New Book - Who By Fire, Matti Friedman

[TGuy]

Canadian born Israeli author and journalist Matti Friedman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matti_Friedman
has published a book titled (in Hebrew) "Who By Fire, Leonard Cohen in the Yom Kippur War".

The book unfolds LC's arrival in Israel as war breaks out in October 1973 and his "enlistment" by Israeli artists to tour with them and entertain the troops.

"Leonard Cohen's tour in the Yom Kippur war is Israeli mythology, but few details surrounding it are known. Cohen almost never spoke of the experience, but it resonated deeply with him. This is evident from his songs and life. It is expressed in lost texts found in the archives of his estate.

In Who By Fire Matti Friedman weaves a dramatic story of an exceptional artist, who maintained a complex relationship with his Jewish roots and Identity. He returns to the place where the unique relationship between Leonard Cohen and Israel was born."

The English translation is scheduled to be published at the end of March 2022.
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Fire-Atoneme ... 143&sr=8-1

[LisaLCFan]

This book sounds very interesting -- I'll certainly be awaiting the English translation. Thanks for the info!

[B4real]

Lisa & all,
At my request in the 'never-ending gallery' thread, Geoffrey has kindly provided for me two days ago a couple of links, inadvertently at the time, referring to this book - https://www.leonardcohenforum.com/viewt ... 10#p377414

[LisaLCFan]

Thanks, Bev -- I did see those links, and I also read a few other things about the book elsewhere, which led me to believe that it may be an interesting read!

Cheers!

[WiTS]

english version
Publication date 14 Apr 2022
https://www.bookdepository.com/Who-by-F ... 982&sr=1-3

[B4real]

More info on this book including the original lines Leonard wrote about the Israeli soldiers.
(they were previously written in my Sept 2021 link above, courtesy of Geoffrey)

Tour Of Duty: When Leonard Cohen Serenaded Ariel Sharon On The Battlefield

https://www.thenorthatlanticleague.com/ ... ttlefield/

October 1973 may be the most horrific month in Israeli history. During this much-documented time, when approximately 2,300 Israeli soldiers were killed during the Yom Kippur War, a surprising figure who seemingly had nothing to do with the bloody events was there on the front lines. Just like Israel, he was also soul-searching.

Leonard Cohen’s Sinai tour during the 19-day war enjoys a relatively prominent place in Israeli lore, but is less well-known among his global fan base. This is understandable: Cohen rarely spoke of his journey into the desert. However, many Israeli soldiers, whose brutal battles with Egyptian forces were interspersed with serenades of “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne,” would never forget him.

As a Jewish-Canadian journalist and Israel Defense Forces combat veteran, as well as the author of three books that explore little-known tales from Israeli and Jewish history, Matti Friedman is uniquely qualified to recount the story of Cohen and the Yom Kippur War – which he does expertly in “Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.”

“I’m always looking for stories that seem marginal but that say something big,” Friedman tells Haaretz in an interview. “I wanted to use the war to see Leonard Cohen the singer in a different light and use the singer to see the war in a different light.”

Unlike most books about the war, which deal primarily with the battles and politicians, Friedman shows how music touched those going through some of the most difficult moments of their lives.

The idea came to him during a Cohen concert at Ramat Gan Stadium back in September 2009. The singer-songwriter had disappeared from the public eye for well over a decade, living in a Buddhist monastery, only making a comeback after discovering that his manager had emptied his bank account.

The music of his fellow Canadian meant a lot to Friedman, but he was surprised by how connected Israelis were to him too. Around the time of the concert, he read an article in an Israeli newspaper about the 1973 visit, which helped him understand why Israelis loved Cohen, and he began researching the book.What started with the sporadic gathering of newspaper clippings eventually led to a surprise discovery: 35 pages of Cohen’s unfiltered thoughts typed upon returning from Israel, held in the archives of the Canadian publishing company McClelland & Stewart as part of an unpublished memoir, “Final Revisions of My Life in Art.”

