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As Cohen and his comrades progressed into the combat zone, other musicians were travelling from unit to unit in the desert and along the northern front on the Golan Heights. The army’s disarray was such that no one seemed to really know where the artists were, or they made sure they stayed a safe distance from the fighting.
The singer Avner Gadasi remembered being sent north from Tel Aviv with another performer and arriving on the Golan Heights. They drove up to a base that had just been lost to the Syrians, then recaptured. Almost no one was alive. “The guard at the gate told us, ‘Go straight uphill and see if there’s anyone left to play for,’ ” he told a journalist. “We went in. You see fire, burning barrels, burnt papers, you see that this place has been through a terrible ordeal. They’d burned things to keep them out of enemy hands. Amid all of this we found a few soldiers, maybe ten. They brought a bulldozer and we sat on its shovel, like a little stage, and we played for them.”
The singer Yardena Arazi volunteered as soon as the war started. There’s a photo of her singing at an air base with her trio Chocolate, Mint & Gum, three young women in jeans and T-shirts, Arazi with her famous black braids. She reached the Golan escarpment along with the reinforcements racing to shore up the faltering troops in the Israeli line. Like many entertainers, including Pupik, she’d started out in the most famous military entertainment troupe, the one attached to a brigade called the Fighting Pioneer Youth. She learned the trade during the attrition battles in the late 1960s along the Suez Canal, where the troupe would travel from outpost to outpost, and where one of her musician friends had his leg nearly severed by shrapnel. But this was the first time she saw dead Israelis. “I remember one concert on the Golan for paratroopers who’d lost a lot of friends. They weren’t in the mood,” she told a reporter years later. It was dark. The musicians used jeep headlights for illumination. They sang a classic from the ’48 war called “Friendship,” about fallen comrades, a song beloved of the parents of these soldiers. When the song was written, at the moment of Israel’s birth, the Jews thought it would be just one war and that’s it. But there had been three since then. It was like the war was never going to end. “They cried, and we cried,” she said.
These were performers the soldiers knew as part of their own story. Cohen wasn’t one of them. He sang in a different language about people and places far away. But soldiers in a war don’t necessarily want to hear songs about war or about where they are. They want to be somewhere else. Music that’s too happy won’t work either, because it’s too distant and makes light of their lives.
I remember a tour in the security zone in south Lebanon in 1998, after which my infantry company went for a week of R&R and they brought a pop star to play for us. She had a hit just then called “Unload Your Weapon, My Soldier” which was all double-entendres and dance moves that she performed with two male dancers who had faux-military uniforms and little plastic guns. We stood and stared at them. It was awful. At the time I resented our officers for forcing us to be there, and resented her for thinking she could possibly have something to say to us. Now my emotion is mostly empathy for the poor singer. I wonder what she was thinking onstage, just as I wonder the same about Cohen, standing in the desert facing people facing death.
It seems reasonable to imagine that he wondered what these soldiers thought of him, and how he’d perform in their place if the roles were reversed. Perhaps he worried about a repeat of that Jerusalem concert, when something about the Israeli audience, even in much simpler circumstances, had cost him his nerve. He might have been asking, as he said he did when he froze at that show: “Where do you get to stand up and speak? For what and whom? And how deep is your experience? How significant is anything you have to say?” He might have been thinking what any honest artist thinks all the time—Am I a fraud?
But here Cohen didn’t freeze. As the days went by and he saw more and more soldiers, he must have felt that his art was working. His confidence can be gleaned from two short lines we’ve encountered in the manuscript, both of proletarian modesty. “Calluses developed on my fingertips,” he wrote, which tells us that he hadn’t touched a guitar for a long time and was now playing constantly. “There were suggestions here and there that I was useful.”
It might have been the songs, or his presentation, or the fact that his outlook turned out to be precisely the one called for in these circumstances. “A pessimist is somebody who is waiting for the rain. Me, I’m already wet,” he once said. “I don’t wait for the rain to fall. We are in the catastrophe.”
In an interview not long afterward, Cohen talked about distinct ways of dealing with disaster. “You have a tradition which says that if things are bad we should not dwell on the sadness,” he said. “That we should play a happy tune, a merry tune.” Then there’s the Middle Eastern tradition, he explained, which “says that if things are really bad, the best thing to do is sit by the grave and wail. And that’s the way you are going to feel better.” Both approaches can help. “And my own tradition, which is the Hebraic tradition,” he said, “suggests that you sit next to the disaster and lament. The notion of lamentation seemed, to me, to be the way to do it. You don’t avoid the situation, you throw yourself into it.”
