By A.R. Hoffman<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People have been singing about wars for just as long as they have been fighting them. The poet Homer and the prophetess Deborah both wove together melody and military, and no doubt songs will emerge from the battle for Kiev just as they did from those for Troy and Mount Tabor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Art may be just an interloper on the battlefield, but it nearly always shows up. Wherever you find the brutal, the beautiful is sure to never be far behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That juxtaposition is the beating heart of journalist Matti Friedman\u2019s new book, \u201cWho By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai,\u201d out March 29 from Spiegel & Grau. It centers on a trip the singer and songwriter made to the front to perform for Israel Defense Forces troops during the early and perilous days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the Jewish state was nearly surprised out of existence by invading Arab armies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a story Mr. Friedman is well positioned to tell. A journalist from Canada who moved to Israel and served in the army, he is quickly assembling a suite of books that tell Israel\u2019s story with insight and grace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Aleppo Codex,\u201d \u201cPumpkin Flowers,\u201d and \u201cSpies of No Country\u201d each are modest in their premises \u2014 an old Torah scroll, a memoir of fighting in Lebanon, an obscure unit of Arab-speaking spies \u2014 but elegant in their execution and illuminating in their scope. \u201cWho By Fire\u201d is a worthy addition to this library of insight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Cohen made his way to Tel Aviv from the Greek island of Hydra, he was nearly 40 and the Jewish state was just 25. Cohen grew up up the scion of Montreal Jewish royalty and showed great poetic promise at McGill, only to flee his family and his synagogue for the life of the 1960s, his version of which he found on Hydra, a rock in the midst of endless azure water and sun enough to make him forget Canadian winter.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By 1973 Cohen was famous \u2014 if not the global icon he would become in the ensuing decades \u2014 with \u201cSuzanne,\u201d \u201cSo Long, Marianne,\u201d \u201cSisters of Mercy,\u201d and \u201cBird on a Wire\u201d having already been released. Three years before he had performed to an audience of 500,000 at the Isle of Wight music festival. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the time he reached Israel, Cohen\u2019s early star was no longer at its brightest. He was not a prodigy anymore, and the promise of his school day literary career seemed to have given way to something far more bitter: what he described as living \u201cinside of hatred and keeping to my side of the bed and always screaming, \u2018No, this can\u2019t be my life,\u2019 inside my head.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The man who decided to go to Israel was pushed just as much by a sense of Zionist longing. He was worried that he \u201cwould not get the blessing,\u201d an especially dire fate for someone descended from the priests of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem whose ancestral job it was to dispense benedictions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The existence of what Mr. Friedman calls \u201ca concert tour, maybe one of the greatest, certainly one of the strangest\u201d ever taken is a certainty, but those hoping for a minute-by-minute transcription won\u2019t find one. It lives on as \u201cunderground history,\u201d and pinning down exactly why Cohen went and what he did once he was there is akin to counting grains of sand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even those who heard him sing on the front lines couldn\u2019t quite believe that he was there, and have marveled at it. One soldier recalls that \u201cthe presence of Leonard Cohen at this field hospital was so unlikely that he may not have believed it was actually happening.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The difficulty in reconstructing the details of Cohen\u2019s series of performances at the front during the war pushes Mr. Friedman to reportorial doggedness and literary creativity. This is a book that feels a little bit like a Leonard Cohen song \u2014 straightforward and also elliptical, telling the truth \u201cslant,\u201d in Emily Dickinon\u2019s memorable phrase.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n