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Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai
By
Published: Sep 24, 2023
Category:
Biography
In 1973, Leonard Cohen was 39. Living on Hydra, with Suzanne and their child, he was a cult favorite — in France, it was said that if a girl had only one album, it was his — but he was miserable. He felt trapped by his family. He found relief only with women and drugs.
Then, on Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel.
There is a tradition in Israel that when troops are engaged, musicians travel to the front lines to perform for the soldiers, but when Cohen rushed to Israel, he intended to volunteer on a kibbutz — he’d help with the harvest while others went off to fight. How little he knew: it wasn’t harvest time. He could be more useful, he was told, if he’d entertain the troops. He balked. He had no guitar, his songs were sad, he was a pacifist. His objections were brushed aside. He was drafted into the musicians’ brigade.
In the 19-day war, Cohen lived with soldiers, slept on the ground, ate combat rations, sang for as few as a dozen men, then rode in a van to the next gathering, performing a few songs eight times a day. “I came to raise their spirits,” he said, “and they raised mine.” It could be no other way. His signature tone was seriousness, urgency, the eternal. In Israel the environment matched his message. After each concert, the men went back to war. “He knew his music might be the last thing they heard,” Matti Friedman writes. “This isn’t Woodstock. It isn’t a night out. Everyone’s sober. The stakes are high.”
It is remarkable that only a line or two about this chapter of Cohen’s life is even mentioned in the otherwise voluminous Cohen chronicles. We know it now because Matti Friedman has published “Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.” This is a short book, just 200 pages. But it’s rich in characters as fascinating as Cohen. Some are soldiers who will die, some are survivors who will live long and share vivid memories. And there are passages from Cohen’s unpublished writing about the war.
For lovers of Cohen’s music — and at this point, who doesn’t respond to his songs? — this is a necessary book. In Hydra, he felt his music was at a dead end, he thought he should retire. In Israel, in the presence of death, he found a new purpose. With typical understatement: “There are suggestions here and there that I was useful.” Friedman puts it more directly — the Yom Kippur War marked a turning point and major event in Cohen’s life. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Of course he sang “Suzanne,” and it was a healing. As Friedman writes, “The men are quiet. They hear about a place that doesn’t have blackened tanks and figures lying still in charred coveralls.” Maybe even more helpful were two songs he wrote in Israel. He closed a show with one of them: “I said to myself perhaps I can protect some people with this song.” That song is “Lover, Lover, Lover.” To watch Cohen perform it, click here.
The second song is “Who by Fire.” It addresses the central question of Yom Kippur: in the year ahead, what is written for me? There’s no question more personal and more solemn. For soldiers who are facing that question every day of the war, it commands silence and reflection. From the lyrics:
And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the nighttime
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?
To watch a mesmerizing performance, click here.
In 1968, Viking published my first book. In the full-page ad in the Sunday Times Book Review, it was photographed leaning against Cohen’s novel, “Beautiful Losers.” Leonard Cohen was a god to me, and I was 22, and nothing that happened for me because of that book mattered as much as that proximity to Cohen.
This is what I took away from the experience of reading “Who by Fire”: At a certain age, we all know what it means to have an identity the world recognizes and not know how to shed it and find the next one. This is a book about how an artist stumbled, reached for a handhold, found one he didn’t expect, and was rewarded with a sustaining path. What a humbling, hopeful message.
BONUS LINKS
I have written about Cohen often, both on Butler and in the Times. Start here.
