinner at Professor Tatiana Navallo's house with other guests of the festival. Luis Carlos Sotelo, who directs the Acts of Listening Lab at Concordia University, has also shared cheeses, salads and wines with us.
I went to dinner immediately after interviewing Philippe Sands in the hotel bar. I had a beer; he, a bloody mary; We also devour the peanuts.
Following the topic of interviewing writers, the last question I asked him, at a quarter past seven in the afternoon, was about his next book:
—Well, I finished writing it in the middle of last year, in the summer, and I immediately sent it to Silvia Sesé, my Spanish editor, and to Javier Cercas, because of how sensitive the topic is. It has been the one that has excited me the most to write, because what I tell matters to me, because I was part of the story of Pinochet's arrest in London and because I think that now I am beginning to have my own voice and enjoy it. Furthermore, it is the most incredible story you can imagine and on top of that I discovered a family connection that I did not know, between Spain and Chile, through my mother-in-law, who is from Burgos. I'm not going to tell you anything else. But she told me that a character I had written about was none other than her cousin. But, despite the high expectations, maybe I'll screw it up. It will be my first book that comes out sooner in Spanish, one day before in English, as a sign of respect, because the story is Chilean and Spanish. It will be in 2025. And in it I wonder why Spain has not done anything with its own past.
Just before, we talked about the possibility of Jair Bolsonaro being tried for ecocide; and Vladimir Putin, for crimes against humanity.
— A special court would have to be created for the invasion of Ukraine, without a doubt. It is a crime of aggression, an idea that was born in Nuremberg, daughter of the “crime against peace.” If it is proven that civilians have been a military objective, we would also be facing crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over these two types of crimes, but not over aggression. Bolsonaro's case is even more difficult, because ecocide has existed since June 2021 as a legal definition of a possible fifth crime, within the framework of the Rome Statute, but it still has a way to go.
Then he frowned and composed his features, which had altered slightly during the response. And he ate a couple of peanuts.
—If the 20th century was marked by crimes against humanity and the notion of genocide, will ecocide be the one that will mark the 21st? –was my previous question.
-Don't know. Without a doubt, the idea was born from the protagonists of Calle Este-Oeste, they inspired it. What I know is that my three children have been more interested in ecocide than in the rest of my work, and they have told me that we, our generation, I mean, have finally done something useful. When we traveled through Utah, in the United States, I realized that we are not destroying the planet, but ourselves, because nature will survive us.
As his legal book Lawless World fueled public debate in 2005 about the illegality of the Iraq War; Ten years later she wrote a report for Amnesty International on the legality of British arms sales to Saudi Arabia; and she has defended the Philippines in its maritime dispute with China or Georgia with Russia, I also wanted to know if she slept well at night:
"I'm lucky enough not to feel all that pressure," he replied. I sleep well, I'm afraid my wife worries about me much more than I do myself. I am used to being criticized in trials, in fact I appreciate the criticism. On the other hand, I receive many letters and I answer them all. "I consider myself a very polite person," she said before taking the first sip of bloody mary, which he took with a half ironic smile on his lips, a few seconds after the waiter brought it to him.
Until I was in front of him, on top of a stool, in front of a raised, circular table in the hotel, I had not seriously thought about the reasons for the global success of Calle Este-Oeste. Was it because it was about the Holocaust and World War II? To reveal to the general public the origin of the legal concept of genocide?
—I think it is because it talks about a universal topic: what I am, how I define myself, what my identity is as an individual and as a group. In terms of law and justice, we must think in the long term, never forgetting that in the most difficult moments, international law is the only language that all countries in the world have in common. It's a kind of Esperanto. I speak it. And I know that I want to be considered as Philippe Sands, individual, not as Philippe Sands, Londoner and Jew.
He lives his relationship with literature as an internal conflict. Imposter syndrome is also universal; He feels, instead, an intruder. Are you a lawyer who writes? He has two nationalities, English and French, and also since 2016, when he published his debut work, two professions:
—But the truth is that I dedicate myself less and less to law, I can't leave it because it nourishes my literature.
And not only her. She has also done film, television, theater and performative shows that combine reading with music.
—I like to experiment, learn, with music, with cinema, with life.
Last year he published The Last Colony, where he tells the story of the Chagos Archipelago, or Oil Islands, which is located in the middle of the Indian Ocean, half a kilometer from the Maldives. A treaty between Great Britain and the United States, for the installation of a military base on one of their islands, caused the deportation of the entire native population. Mauritius claims the territory so that the Chagossians who are still alive, as well as their descendants, can return to their homeland.
—In the book I say that I am not independent, because I have represented Mauricio, who is my client, for thirty years. Writing it, I say half seriously, half joking, has been an act of literary advocacy, to force the UK government to negotiate. And the truth is that two months after the book was published the government changed its position. I don't know if there is a connection. But it was a best seller.
The waiter asked us what we wanted to drink while Sands told me about his transition from academic author to literary writer. He had already published fifteen university and legal books when the dozens of copies sold of Lawless World marked a definitive turning point. By then, dealings with the Spanish family of his very literate wife had made him realize that academic literature has a very small audience, while the essay can aspire to reach many more consciousnesses.