Friedman says Cohen’s writing helped him understand something he’d never realized before: “Our crisis in the Yom Kippur War was in some ways a way out of his own crisis.”

Cohen had just turned 39, was frustrated with his music and had recently announced his retirement. His relationship with his then-partner Suzanne Elrod, with whom he had a child, was also falling apart.

Besides this, Cohen’s religious upbringing had led to his Judaism becoming a greater part of his identity, which led him to seeing Israel as a sort of long-lost home. He performed there for the first time in a year and a half before the war in Tel Aviv. When the war broke out, along with the need to get away from his home on the Greek island of Hydra, it felt natural for him to be there.

Singer without a guitar
It’s not clear what Cohen intended to do upon his arrival shortly after the war began on October 6. Perhaps he planned to volunteer on a kibbutz that was missing workers who had been sent to the war. Performing for the soldiers wasn’t apparently on his mind – after all, he had arrived in Israel without his guitar.

However, by total chance, Cohen was recognized by singer Oshik Levi and actress-singer Ilana Rubina (aka Rovina) while sitting at a cafe in Tel Aviv. Levi convinced Cohen to play for the soldiers and quickly assembled a band that included future Israeli star Matti Caspi, just 23 at the time.

At an air base where he would give his first performance of the war, Cohen wrote “Lover Lover Lover,” including a verse about Israeli soldiers – which was later removed when the song was recorded in 1974. Friedman discovered these lyrics in a notebook that Cohen’s estate gave him access to, and are revealed for the first time in his book:

“I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight

I knew that they weren’t wrong

I knew that they weren’t right

But bones must stand up straight and walk

And blood must move around

And men go making ugly lines

Across the holy ground.”

“Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai” author Matti Friedman.
Mary Anderson
In order to piece together what had taken place in Sinai, Friedman also interviewed Israelis who had seen the musician there. This was how he discovered that the tour’s logistics were dictated by the chaos of war. In fact, there is no official record to prove that Cohen was even there. The singer-songwriter himself had no idea where he was being taken to or where he was; his manuscript refers to the whole Sinai area as “The Desert.”

One of the few performance dates Friedman was able to verify with any level of certainty, October 14, was because a soldier recalled seeing Cohen the day after a well-known Israeli general, Albert Mendler, had been killed in action.

He also reveals how the process for deciding where Cohen would perform was often an argument between representatives of different units as to who had more dead soldiers and was therefore more deserving of a concert.

Leonard Cohen performing for Israeli soldiers in Sinai. Some performances were deep into enemy lines.
Isaac Shokal

Deep impression
The best example of the chaos surrounding the tour is its most iconic image, where Cohen is seen singing for dozens of soldiers. Standing next to him is then-Maj. Gen. Ariel Sharon. The photograph was taken at an Egyptian air base on the southern side of the Suez Canal. How Cohen was allowed so deep into enemy territory is unclear. Sharon’s son, Gilad, told Friedman he had no recollection of his father ever mentioning Leonard Cohen. Indeed, Friedman speculates that the army general had no idea who Cohen even was.

In the manuscript, Cohen wrote that he would often be driven around in the middle of the night, until his jeep happened upon tired soldiers. He would sing a few songs for them, and then move on.

The sight of musicians performing for soldiers during wartime often looks absurd. There is archival footage of an IDF entertainment troupe performing for soldiers in the Golan Heights during the war, in which the performers are seen helplessly smiling and clapping in a bid to perk up the shell-shocked combatants.

The dissonance between the soldiers’ experiences and those of the troupes and their cheerful songs would often have the opposite effect of what was intended. But something about Cohen performing his melancholic songs, and then later sleeping under the same conditions and eating the same rations as the soldiers, seemed to leave a far deeper impression on those who saw him. The sense was that he truly identified with those in battle.

The book gives some surprising insights into who Leonard Cohen was. Unlike the sweet, fedora-wearing elderly gentleman most are familiar with from his later years, Friedman says the Cohen who showed up in Sinai – at least as far as his writings reveal – was a dark and flawed character, both angry and depressed. He was driven by lust, treated women awfully and was totally self-involved.

