Leonard Cohen during his visit to Israel during the war in 1973. One of the strangest concert tours in the annals of rock, it has lived on in Israel as a kind of underground history.Yaakovi Doron/Courtesy of McClelland & Stewart
Matti Friedman’s latest book is Who by Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen. He lives in Jerusalem.
The reputation of an artist, even a great one, tends to fade after their death. Leonard Cohen is one of the few exceptions. From the mural towering over Montreal to the half-dozen new books about him just in the past year or two, the pull of Mr. Cohen’s words and music are at least as strong as when he was still onstage.
For Canadians, Mr. Cohen is primarily a national icon, maybe the most significant artist to come out of the country – born in Montreal, of course, known first as a rebellious and profane Canadian writer, living off Canada Council grants before he ever became famous in America and beyond as the “poet of rock.” Much has been written about what made Mr. Cohen tick, and about the influences that shaped his songs: the old port of Montreal, the electricity of Greenwich Village in the days of Joan Baez and Nico, the Greek island of Hydra, the Hebrew Bible, the Catholic Church, the folk music of Quebec. But almost nothing has been written about what may have been one of the key experiences of his life, an episode that seems almost completely removed from the ordinary course of that life, and thus remains hard to grasp. I mean the time he walked into a war in the Middle East, changed the people who saw him and changed himself.
October, 1973, was a dark month in different ways. Mr. Cohen was in a crisis, or multiple crises. He was 39, a fraught age for anyone, stalked by depression and felt trapped in unhappy domesticity. He was a new father; Mr. Cohen and his partner, Suzanne, had welcomed their son, Adam, the previous year. He thought his career was stuck and that his songs weren’t working. A few months earlier he’d announced his retirement. “I just feel like I want to shut up,” he told a reporter.
Then, on Oct. 6, a different kind of crisis erupted, this one in Israel. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar, when the Egyptian and Syrian armies launched surprise attacks on two fronts. Israel was caught off guard, its border defences overrun, the country’s vaunted air force crippled by new Soviet missiles, and the country plunged into shock and despair. Surprising the people around him, and quite possibly surprising himself, Mr. Cohen caught a plane to Tel Aviv.
What happened next – one of the strangest concert tours in the annals of rock – has lived on in Israel as a kind of underground history, a story that was never quite written down, but whose importance to people here continues to grow. Mr. Cohen remains a beloved figure in Israel, perhaps the most revered foreign artist. Newspaper articles are published about his visit every fall, before the anniversary of the outbreak of fighting on Yom Kippur. I spent years looking into what happened – how he experienced it, of course, and how it shaped his art, but also how this was all remembered by the young Israelis who encountered him at the worst moment of their lives. A 19-year-old radar operator, for example, who heard him play after the destruction of her base and the death of five friends on the first night of the war. Or an army doctor called out of an overwhelmed field hospital when someone said that Leonard Cohen was outside, which was utterly impossible but turned out to be true, and who stood in his bloody smock and heard Suzanne. Or an infantryman who, after some of the worst battles in the Egyptian desert around the time of the Israeli counter-attack across the Suez Canal, found the singer by a remote encampment at night, sitting on a helmet and strumming his guitar. “It is,” the soldier told me, “as if you’re walking in the desert and God comes down to you and starts speaking. I was like Moses hearing the voice, and I walked toward it.”
Leonard Cohen singing with Israeli soliders, 1973Isaac Shokai/Courtesy of McClelland & Stewart
I began looking into the story simply because it seemed like such an unlikely confluence of my parts of my own life in Canada and in Israel – a singer who seemed always to be intoning obscure wisdom in the background of my Toronto childhood, and one of the great traumas of the Middle Eastern country where I live and work as a journalist. The story of Mr. Cohen in Sinai seemed like a window into the way we all build our identities from odd and sometimes contradictory pieces of the past.
To the extent that Cohen fans are aware of this episode at all, some assume that he played a few Bob Hope-style concerts in the rear. That’s not the case. Mr. Cohen was picked up in a Tel Aviv café by Israeli musicians who were going to sing for troops, and who persuaded him to come along. They formed a pickup band. He ended up not only at the front but at its very extremity, crossing the Suez Canal just a day or two behind Israeli forces and placing himself in grave danger. He drove in a Jeep between small units scattered in the sands, using ammunition crates for a stage and headlights for illumination. The enemy was close, the desert strewn with bodies.
After the war, Robin Pike of the British music magazine ZigZag asked Mr. Cohen if he’d been scared to die. Yes, Mr. Cohen replied, once or twice: “But you get caught up in the thing. And the desert is beautiful and you think your life is meaningful for a moment or two.” In his own unpublished writing about the war, however – particularly a remarkable manuscript kept at McMaster University – the singer is clearly disturbed by what he’s seeing. At one point he breaks down after watching a helicopter land with a load of wounded soldiers and finds himself relieved to be told that these aren’t Israelis, but Egyptians. He’d been driven to come here out of his deep identification with the Jews, and even asked the other musicians to call him by his Hebrew name, Eliezer. But now he thought his humanity had been undermined by tribal allegiance. “My relief amazes me,” he wrote. “I hate this. I hate my relief. This cannot be forgiven. This is blood on your hands.”
One of the songs beloved of Mr. Cohen fans, Lover Lover Lover, was written during these weeks, at an Israeli air force base. It was first performed for air crews just back from running the deadly gauntlet of anti-aircraft missiles over the battlefield, and just before taking off again. He played for them knowing it might be the last thing they heard. And there are other echoes of the war in his work, like Who By Fire, his famous riff on a medieval Yom Kippur prayer that lists the many ways we might die in the coming year. Or Night Comes On, which includes a striking memory of “fighting in Egypt” in a list of intimate chapters in his life. But Mr. Cohen was cagey in interviews, reluctant to link his work to actual events, perhaps fearing that his poetry would be reduced to mere journalism, or that he’d be perceived as being on one side. One of the most remarkable aspects of this story, considering how deep he went into the war and how strong the impression he made, was how seldom he mentioned it afterward. That left me with a challenge and an opportunity – the history here was uncharted and often tricky to navigate, but it was virgin territory.
Mr. Cohen went into the war believing that he might be finished. He seems to have been hoping for some kind of renewal, referring to Israel in his manuscript as “a place where you may begin again.” Incredibly, this seems to have worked. Something happened in Sinai. Had he faded that year we wouldn’t have Hallelujah, Anthem, Everybody Knows, or other masterpieces, and music history would be different. But a few months after the cease-fire he released one of his best albums, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, and continued to one of the most storied careers in popular music. If he’d lost his creative thread at 39 it wouldn’t have come as a surprise – most singers don’t even make it that far. What’s unique is how he refused to burn out, the way the singer, surrounded by death, brought himself back to life.
Leonard Cohen sings to Israeli troops during his tour of Israel during the war in 1973. Mr. Cohen remains a beloved figure in the country, perhaps the most revered foreign artist.Isaac Shokai/Courtesy of McClelland & Stewart
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