—I met the editor of Penguin at a party and I told him the story of my grandfather and the two Jewish lawyers, from the same city, who had created the legal framework for the Nuremberg trials, and the Nazi genocide, and he told me to send him a ten-page proposal. And that's what I did. And my life began to change. And he hasn't stopped doing it since then.
The interview began at six in the afternoon with a direct question:
—Why is Philippe Sands in Montreal?
—Well, I accepted the invitation, among other things, because I really wanted to meet Gideon Zelermyer in person and visit the Leonard Cohen synagogue, because he has been fundamental in my life. Tomorrow Sunday we will talk there about it. I met an hour early. I have been wanting that meeting for a long time.
The festival bookstore, in the same room of the hotel where empty glasses of wine are served every midday, is managed by Paragraphe, one of the most important bookstores in the city, located on the nearby urban campus of MGill University. I had taken advantage of the fact that there was no one who wanted a dedicated copy to get up and browse their tables and I had immediately discovered that Philippe Sands had published a book in English and French that I did not know, La dernière colonie, when suddenly it materialized by chance at my side and I took the opportunity to ask him when it will be published in Spanish:
"Next October," he told me with a smile, as he looked towards my books. Very interesting. My mother was a bookseller, so during my childhood I spent many hours in a bookstore.
“What a coincidence,” I said before introducing myself. I would like to interview her, if she has a moment.
—This afternoon I have a space. Shall we meet at six at the hotel bar?
I say goodbye to the day talking in the hotel bar with the Chilean writer and friend Lina Meruane, and with her partner, the Spanish linguist José del Valle, whom I did not know. She, who has just published Palestine in Pieces, will receive a festival award tomorrow for her entire work. And he, an expert in glottopolitics, explains to me that he tries to study the political in language and the linguistic in politics:
—It's about getting out of the comfort zone. And always remember that sexism or racism, exclusion, are in the very language we speak.
The opening of the festival, in the afternoon, consisted of a succession of very brief conferences. The one with the greatest emotional intensity has been given by the indigenous poet, narrator and storyteller Duncan Mercredi, with his long white hair and his precise pronunciation of each of the words in English and in his native language, Cree. His work insistently recalls the trauma that thousands of children experienced in residential schools in Canada, where religious people violently assimilated them.
“Well, for us hair is very important, the aborigines take great care of their hair,” says Paul Andrew in a vignette from the graphic chronicle A Tribute to the Land, by Joe Sacco, —the first book I read about that reality—, before remembering that a nun was waiting for all the children with a razor in her hand. “Another thing I remember is the first night… The tears. Because many of us were seven, eight, six years old, and there was only one bedroom.”
Philippe Sands also addressed the public in English, his native language, because his speech tomorrow, Saturday, will be in French, his native language. He speaks melodiously, with a very British accent, that voice trained in the best universities and the most demanding courts in the world is used to sliding from persuasion to seduction. The gentleness of his features belies the metallic shine of his gaze, sharp as the point of a laser beam. From time to time, he frowns, as if in this way he readjusts the harmony between his eyes, his face, his voice.
His book Escape Route reminds us that the connivance of the Catholic Church with the darkest dimension of empires is very old and also extends through our times. A legion of priests, bishops and cardinals hid Nazi war criminals in Rome and helped them escape to South America. It was not until 1996 that the last residential and federal school run by a church closed, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. In that same province, 171 unidentified graves of Aboriginal children were found earlier this year. The findings of corpses have been periodic throughout the 21st century. There is no doubt that it was a cultural genocide, but also a physical one.
I took advantage of the hours before my first day in Canada to visit the bookstores in Montreal. Seeing that they are divided between Anglophones and Francophones, I was happy once again to live in Barcelona, in whose bookstores and libraries books in Catalan and Spanish coexist, and we even found titles in other languages. In Paragraphe I started reading I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, by Sylvie Simmons, which explains that in Hebrew “Cohen” means “priest” and that Leonard might have been a rabbi, if at the age of fifteen, in a bookstore like the one I was in, I would not have bought a book by Federico García Lorca, and if shortly afterwards his life had not crossed paths with that of a gypsy guitarist, nicknamed El Hispano de Montreal, who was his first music teacher. He named his daughter Lorca when she was born in 1974; two years earlier Adam had been born; Between both dates he went to the Yom Kippur war as a volunteer to sing before the Israeli soldiers.
When I got out of the taxi that brought me from the airport early in the morning and walked up the stairs of Hotel 10 dragging my suitcase, I recognized Philippe Sands in the lobby. Since I read both of his books translated into Spanish last year and was impressed by them, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to interview him. Two ideas immediately came to mind. That the soundtrack of this city had been composed by Leonard Cohen. And that Sands' two books rewind history from the scars of today to the wounds of the 1930s, so that we understand how memory works, its healing in reverse.
While I was checking in at the entrance table, I was embarrassed to introduce myself, but not listen to other people's conversations. At that moment, Ingrid Bejerman—teacher, host of the festival, Jewish of Brazilian origin—explained to him that we were on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, which is the street that separates French-speaking and English-speaking Montreal, crossing the city from East to West. :
"Separate the Catholic French from the Protestant English," she said.
And he added, before disappearing through the revolving door:
—Two solitudes.
