Some of the men on the sand look up at the visitor with his guitar. Others look down at their dirty knees and boots. Cigarettes glow in the dark. The heat has broken and the desert is still for now. They’ve been fighting for fourteen days and no one knows how many days are left, or how many of them will be left when it’s over. There aren’t any generals or heroes here. It’s just a small unit getting smaller. In the wastelands around them, thousands of Egyptians and Israelis are dead.
The visitor, dressed in khaki, is Leonard Cohen. This makes little sense to anyone at the outer extremity of the Sinai front in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Not long ago he was playing for a half million people at the Isle of Wight Festival, which was bigger than Woodstock. Here it’s a few dozen. None of the soldiers know how Leonard Cohen came to be here with them, or why.
Cohen is thirty-nine. He’s been brought low and thinks he’s finished. News of his retirement has appeared in the music press. “I just feel like I want to shut up. Just shut up,” he told an interviewer. He might have come to this country and this war looking for some desperate way out of his dead end, a way to transcend everything and sing again. If that’s what he was looking for, he seems to have found it, as we’ll see. Five decades later, on Spotify and in synagogue, you can still hear the echo of this trip. Anyone reading these lines remembers the elderly gentleman grinning out from under a fedora at packed concert halls around the world, and knows that in 1973 his greatest acts are yet to come. But right now this isn’t clear to him or to anyone else.
Cohen addresses the soldiers in solemn English. A reporter who is there describes the scene in a dispatch for a Hebrew music magazine. In the yellowing newsprint you can tell the reporter is a cynic. He mocks the star as “the great pacifist” come from abroad, a glorified tourist. A reader has the impression that the reporter doesn’t want to be moved but is.
When the soldiers join Cohen for the chorus of “So Long, Marianne,” their voices are the only sound in the desert. He introduces the next number. “This song is one that should be heard at home, in a warm room with a drink and a woman you love,” he says. “I hope you all find yourselves in that situation soon.” He plays “Suzanne.” The men are quiet. They hear about a place that doesn’t have blackened tanks and figures lying still in charred coveralls. It’s a city by a river, a perfect body, tea and oranges all the way from China. “They’re listening to his music,” writes the reporter, “but who knows where their thoughts are wandering.”
Sometimes an artist and an event interact to generate a spark far bigger than both: art that isn’t a mere memorial to whatever inspired it, but an assertion of human creativity in the face of all inhuman events. It isn’t necessary to know the convoluted course of Spain’s civil war to grasp Picasso’s Guernica. A listener can wonder at Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, composed amid the Napoleonic Wars, without recognizing the bars of a French revolutionary song hidden in one of the movements. It’s possible to appreciate the beauty of a shard of glass without knowing how the window looked before it was smashed, or what the moment of shattering was like. But it seems to me that if we can know, our understanding is enriched—not just our understanding of a momentous occurrence or of the personality of an artist, but of the nature of inspiration, and of art’s supernatural ability to fly through years and places and lodge in distant minds, helping us rise beyond ourselves.
The moment, in this case, was a concert tour, maybe one of the greatest, certainly one of the strangest. The tour might have produced a celebrated rock documentary or live album—but no one thought to film it and hardly any recordings survive. It happened in the midst of an Israeli war but isn’t documented in the country’s military records. The account you just read is the only description of any of the concerts to appear in print at the time, and even that magazine, a local version of Rolling Stone, has been defunct for years. The tour has lived on as underground history—in word of mouth, in photographs snapped by soldiers, in notebooks filed in an office on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, in a box of papers in Hamilton, Ontario, and recorded between the lines of a few great songs. Reconstructing what happened has meant piecing together these scraps over many years.
While no detailed account has appeared before, and while this cultural moment is known even to Cohen’s fans as a footnote, if at all, its importance keeps growing in a curious way. Here in Israel, for example, before the anniversary of the war every fall, more and more articles appear in the press, as if the story must be told and retold each year. Some of the descriptions are repetitive or inaccurate. But all are genuine expressions of the fact that the memory of that terrible month, October 1973, has somehow become linked to the strange appearance of Leonard Cohen.