If that’s what he was doing, it came across even in a language that many of those listening didn’t know. “When people think that a song has to make sense, Leonard would prove otherwise,” Joan Baez once explained. “It doesn’t necessarily make sense at all. It’s just coming from so deep inside of him that it somehow or other touches deep inside of other people. I’m not sure how that works, but I know that it works.” Baez was talking about Cohen’s performance in 1970 at the chaotic rock festival on the Isle of Wight, where he had to play for a half million people who were wet, tired, and fed up, and who’d already heckled Baez, thrown bottles at Kris Kristofferson, and burned the stage with Jimi Hendrix on it. Looking bedraggled and defeated himself, Cohen appeared late at night. He strummed his guitar quietly and spoke to the crowd as if they were friends in a room. He had them light matches so he could see where they were. He hypnotized them. The whole masterful act was caught on film.
The Isle of Wight, however, wasn’t the most relevant precedent for the way Cohen communicated with soldiers in Sinai. Neither was his previous brush with international conflict in 1961, when he travelled to Havana and happened to be there for the Bay of Pigs invasion. (A photograph survives of Cohen posing with two communist soldiers, wearing pseudo-revolutionary garb and looking silly.) The precedent was playing at mental asylums.
The first of these concerts was at Henderson Hospital near London in August 1970, two days before the Isle of Wight and three years before the war. Sylvie Simmons describes the show in her Cohen biography, I’m Your Man. The hospital had grim stone walls and a tower. A few of his bandmates from the Army were resistant but came around when Cohen insisted. Cohen didn’t tell the band exactly why it was important to him, but they understood that he had empathy for people who’d gone over the edge and was familiar with the edge himself.
The shows were potent. There’s a story that Ron Cornelius, the guitarist, told Simmons about a young man who stood up with a piece of his skull missing—you could see his brain beating through his skin—and started screaming at Cohen so loud that the band stopped playing. “The kid said, ‘Okay, okay, big-time poet, big-time artist, you come in here, you’ve got the band with you, you’ve got the pretty girls with you, you’re singing all these pretty words and everything, well what I want to know, buddy, is what do you think about me?’ ” Cohen walked off the stage and into the rows of seats, the guitarist remembered, “and before you knew it he had the guy in his arms, hugging him.”
Cohen believed, as he told an interviewer, that the experience of mental patients “would especially qualify them to be a receptive audience for my work.”
In a sense, when someone consents to go into a mental hospital or is committed, he has already acknowledged a tremendous defeat. To put it another way, he has already made a choice. And it was my feeling that the elements to this choice, and the elements of this defeat, correspond with certain elements that produced my songs, and that there would be an empathy between the people who had this experience and the experience as documented in my songs.
Soldiers aren’t mental patients but sometimes they’re not far, and some of them will be later on. In a war anyone who’s honest knows they’ve been defeated, even if their side wins. Cohen had never seen a war, couldn’t speak Hebrew, and couldn’t make much sense of what was going on around him. He didn’t know where he was. But he knew something about the audience.
“I was afraid at first that my quiet and melancholy songs weren’t the kind that would encourage soldiers at the front,” Cohen told a reporter from the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot who caught up with him during the war, in one of the few quotes we have from Cohen in those weeks. “But I learned that these wonderful kids don’t need glorious battle-anthems. Now, between battles, they’re open to my songs maybe more than ever before. I came to raise their spirits, and they raised mine.”
Cohen’s tour didn’t attract much public attention. There was too much else going on. There are just a few mentions in the Israeli papers, usually in articles about other stars who’d arrived from abroad and were more famous at the time, like Danny Kaye and the French singer Enrico Macias. (In the article quoted above, for example, Macias was in the headline and Cohen mentioned near the end.) A second quote survives from a radio report on the Voice of Israel, after a segment with Danny Kaye. “Another famous artist is the singer Leonard Cohen,” the reporter says, “whose quiet protest songs challenge the idea of war. Modest, quiet, and looking younger than his age, he told me that only now that he’s seen the war and its effects does he understand the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of describing it in a poem or song. I asked him if his experiences here would be expressed in some way in his work.”
Cohen’s voice comes in with its careful Canadian cadence. “Oh, I really don’t know,” he says. “It’s impossible for me to talk of it. I don’t have anything to say. I’m just an entertainer here. Of course I have impressions of things I’ve seen. If they’ll be expressed in my songs—I don’t know yet. In any case, I didn’t come here to collect material.” There’s a question from the interviewer that is unclear in the recording, and Cohen answers: “I don’t have any thoughts about it. I just came as soon as I could.”