Ozar Taamei Hazal אוצר טעמי חז״ל

New York: Shulsinger Bros. Linotyping & Publishing Co, 1939. Hardcover. xv, 678p., hardcover with minor shelfwear to edges of boards, spine ends and covers rubbed. Text in Hebrew. A thesaurus of Talmudic interpretations of Biblical verses, by the grandfather of the noted singer / songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. One of those to whom the book is dedicated is Leonard Cohen's father Nathan; Leonard himself (not quite five years old at the time) is mentioned near the end of the preface, in the middle of the unnumbered page following xv. In a 1993 interview with Arthur Kurtzweil, Cohen said of his grandfather that "My mother's father, 'Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline' is the way that they transcribed his name in the publications that were printed here. He was known as Sar HaDikduki, the Prince of Grammarians. And he wrote a thesaurus of Talmudic interpretation and a dictionary of synonyms and homonyms. They were used in institutions of higher learning until Israel took over the grammatical institution. He was a wonderful man, and my mother always used to tell me that 'people came from 100 miles' to hear him speak. My grandfather was the principal of a yeshiva in Kovno. He was a disciple of Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan and, in fact, my grandfather closed his teacher's eyes when his teacher died. He had a very strong secular side to him. He rode, for instance. He liked to ride horses. He was a kind of confrontational teacher, especially when he got to New York, where he ended up. He came first to Atlanta, where his daughter married into the Alexander family of Georgia, who were Jews who arrived in 1708, and he originally moved to Atlanta. But there was nothing there for him in Atlanta, so he moved to New York and he became part of the Forward and that group of Yiddish writers, although I don't think he contributed to any of the newspapers. But he kept on with his grammatical and Talmudic studies.