by Inna Rogatchi
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-lo ... eliauskas/
Zilvinas Beliauskaus, the founder and a long-term director of the Public Vilnius Jewish Library in Lithuania, did fight a very nasty illness bravely for two and a half years. His noble heart stopped in his sleep, on the Shabbat eve, in Vilnius, at the end of July this year.
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Devotion to Leonard Cohen
Zilvinas’s love for Leonard Cohen was limitless and all-embracing. He discovered Cohen for himself very early, in the beginning of the 1980s. First, Zilvinas discovered Cohen as a poet, he told us, finding by a pure chance, a small book of his poetry in a bad condition in one of the libraries he always loved so much.
Since then, Zilvinas’ immense devotion to Leonard Cohen never left him. He was reading it deeper and deeper, finding allusions, getting deep down to everything Cohen meant to say in his poetry, and understanding him exceptionally authentically and deeply.
When Zilvinas, to his amazed happiness, found out that Cohen’s family were Litvaks from Kaunas (Kovno), he understood the roots of his mighty attraction and his devotion to Leonard, which he started to feel in yet a more powerful way. We spoke about it often. I do not know many of all fantastic Cohen’s fans and experts, among whom are many of our good friends, did understand him as deeply and authentically as Zilvinas did. He was a real Cohen expert, on the level of microanalysis of the Leonard world.
Ever full shelves of the Vilnius Jewish Public Library. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation Archive.
Zilvinas was dreaming of inviting Leonard to Lithuania, especially when Cohen was so close to it in the late 2000s and early 2010s , coming with his great concerts to Warsaw, Poland, just next door. We were discussing possibilities to invite Leonard to Lithuania then and later on, it was Zilvinas’ dearest idea and an incredibly important, innermost project of his. We were ready and willing to assist our friend and to speak with Leonard about such a possibility.
We knew that it was a very touchy theme for Cohen, as he felt the Holocaust very close to his heart, and his family’s origin from Kovno, and the very painful history of the Holocaust in Lithuania was not a low hurdle to overcome for Leonard. He needed time, and he needed to be ready for that, he was saying. It was a special Leonard’s motto in life and creativity which was the one for that exceptional man, to be ready, inside, making his own work for that readiness.
Importantly, Leonard Cohen was – and still is – extremely popular and much loved in Lithuania, as in many countries in Baltics, Scandinavia, Northern and Eastern Europe, and there was a hope, we understood, that a door was open for that daring visit. So we hoped and dreamed together with Zilvinas that Leonard might consider coming to his mother and her family’s place. Then Leonard got really ill, and the situation became even more complicated.
I remember Zilvinas’ call on the gloomy autumn afternoon: “I finally decided to write, actually, to finish and send to you my letter to Leonard, that you are still waiting to get from me before talking with him about his visit here to Lithuania. I was walking all night, polishing and polishing my letter which, as you know, I drafted some while ago, and re-did so many times ( ‘just like Leonard did with his poems” – I remember thinking at the moment). So, I did it, finally, and I knew that it was the right text, finally. I came home, made a coffee, turned on my PC to learn that Leonard passed away the previous night”. How can you respond in a situation like that? I just sigh. We sighed together.
He was one of those rare people with whom it was very comfortable and natural to keep those moments of silence, both short and longer ones, when you knew that you are not alone, that your friend cares about you, that he is near, that you are understood and are cared for.
That unfulfilled and so dear to Zilvinas idea and dream of inviting Leonard Cohen to Lithuania and greeting him there, on the soil of his mother’s family, was always present, even years after Leonard’s passing in 2016.