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When people in Israel say the Yom Kippur War killed the accordion, they mean that the music and culture afterward was different from what came before. The war discredited the old political leadership and the communal “we” and the approved soundtrack of folk songs and military troupes. But it didn’t happen right away. The two most enduring songs written in the war were still in the old style—one trying to put a comic spin on things, the other offering communal solace and hope for better days. Both approaches are necessary and currently undervalued. “Send Underpants and Undershirts” is an amusing number in which a soldier gives his girlfriend a list of items to mail him at the front, reassuring her that he and his friends are “fighting like lions” and that when he gets home they’ll get married. For a light song so out of step with the dark events, “Send Underpants and Undershirts” has had an impressive shelf life and remains popular.
The second song, “Lu Yehi,” became not just the anthem of the war but one of the most beloved songs in the country’s history. It started out as a Hebrew version of “Let It Be,” with original words set to Paul McCartney’s tune. The songwriter was Naomi Shemer, famous for “Jerusalem of Gold,” which in the Israeli mind is indivisible from the lightning victory of the Six-Day War and the Jewish return to the Western Wall and the Old City. “Jerusalem of Gold” has a status similar to the national anthem. Her song from 1973, on the other hand, was a different kind of song for a very different war.
Shemer seems to have understood the phrase “Let It Be” to mean “would that it were”—in Hebrew, lu yehi—making it a kind of prayer, rather than a suggestion to leave things alone and let them take their course. Her lyrics are grim but hold out reasons for hope: There’s a white sail still silhouetted against the black storm cloud. Sabbath candles still tremble in the window at night. She played the song for her husband, who was just back from the reserves. “He said, ‘I won’t let you waste this song on a foreign melody—this is a Jewish war, so give it a Jewish tune,’ ” Shemer recounted later on. Scheduled to sing on TV one evening during the fighting, she worked on the melody in the taxi and performed it in the studio. By the time she reached the Sinai front herself, many of the soldiers already knew it and could sing along.
The song seems to have had a remarkable effect at the time, opening a crack in the tough persona of the founding generation. When Shemer came to sing at a kibbutz that had lost eight of its sons in the war, for example, the members sat in a circle around her piano in the dining hall. Until then, no one at the kibbutz, Giv’at Haim, had publicly expressed grief. Sentimentality and self-pity were anathema to these people, who’d come out of the disaster in Europe and willed a Jewish state into being against long odds. When Shemer played “Lu Yehi,” one member started to cry. Others followed. These were the kibbutz’s first open tears, the first time anything like it had happened. “This song,” Shemer’s son has said, “gave people the chance and the right to cry.”
After the ceasefire at the end of October, the Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. David Elazar, known to all as Dado, came to pick up a file in the room where his secretaries worked. They had the radio on, and he heard “Lu Yehi,” apparently for the first time. Dado had kept his composure throughout the catastrophe of the preceding three weeks, as other commanders and government ministers lost theirs. The prime minister, Golda Meir, called him her “rock.” During the war, Cohen sent a postcard to his sister with Dado’s craggy features on one side. He was dressed in an immaculate uniform, big fingers clasped on his desk, giving you the feeling that the country’s safety was good hands. Later Dado was blamed for the war’s failures and forced out of the army in disgrace.
When Dado heard the song in the secretaries’ room, according to his biographer, he stood transfixed and listened. Then, forgetting the file he’d come for, he hurried back to his own office. A secretary followed him and was shocked to see the general at his desk with his head in his hands, sobbing.
The music that came after the war was less concerned with comfort or morale. It tended to be about the individual and the soul. The most talented member of the new school, and perhaps the only Israeli artist who is Cohen’s equal, was the poet and singer Meir Ariel. As it happened, Ariel was a soldier on the canal in 1973 and came within a mile or two of Cohen as the war flared out with a final tragedy at the city of Suez.
“I took my guitar with me to Africa,” Ariel told an interviewer after the war, “but I wasn’t completely sure the guys really liked my songs, or if they encouraged me because they had no other entertainment.” He developed an intimate style that later became his trademark, along with strange, smiling monologues that usually, but not always, remained on this side of lucidity. As the war drew to a close, his company was barracked in buildings on the southern edge of Suez City, near the canal, part of the encirclement of Egypt’s Third Army. The soldiers grilled meat and talked endlessly. They looked at centrefolds in magazines sent by the wife of the Israeli president to the forces at the front, which they called “frontal pictures.” They mixed vodka with grapefruit syrup and called it “High Explosive Cocktail.” Ariel was seen dragging his rifle on the ground, holding its strap like a dog’s leash.
Every morning, the announcers on the Israeli radio news would report, “Our forces at Suez had a quiet night.” Ariel took that line and made it the name of one of his best songs, a train-of-thought description of a night in the life of a soldier: He’s reading Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway. He summarizes the plot. He compliments the Hebrew translator. He’s drinking apple tea and smoking. Mindless pop songs are on the radio. There’s a warning that an enemy squad has infiltrated. The moon pours bright light on Suez City and the sea. A friend shows up at the post and says: “Your time’s up.” That’s the whole song. There’s no heroism or death, or even a battle. Nearly everything that happens in the song is in the mind of the soldier. It’s one of the great modern war songs—the opposite of “Jerusalem of Gold.” There’s no army, no nation, no reason, no meaning, just a human in a war.
