‘Who By Fire’ recalls Leonard Cohen’s songs for the troops
So much of it feels like a dream. First there is the Yom Kippur War. On the Jewish Day of Atonement in October 1973, Syrian and Egyptian military forces attacked Israel on two fronts. Three weeks later, Israel essentially defeated both armies but suffered heavy casualties. Over 10,000 people died as a result of the conflict. Israelis who fought in the war, or lived through it, are aging, their memories of events sometimes still clear but often gauzy.
Then, there is the appearance of poet/ songwriter Leonard Cohen on the desert battlefields of the war. Cohen lived on the island of Hydra at the time with his girlfriend and their young child. He was seriously debating whether he wanted to continue making music as a career and where he might next take his writing. After reading about the crisis in his “myth home,” however, he flew to Israel and offered impromptu mini-concerts for soldiers on and near the front lines of battle. Cohen rarely mentioned this experience afterward, and, with relatively few Israelis recognizing Cohen or his work at the time, his appearances before the troops have been rendered diaphanous.
Enter author Matti Friedman and his quest to depict Cohen’s wartime work as a rich, grounded, concrete event in “Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.” Through access to Cohen’s archived notebooks from the period and extensive interviews with people who lived in and fought for Israel in 1973, Friedman turns his search for proof and detail into part of the story itself. Could any of this really have happened? It did, and it makes for a compelling, if meandering, tale.
While Cohen is at the center of the story, and Friedman’s denouement beautifully ties together ideas about the artist’s craft, identity and connection to Israel, not everyone the author interviews agrees on what it meant to see the singer offering his songs on dangerous ground. Israeli musician Matti Caspi, who was part of some of the same performances as Cohen, offers only that “no close connection was formed between us, and
I don’t like filling holes in the air.” At the opposite end is Israeli brigadier general Amatzia “Patzi” Chen who led secretive combat missions during this war. He says that hearing Cohen play “‘ touched [ him] very deeply’” and reassures Friedman that anomalies like Cohen’s appearances are “the only kind of thing worth writing about a war.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, many ordinary people caught up in the fighting have stories at least as intriguing as Cohen’s. What could have been a mere device for contextualization proves a highlight of the book as Friedman weaves their narratives through the plot. There are the idealistic young women and men of Radar Station 528 whose military service felt like summer camp until the Yom Kippur War forces them into vital, unexpected roles. There are the Israeli musicians and entertainers like Oshik Levi, Ilana Rovina and Pupik Arnon who run into Cohen in a Tel Aviv cafe and convince him to come with them to entertain the troops…and who need to call an air force officer friend to hopefully score Cohen a guitar. There is Gidi Koren, a young doctor, who unexpectedly encounters
Cohen singing “Suzanne,” a song Koren once recorded in a translated Hebrew version, at his beleaguered field hospital.
And there is a young American medic trying to sleep off witnessing the carnage wrought by rocket attacks who suddenly hears a familiar voice nearby. Exhausted, he can’t make himself get up and investigate. “‘I thought, it can’t be true,’” he says. “‘But it’s a beautiful dream so I’m going to keep on dreaming.’” And thus he almost witnessed Leonard Cohen singing in the Sinai.
Kudos to Friedman for penning a brief, audacious, thorough book turning such a dream world unconventionally and surprisingly real.
“WHO BY FIRE: LEONARD COHEN IN THE SINAI” By Matti Friedman Spiegel & Grau ($27)