Joseph
A. Cohen turns 100
William
Falcetano
You’ll
find him most Saturday mornings seated in the same café with a
cheese danish and a black coffee, chatting with his fellow poets,
writers, and artists – he is Joe Cohen and he is about to turn
one-hundred years old tomorrow, July 13th.
The fact that a ninety-nine-year-old gentleman is a “man about
town” is in itself noteworthy; but Joseph A. Cohen doesn’t only
attend the Bagels and Bards informal weekly meet-up; he also gives
public readings of his poetry in such literary settings as the
Periodicals Room of the Boston Public Library (for National Poetry
Month), the Armory in Somerville, and the Somerville and Cambridge
Public Libraries. Joe’s poetry readings are often
accompanied
by his violinist daughter
Beth Bahia Cohen, who teaches world
violin traditions at Berklee
College of Music and Tufts University.
Joe’s parents were Arabic-speaking Jews from Aleppo,
Syria. They emigrated to America in 1911. Six years later, in 1917,
Joe was born in the Lower
East Side of New York City. The Cohens
moved to the Bensonhurst
section of Brooklyn, where they raised a large family of 8 children.
Joe’s childhood in the 1920s was straight out of The
Little Rascals – he and his pals searched
for empty lots for a place to play stick-ball; they went to Ebbets
Field to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play baseball (his
cousin Sam Nahem pitched for the Dodgers in 1938). But
by the time Joe went to New Utrecht High School the Great Depression
had descended on America and people were hurting; but Joe got
straight into the table linen business after graduation.
As a young man, and a handsome fellow to boot (see
wedding picture), Joe was naturally looking for love; and he found it
when he met Sonia,
who was from a Yiddish-speaking
Jewish family from Ukraine. From these two regions of the world, now
so mired in misery, they seemed destined to find happiness together
in America. To the question: “How’d you met your wife?” Joe
shrugged his shoulders and said, “well, we were both lefties and we
went to meetings”. He brought Sonia
home and said to his disapproving mother (it was a mixed marriage
after all): “if you like her I’ll
marry her; and if you don’t like her
I’ll marry her.”
Then, in December, 1941, America was suddenly at war and
Joe joined the U.S. Army. He fought Hitler’s legions as part of an
anti-aircraft gun battery in North Africa, Italy (Anzio), France, and
Belgium. Joe Cohen went up against Hermann Goering’s dreaded
Luftwaffe and shot Messerschmitts and Junkers out of the European
skies; but you could never get him to admit it – “hundreds of
shots went up but nobody knew whose shot downed the plane”. That’s
how real heroes talk; never taking personal credit for their amazing
deeds. On Bastille Day last year, Joe was awarded the Legion of
Honor from the government of France for his services during the war –
that’s no small distinction when a whole country says “Thank
You!”
The 1950s were good to the Cohens; Joe’s table linen
business boomed and he employed 200 workers selling his wares all
over the world. Joe and Sonia
had three children; he lived in Great Neck N.Y. for 50 years before
he moved to Cambridge at the age of 94. Despite his business success
Joe never forgot his political convictions; so he pitched in to help
the singer-activist Harry Belafonte fund and organize the legal
defense for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then he fought to desegregate
another famous American place – Levittown, N.Y., where the Cohens
lived for a time on their journey from Brooklyn to Great
Neck.
In the meantime, Joe became a student and later a
teacher of photography; he studied with highly acclaimed
photographers at The New School in NYC, Parsons
School of Design, CW Post; he also taught the art of photography for
over 40 years at colleges in the area. His
photos were exhibited widely
in New York. Joe also took time out to
study poetry; and he became a published poet with two fine chapbooks
– one book, aptly named A Full Life,
shows a photograph of Joe reading Tolstoy’s War
and Peace in a foxhole. A second book by the
title A New Path, was
published in June. Joe’s poems often evoke scenes of Middle Eastern
hospitality, food, and music. They reveal a man who pays attention
to details and who savors the good things of life – family,
friends, the taste of Syrian cuisine, the color of green in
springtime.
Joe has been a beloved “Bagel Bard” ever since he
arrived in town; and he has graced our table with portraits of each
of us, as well as with his poetry readings, his keen observations,
and his wry wit. I can report that Joe Cohen still has a strong hand
shake, he takes a glass of scotch and soda every night with dinner;
his eyes twinkle and his wit is keen. Now don’t be fooled, old age
isn’t a walk in the park; it’s not easy being a hundred. After
all, most of the
people he grew up with are long gone; as Joe complained in a turn of
phrase worthy of Yogi Bera: “everybody I know is dead”.
In
Joe Cohen, we find a man who was a soldier and a poet, a successful
businessman and a civil rights activist, a Jew who speaks Arabic, a
beloved husband, an adored father of three and
grandfather of five, and a photographer
whose long and clear view of life has earned him the right to the
title “A Full Life”. But to come out at a hundred with another
title – “A New Path” – what can be new at 100? Stay tuned to
Joe Cohen and you’ll find out. No wonder why the City of Cambridge
has declared July 13th
Joseph A. Cohen Day.