If Cohen’s tour is now part of the Yom Kippur War, the war itself is inseparable from a date in the Jewish calendar. The fighting began with a surprise attack by Syria and Egypt at two p.m. on the Day of Atonement, when Jewish tradition demands introspection and tells us that our fates are decided for the coming year—who will die, and how. The symbolism here is so clumsy that it seems to beg an apology.
The war’s timing has lent a kind of awful grandeur to the grim proceedings. In fact the war is sometimes called the War of Atonement, as if it were itself a penance for the pride and blindness that preceded it, for the failures of leadership that left Israeli soldiers exposed on October 6, 1973, when the Syrian army attacked through the basalt outcroppings of the Golan Heights and the Egyptians across the sand embankments of the Suez Canal. Israel’s judgment had been clouded by victory in the Six-Day War, six years earlier, and the country had allowed itself to sink into arrogance and complacency. The borders were defended by a handful of ill-fated infantrymen and tank crews.
For a few desperate days on the Golan plateau there were nearly no Israeli troops left between the Syrians and Israel’s heartland beneath the heights, in Galilee. On the southern front, the one of interest to us here, the Egyptians captured the Israeli outposts along the Suez Canal, drove into Sinai, and shredded the defenders’ frantic counterattacks. Israel’s air force, which was supposed to win the war, was instead crippled by new Soviet missiles, and within days the defence minister, the one-eyed war hero Moshe Dayan, was heard despairing that the “Third Temple is in danger,” meaning Israel itself. Only with extraordinary exertion, and at the cost of more than 2,600 fatalities, did the soldiers in the field turn the war around and, by the end of the month, deliver a victory that still felt like a defeat.
When the battles ended, the prestige of Israel’s generals and political leaders, the icons of the founding generation, was shattered. The country became less confident, less united, and more introspective; after the war this was, in many ways, a different country. The mistakes would be picked apart in hundreds of anguished memoirs and critical histories whose publication began at the end of the war and continues to this day. When I served in an Israeli infantry unit twenty-five years later, our training involved imaginary battles against columns of enemy tanks invading through the desert, a scenario which had little to do with the actual warfare of the late 1990s—it was recognizably Yom Kippur, the war the army was still fighting in its mind.
For people in Israel, the ancient fast day and the dark anniversary of the war are so intertwined that they can no longer be detached. And so Leonard Cohen—who many considered a poet of cigarettes and sex and quiet human desperation, who’d dismissed the Jewish community that raised him as a vessel of empty ritual, who despised violence and thought little of states—made himself not only part of this Israeli war but of the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar. How this all came to pass has never been explained: the meeting of young soldiers at a moment of extreme peril with one of the great voices of the age. That’s the subject of this book.
One of the oddest aspects of this episode is that Cohen almost never mentioned it afterward. This fact seemed stranger and stranger to me the more I discovered about how deep he went into the war, and how significant the experience was for the people who saw him. There are a few comments to the music magazine ZigZag in London a few months later, when he was asked explicitly, but not much more. The same seems to have been true in private: people who were close to Cohen don’t remember ever hearing the details. Cohen’s concern wasn’t history but the soul. He might have felt that a link to real events would reduce his work to mere journalism. “For me, poetry is the evidence of a life, and not the life itself. It’s the ashes of something that’s burning well,” Cohen once said. “Sometimes you confuse yourself and try to create ashes instead of fire.” In this case, the war was just the fire. It wasn’t his business to explain how many logs went in and how hot it burned, or how close he was standing. Some beautiful ashes came of it, and that’s enough.
It turns out, however, that Cohen did leave an account of those weeks. It is, as you might expect, remarkable, but it was never published. It’s a manuscript of forty-five typewritten pages in a box at the McMaster University library in Hamilton, outside Toronto, in the archive of McClelland & Stewart, the venerable Canadian house that was his publisher. The pages aren’t a finished product. They were the larval stage of a project he called “My Life in Art,” which evolved into a book of poetry called Death of a Lady’s Man, published five years after the war. A few fragments of the original manuscript appeared there as individual poems, and the rest was forgotten.
