Cohen, Matt
COHEN, MATT
COHEN, MATT (1942–1999), Canadian writer. Cohen was born in Ottawa and then moved with his parents to Kingston, Ontario. Later, he moved to Toronto and took advantage of a rich cultural moment, when the few square blocks around Spadina and College were becoming one of Canada's most exciting cultural and artistic centers. Despite frequent travels abroad, Toronto remained his most intimate personal landscape.
Cohen's most sustained attention to Jewish themes appeared in a trio of novels published in mid-career. Their themes were disparate: The Spanish Doctor (1984) explored the experience of Spanish *Marranos, while Nadine (1986) and Emotional Arithmetic (1990) focused on postwar Jewish identity, including the Holocaust. In the posthumously published Typing: A Life in 26 Keys (2000), Cohen expressed frustration with the Canadian reception of these books, suggesting that it was his foray into books with overtly Jewish themes that guaranteed them a chilly reception at home. The response of the Canadian literary establishment was abrupt and largely dismissive.
Cohen's was not a career in any way circumscribed by Jewish upbringing, Jewish values, or Jewish literary influences. He swam in the waters of the late-1960s counterculture without completely committing himself to its idealism; he took part in the explosion of small press publishing in Toronto; and he guided the Canadian Writers' Union. He is best known for a set of works dubbed his Salem novels, set in the countryside around Kingston, Ontario. He received acclaim for his final two novels, Last Seen (1996) and Elizabeth and After (1999). Other literary achievements include numerous excellent short stories, poetry, translations from French to English, and popular children's books, which he wrote under the pseudonym Teddy Jam. Typing takes the reader by surprise, with its recollection of the impact on Cohen of his immigrant grandparents and with its portrait of the particular struggle of one Jewish writer to find footing for himself in Canadian literature.
[Norman Ravvin (2nd ed.)]