Also, the writer notes, Cohen’s knowledge of Judaism and its entrenchment in his identity was surprisingly deep. This is a key theme of the book and explains how his affiliation with the Jewish people motivated him to go to Sinai. During the tour, those there say he asked them to call him by his Hebrew name, Eliezer.

However, when he found himself feeling relieved that the dead soldiers being brought in on a helicopter were Egyptian and not Israeli, he became disgusted with himself and realized that he had allowed his tribal instincts to push him too far. He felt that as a poet, his work needed to have a universal outreach. He would backtrack even further years later and say that “Lover Lover Lover” was written for the Egyptian and Israeli soldiers. “In that order,” Friedman emphasizes.

The author believes, though, that Cohen never ran away from his Jewish identity; he just wrestled with it. The title track on his final album, “You Want It Darker” – released a few weeks before his death in November 2016 – featured the cantor from his synagogue. And even though Cohen wrote a poem in the 1980s that was scathingly critical of Israel, being a critic of Israel is a big part of being Jewish, Friedman argues.

Cohen’s manuscript reveals another previously unexplored aspect of his Judaism: his preoccupation with his being a Kohen – a high priest in the Jewish tradition who is believed to be descended from Moses’ brother, Aaron. He wrote often of a spiritual role that required him to call down for divine protection in the name of the community.

In retrospect, it is impossible to fully understand Leonard Cohen without examining this chapter in his life. A musician who had recently called time on his career would, just four months after the war, be recording his fourth album, “New Skin for the Old Ceremony,” which contained the war anthem “Lover Lover Lover” and “Who By Fire,” whose lyrics were inspired by the Yom Kippur liturgy. His Sinai tour gave him a full understanding of who he was as an artist, Jew and man.

Perhaps more than anything, Friedman’s book is a reminder of how the world’s relationship with Israel has changed in the decades since. Nowadays, Israeli military operations draw global condemnation and performers are increasingly pressured to boycott the country. But in October 1973, as the state fought its bloodiest war since gaining independence, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century not only came, but traveled deep into enemy territory to share his music during the nation’s darkest hour.

“Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai,” by Matti Friedman, is published by Spiegel & Grau and is out on March 29.

[Geoffrey]

courtesy of Geoffrey

saint.jpg (2.56 KiB) Viewed 6559 times

[B4real]

courtesy of Geoffrey

saint.jpg

“I practiced on my sainthood
I gave to one and all”.....

[Geoffrey]

"i practiced on my sainthood, i gave to one and all . . ."

the mood of 'came so far for beauty' always makes me think of 'adagio cantabile'

[lizzytysh]

Thanks for posting that long review, Bev. It has been frustrating over the years to pretty much just see that photo that we're all familiar with, and that's it. It's heartening to know that we can now find out more about the time he spent with the soldiers, and that the information is substantive. I look forward to reading this book.

~ Lizzie

[B4real]

Always my pleasure, Lizzie

Here's a couple more links to do with that time for Leonard and his song Who By Fire -

https://blog.nli.org.il/en/leonard-cohen-sinai/

“I am in my myth home but I have no proof and I cannot debate and I am in no danger of believing myself …
Speaking no Hebrew I enjoy my legitimate silence.”

https://plus61j.net.au/editors-picks/yo ... n-classic/

He cites the Yom Kippur liturgy and shifts the focus from a theological message to an inquisitive investigation into the mystery of death, almost flirting with the thought of how one may die – by fire, by water, by powder, in the snow or in spring. Instead of the fear to die Cohen practices intimate contemplation with the concept of death.

[lizzytysh]

Thanks for those links and additional quotes, Bev. VERY interesting.

[phillip]

Getting the book tomorrow for my birthday can't wait

[ForYourSmile]

This book offers few new things. I found interesting the references to Cohen's orange notebook and an unpublished short fragment of an interview by Sylvie Simmons with Cohen. The testimonies interviewed are indirect and dubious. The most interesting would have been those of Ilana Rubina and Matti Caspi, but they did not agree to be interviewed. Matti Caspi said that he had nothing to add, that there was no close connection between them and that he does not want to fill in any blank spaces, which seems to me to be an honest attitude. The days of the Yom Kippur war were transcendental for Cohen, but he avoided giving explanations. He was born a Jew, procreated a Jew, died a Jew and went to Sinai alongside his Jewish brothers.

