In 1973, Leonard Cohen announced he was done with music for good. The same year, in October, war broke out in Israel.
The Yom Kippur War would become the bloodiest in Israel’s young history—and Cohen was there to witness it. As the war broke out, he left his home on the Greek island of Hydra to fly into the warzone.
Leonard Cohen never said much about why he went to the front. What we know is that in the months that followed, he would write “Who By Fire.” Five decades later, on Spotify and in synagogue, you can still hear the echoes of this trip.
So what was it that happened in the desert in October of 1973 between this depressed musician and these too young soldiers going off to battle? How did it remake Leonard Cohen? How did it transform those who heard him play? And how did the war transform Israel itself?
Those are just some of the questions Matti Friedman explains in his beautiful new book Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.
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I'm catching up on some older Honestly podcasts and came across the first episode I could not finish. I knew little about Leonard Cohen and thought the premise of the story was fascinating, but Matti Friedman was infuriating. Nearly 3,000 Israelis and maybe 15,000 Arabs died in a war intended to wipe Israel off the map and Matti Friedman thinks it's all absolutely hilarious,. He could barely finish a sentence without giggling. He tells us about Cohen playing for soldiers who had been witnessing their friends being killed in front of them, and who knew they might not survive the week themselves, and that's good for titters from Friedman. Friedman also thinks it funny that Leonard Cohen played for patients in a French mental hospital, which was worth a good giggle, too. I have to wonder if his book is full of one-liners about how many dead soldiers you can fit under the tracks of a tank. Bari, you can do much better than this misanthrope. Fortunately, since then you have.