Tracing a Portrait of Leonard Cohen Through the Fog of War

‘Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai’By Matti FriedmanSpiegel & Grau, 224 pagesPeople have been singing about wars for just as long as they have been fighting them. The poet Homer and the prophetess Deborah both wove together melody and military, and no doubt songs will emerge from the battle for Kiev just as they did from those for Troy and Mount Tabor. Art may be just an interloper on the battlefield, but it nearly always shows up. Wherever you find the brutal, the beautiful is sure to never be far behind.That juxtaposition is the beating heart of journalist Matti Friedman’s new book, “Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai,” out March 29 from Spiegel & Grau. It centers on a trip the singer and songwriter made to the front to perform for Israel Defense Forces troops during the early and perilous days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the Jewish state was nearly surprised out of existence by invading Arab armies.This is a story Mr. Friedman is well positioned to tell. A journalist from Canada who moved to Israel and served in the army, he is quickly assembling a suite of books that tell Israel’s story with insight and grace. “The Aleppo Codex,” “Pumpkin Flowers,” and “Spies of No Country” each are modest in their premises — an old Torah scroll, a memoir of fighting in Lebanon, an obscure unit of Arab-speaking spies — but elegant in their execution and illuminating in their scope. “Who By Fire” is a worthy addition to this library of insight. When Cohen made his way to Tel Aviv from the Greek island of Hydra, he was nearly 40 and the Jewish state was just 25. Cohen grew up up the scion of Montreal Jewish royalty and showed great poetic promise at McGill, only to flee his family and his synagogue for the life of the 1960s, his version of which he found on Hydra, a rock in the midst of endless azure water and sun enough to make him forget Canadian winter. By 1973 Cohen was famous — if not the global icon he would become in the ensuing decades — with “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Bird on a Wire” having already been released. Three years before he had performed to an audience of 500,000 at the Isle of Wight music festival. By the time he reached Israel, Cohen’s early star was no longer at its brightest. He was not a prodigy anymore, and the promise of his school day literary career seemed to have given way to something far more bitter: what he described as living “inside of hatred and keeping to my side of the bed and always screaming, ‘No, this can’t be my life,’ inside my head.”The man who decided to go to Israel was pushed just as much by a sense of Zionist longing. He was worried that he “would not get the blessing,” an especially dire fate for someone descended from the priests of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem whose ancestral job it was to dispense benedictions. The existence of what Mr. Friedman calls “a concert tour, maybe one of the greatest, certainly one of the strangest” ever taken is a certainty, but those hoping for a minute-by-minute transcription won’t find one. It lives on as “underground history,” and pinning down exactly why Cohen went and what he did once he was there is akin to counting grains of sand. Even those who heard him sing on the front lines couldn’t quite believe that he was there, and have marveled at it. One soldier recalls that “the presence of Leonard Cohen at this field hospital was so unlikely that he may not have believed it was actually happening.”The difficulty in reconstructing the details of Cohen’s series of performances at the front during the war pushes Mr. Friedman to reportorial doggedness and literary creativity. This is a book that feels a little bit like a Leonard Cohen song — straightforward and also elliptical, telling the truth “slant,” in Emily Dickinon’s memorable phrase. His major coup was gaining access to a hitherto unpublished, 45-page manuscript that the singer wrote on his return to Greece. By also leaning on Cohen’s pocket notebooks and a smattering of photographs, Mr. Friedman gives us as much resolution as anyone can reasonably expect of an event that transpired behind the fog of war. While Cohen is at the center of this book, Mr. Friedman knows that the young men and women who were his audience before and after battle are themselves worthy of centerstage. This chorus delivers us not just an oral history of Cohen’s tour, but also a portrait of what it means to fight with desperation to save a place you love from the sword’s edge. It’s hard not to fall in love with these young soldiers, dashing and afraid and brave and dying by the hundreds just a quarter century after Auschwitz. We meet soldiers in one sentence and they are gone in the next, downed in an airplane or entombed in a tank. Or else they grow old and remember hearing Cohen singing to them. Some of these soldiers are known to only a few, while others like General Ariel Sharon would be heard from widely in the ensuing decades. Then there are those somewhere in between, like the legendary soldier Amatzia Chen, known as “Patzi.”In those less regimented days Patzi commanded his own unofficial brigade as a subset of the elite Almond Reconnaissance unit, operating with righteous outlaw abandon and ravaging Egyptian forces like Achilles on the plains of Troy. Mr. Friedman finds the old warrior on his kibbutz, and this most unsentimental of men, no flower child of the ’60’ but a hardened veteran of Israel’s wars, recalls asking one of his men who the Canadian singer was, and, “Someone said he was from Canada or God knows where, a Jew who came to raise the spirit of the fighters. It was Leonard Cohen. Since then, he has a corner of my heart.” Cohen wrote one song during his time in Sinai, “Lover Lover Lover,” though Mr. Friedman astutely notes that a stanza he performed then, in which he calls Israelis “my brothers,” was subsequently edited out. That is a shame, because the Cohen who moves through “Who By Fire” is not only a serious artist but a serious man. He asks for no special treatment at the front, eats combat rations, and never once complains. He crosses the Suez Canal and keeps on performing, sometimes for just a few soldiers in sweat-stained fatigues, their eyes drooping with lack of sleep. He sings next to corpses half shrouded in sand. Israelis still remember that in one of their darkest moments, when General Moshe Dayan worried about the “Third Temple falling,” or the state collapsing, a star from another galaxy briefly but indelibly came into their orbit. Cohen was a lothario with a penchant for uncanny verse and a priestly surname who showed up in war’s charnel house, and told the troops of the Jewish state — not “so long,” as he did in “So Long, Marianne,” but hineni, “Here I am.” However improbable, there he was.

Tracing a Portrait of Leonard Cohen Through the Fog of War

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