The apparent great contribution is found in a supposed typewritten manuscript by Cohen opportunely discovered by librarian Chris Long in a cardboard box in the McClelland & Stewart archive at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. It was just what Matti Friedman needed to offer something new in his book, “…which was exactly what I was looking for…” he said in an interview.

In chapter 3, Friedman warns us that he has cut and corrected the manuscript. At the end he has left not much. Friedman seems to think he can abbreviate and correct Cohen's work and improve it for Cohen's readers. Great! I have read all of Cohen's published work, including “A Ballet of Lepers”, more than once, and I do not recognize Cohen in this manuscript.

Friedman describes the war scenario that Cohen found from one side of the conflict, this is reasonable. But he gets lost in stories and photos that have little to do with it and that take up most of the book, possibly with a different intention than documenting Cohen's presence. He exposes his radical political point of view closely linked to religion. It is difficult to classify the literary genre of that book, it is not exactly biography. He seems to enjoy recounting war exploits. He shamelessly recounts war crimes as a way of finishing the job (Yukon, chapter 18). (At least that part of the book is not fiction, the criminal has name and surname and we know where he lives with impunity, Friedman interviewed to his admired criminal in 2020).

The ex-military Friedman writes (chapter 20) that the singer who called himself “Field Commander Cohen” and his band “The Army” believe that war is a metaphor or an ironic pose. For the blond commander (here Friedman refers to the criminal) war was a daily terror with real corpses, friends and enemies, fallen in the sand. The poet knows beauty, morality and the criminal who uses violence to create the security bubble where poets can ignore criminal actions; they can even condemn the people who carry them out. Here I see a certain disdain directed at Leonard Cohen, right?

In reality, the criminal does not provide any security, creates hate. On the other side they also fight to defend themselves, they also have their heroes, their martyrs and their criminals. This is how the spiral of violence, pain and terror grows for the enjoyment of the “Masters of War” that Dylan denounced, those who play to increase their geostrategic power.

That war in the desert was between soldiers, they went to kill and die, some survived somehow. Some went voluntarily, some did not. They were soldiers and it was a war. It is not a war when the objective is the annihilation of a people.

Today I have no hope of having your smile,

~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~

https://www.leonardcohenforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=4978
LC and the Yom Kippur war , 1973 - 2005 2014.

https://www.leonardcohenforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=14874
Help - photos of LC from the Yom Kippur war - 2009 2017.

https://www.israellycool.com/2016/11/11 ... ippur-war/
When Leonard Cohen Performed For Israeli Troops During The Yom Kippur War. By David Lange 2016.

https://ha-dibuk.blogspot.com/2019/06/blog-post_89.html By Eran Rusk 2019.
Ilana Rovina recounts the encounter with Cohen in a Tel Aviv café, similar version to the book (translate.google.com):

"We were sitting in a 'corner' cafe in Tel Aviv, Mati, Ushik, Popik and I - and we got ready for the performance, and Ushik said: 'This man sitting there alone looks like to Leonard Cohen'. I said to him: 'You would have died', but he said: 'Oh dear, it's Leonard Cohen.' he approached him and asked: 'Are you Leonard Cohen?' And the man said: 'Yes'. We invited him to sit with us, we said To him that we are singers and we asked what he was doing in Israel. He said: 'I heard there was a war so I came Volunteer to work in the kibbutzim in the harvest and release some guys to the army. We told him that now there is no harvest And we offered him to come perform with us, so he said he was a pacifist. We told him we were not fighting but perform then he said he didn't have a guitar. "We called Oded Feldman, who was the culture officer of Air Force, and in a second there was a guitar. This is how we moved between the outposts for several months, the soldiers They just didn't believe it. It was at a time when he was an idol in Israel, and he was also very excited. Leonard was then at the height of his popularity, the youth adored him. When the soldiers heard that he was coming to perform To their face, they thought they were being made fun of. When he arrived with us there was an excitement that is simply hard to describe. It was a surreal spectacle”.

https://www.hamiltonjewishnews.com/news ... manuscript
McMaster’s Leonard Cohen manuscript. By Wendy Schneider 2022.