Parts of this document seem to be the early draft of a work of fiction, one written in the heightened emotional style of the early novels, like The Favourite Game, which Cohen wrote before turning to music. The manuscript is written in the first person. Though the material is so raw that the true events and characters are barely concealed, or entirely unconcealed, we’re not necessarily meant to mistake this “I” for the literal Leonard Cohen. Other sections of the manuscript consist of clear summaries of events in point form, sketches of episodes that Cohen might have planned to flesh out later, but never did. These seem to be accurate descriptions, close to journal entries.
The work of triangulating the facts in this manuscript involved the second trove of Cohen material that I used for this book—the pocket notebooks he kept around the time of the war, to which I was granted access by the Cohen estate in Los Angeles. Compared to the hundreds of notebooks Cohen kept throughout his life, the ones from the war are meagre, implying that the poet was diverted by these events, perhaps disturbed by them, and that his introspective flow was unusually disrupted. The notebooks suggest that even if the narrator of the literary manuscript is a fictionalized version of Cohen, the events are mostly factual. For example, one might suspect that the characters who serve obvious literary functions are inventions. But in the notebooks you can find their phone numbers and addresses.
That makes it possible, with all necessary caution, to treat the literary manuscript as Cohen’s immediate attempt to put into words what he’d just seen. The document gives us a version of Cohen’s voice that is very different from the polished and evasive one he used in interviews. With this resource at my disposal, and with the estate’s rare permission to publish it for the first time, I’m lucky enough to be able, at several points in this book, to simply turn over the microphone and let Cohen tell the story himself.
A great rock tour tends to follow a familiar story line: adulation, decadence, chaos, collapse, musical redemption. This one wasn’t like that, or like any other tour. The connection between the musician and the landscape, for example, was unique: Cohen, an artist formed by the language of the Hebrew Bible as a child growing up in a Montreal synagogue, the grandson of a learned rabbi, was playing the wilderness around Mount Sinai. The names in the war could have been taken from his poems, like “Israel” and “Egypt,” or “Babylon,” which here is an intelligence base under a mountain. In this story there’s a soldier named Isaac, and a lieutenant named for the warrior-king David. There’s even a Bathsheba, the woman David saw bathing on her roof, whose “beauty in the moonlight overthrew” him, and who the king loved so deeply that he sent her husband to die in a war. (Here “Bathsheba” is not a woman but a naval landing craft slated for a suicide raid.) A parallel in rock music might be Springsteen playing the tracks from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. in Asbury Park, N.J., or the Beatles doing a free concert at Strawberry Fields.
Cohen wasn’t from here. But he called Israel his “myth home,” and being here seemed to trigger a fevered consideration of who he was and what he owed to others—the woman waiting for him with his child on a Greek island, his family, the Jews. It’s not quite clear what he meant by “myth home,” or if even he understood what he meant. But it’s clear this wasn’t just another gig.
More than anything, what made this tour exceptional was the audience. A singer whose themes were human imperfection and transience, and the brief pleasures that can sweeten your night, found himself in front of people for whom those weren’t abstractions floated into the air of a dorm room. They knew death was waiting for them when the concert ended. He played for them knowing his music might be the last thing they heard. So while a typical report on a concert tour would focus on the artist, with the audience appearing as a sea of blurry faces or a muted roar of applause, that can’t be the case here. I’ve spent several years looking for people who encountered Cohen during those weeks and trying to understand what happened to them before and after the show. More information about the characters, the chronology, and my sources can be found in the notes at the end of the book.
Each concert was a pure artistic transmission. No money changed hands. No one sold tickets or bought records. Many of the soldiers didn’t know English, and Cohen couldn’t speak Hebrew, but T.S. Eliot is right that poetry, when it’s good, “can communicate before it is understood.” In photographs the singer seems transported and the audience intent. This isn’t Woodstock. It isn’t a night out. Everyone’s sober. The stakes are high. Something important is happening.