“Cohen never seems to have mentioned it afterwards,” said Friedman. “It was clearly a difficult experience for him, and yet, I didn’t have his own words about what had happened, and that was obviously a gaping hole at the centre of my book project.”

When Friedman reached out to Long that day, he was following up on a footnote in a 1990s Cohen biography that referred to a manuscript in the university’s McCLelland and Stewart archive. It felt like a shot in the dark, which turned out to be the case. For Long was unable to find any mention of the manuscript at first, and it was only on further investigation that he found the mystery manuscript in a box in an off-site storage facility in Dundas.

“I was astounded by it,” Long, a long-time Leonard Cohen fan, told the HJN, recalling the moment he first laid eyes on the 44-page typewritten document that he immediately scanned and forwarded to Friedman. Friedman was just as excited. “He said very pointedly that the document was fascinating, that it would be very significant to his research and that it was real and raw Leonard Cohen … that was very exciting for us,” Long says.

Friedman told the HJN that finding the manuscript felt “like striking gold.” “I hadn’t been sure that this manuscript even existed or that it could be found. And then, suddenly, there it was,” he says. “I opened it and realized what I was seeing, which was exactly what I was looking for. That doesn’t happen a lot in journalism that you get exactly what you were looking for. But here was Cohen in the first person telling us not only what had happened in kind of journalistic language, but also what it felt like in very Cohenesque, often very difficult, sometimes obscene, but always interesting prose.”

https://thecjn.ca/arts/matti-friedman-montreal/
The Canadian Jewish News, What was the guy who wrote “Suzanne” doing in the Sinai?’: Matti Friedman talked about Leonard Cohen—and his own writing about Israel—during a visit to Montreal. By Hannah Srour-Zackon 2022.

https://everythingzoomer.com/zed-book-c ... ippur-war/
The Story Behind Leonard Cohen’s 1973 Concerts for Israeli Troops Fighting the Yom Kippur War. By Kim Hughes 2022.

Even if the backstory was begging to be told, it wasn’t easy. For one thing, Cohen didn’t detail it in his notebooks, which Friedman flew to Los Angeles to read. He had to piece together the narrative through interviews with those who saw Cohen play or who had performed in his local pick-up bands; through photographs snapped by soldiers at the shows (many included in Who By Fire); and through a deep dive into the archives of his publisher, McClelland & Stewart, at the McMaster University library in Hamilton, Ont. At McMaster, Friedman uncovered a 45-page manuscript, housed in a box, that Cohen typed on the Greek island of Hydra (where he lived with his partner, Suzanne Elrod, and their son, Adam), shortly after he got back from Israel.
“The entire document is too long to print in full,” Friedman writes, “so I’ve taken the liberty – with great trepidation – of abridging the text to distill the narrative of his journey to Sinai.”
Even so, the manuscript is cryptic and impressionistic. It is also, as Friedman writes, “often livid and obscene. The way he writes about women, and the way he related to them, was part of the style of those days, but it is out of step with our own times.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFH1Q16g_10 Aya Korem àéä ëåøí - îé áàù

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Luz4weTydPk Unetaneh Tokef (Yair Rosenblum) - Cantor Sydney Michaeli

https://matticaspi.co.il/en/%d7%99%d7%a ... %95%d7%94/
The Geneva Conference / Leonard Cohen by Matti Caspi

Video and photo from Matti Caspi web:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAMSdPAcUto&t=18s
Ilana Rubina and Matti Caspi - We Have No Words, Lyrics: Oshik Levy, Ilana Rubina, Matti Caspi and Popik Arnon, Music: Matti Caspi