We can place Cohen near Suez City around this time thanks to Jacob El Hanani, who is now an accomplished artist in New York but was then a twenty-seven-year-old technician in the army reserves. Jacob hadn’t showered in weeks and his hair stood up like straw. He was living in an abandoned fertilizer factory, an apocalyptic maze of concrete towers and rooms that had become barracks and makeshift toilets. Not long before, he’d been sleeping on a filthy mattress in SoHo, trying to draw, and before that he’d been in Paris, living on cheap sidewalk food, chasing an art scene that wasn’t there anymore because everyone who mattered was in Manhattan. It was on Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Île Saint-Louis that he discovered Cohen’s music. Cohen was still considered an acquired taste in America—it would be that way until the last years of his life—but in France they said in those days that if a girl had just one album, it was Cohen.
When the war broke out, he fought to get on a plane and eventually made it to Suez. He remembers spending hours on guard duty at night, hearing ominous sounds and seeing strange figures flitting by. There were Egyptian soldiers around, deserters and stragglers trying to get back across the lines. One night they got an intelligence warning of an attack and they all took up positions at the windows of the fertilizer plant, swapping rumours about the Egyptians being so desperate they were going to use poison gas.
Nothing happened and instead, one night around the same time, a young driver from Jacob’s unit showed up with a message. The soldier, Yehuda, was a pitiable character, barely out of high school. The army had picked him up and thrown him here, and he wanted to go home. Jacob heard him saying over and over, “I’m just a kid,” repeating those words as if they were going to help. The kid didn’t want to get up at night for guard duty, and once the older soldiers had to pick up his cot and dump him on the floor. The message Yehuda brought was that Cohen was here and everyone had to come.
Neither Jacob nor anyone else knew who he meant. The kid didn’t know either, he’d just been given the message and didn’t understand it himself. Half the people in Israel are called Cohen. Even if he’d said Leonard it wouldn’t have meant much. There were about eighty men in the unit. Some of them spoke the harsh Hebrew of Israel’s poor neighbourhoods, others knew Romanian, maybe Arabic. Jacob was from a middle-class family in Casablanca. When his comrades heard him speak French on the phone to his mother they laughed at him for putting on airs. No one, as far as he knew, spoke English.
They were ordered to gather in a damaged amphitheatre nearby, part of a defunct vacation village for tourists who used to winter at Suez. The soldiers were warned not to point flashlights upward in case there were enemy planes aloft, and to be careful on the paths around the fertilizer plant because the area was full of unexploded munitions. They were cursing: Who wants to go hear Cohen, who is Cohen? The soldiers had already been forced to see a few army entertainment troupes, musicians who tried to raise morale and who sang “la-la-la in Hebrew,” as Jacob recalled. They were tired of it. A few other units had been rounded up, and there were about 250 soldiers at the amphitheatre when Jacob arrived.
An army troupe played a few songs that didn’t make an impression and then Leonard Cohen walked out on stage, alone, with a guitar. Jacob associated Cohen with the life of the cafés in Paris, with his own life in art, which was on a planet unimaginable from the banks of the Suez Canal. It was not possible that Cohen was here.
As he seems to have done in all the Sinai concerts, Cohen played “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne,” and “Bird on the Wire,” which were his most familiar songs, at least to the people who knew his songs at all. There were few of those present at this show. The older reservists, the ones in their forties, had never heard of him. Some of the younger ones had, but even they didn’t know much more than his name. We know that Meir Ariel, Israel’s answer to Leonard Cohen, was somewhere close by with his company of paratroopers. There’s no evidence that the Israeli was at the concert. But it’s tempting to imagine the two of them in one place: Cohen onstage, Ariel listening and smoking in the back. What would they have made of each other—two poets of rare genius in the unlikeliest of places at the same time?
The concert was kept short because it was still dangerous to have that many soldiers massed outdoors so close to the front. When Cohen finished singing, he was escorted away and the units scattered. The men picked their way back down the treacherous paths, avoiding the explosives that were lying around, and went to sleep in the concrete rooms to wait for the war to end. While they were waiting, Yehuda, the kid who’d been sent to call them to see Cohen, who didn’t know who Cohen was or what he himself was doing here, touched something on the ground that blew him to pieces. He was eighteen.
Around that time the ceasefire negotiations began, and then the ceasefire violations. Kissinger was running messages back and forth from Jerusalem to Cairo. Oshik heard Cohen saying, “As soon as the politicians are in the picture, I’m out.” At Suez City the army decided at the last moment to push from the outskirts into the city itself, sending tanks and paratroopers down the main boulevard, underestimating the Egyptians as if the preceding three weeks hadn’t happened. The convoys were ambushed and dozens of soldiers died before they could be extricated. Jacob could hear the battle from the fertilizer plant outside town.
The musicians in Cohen’s improvised band left conflicting accounts of the attack. According to Oshik, they played at an airfield as the troops boarded Hercules transports to fly down to Suez. He stood singing next to the planes and thinks Pupik was with him, but not Cohen. “We got stuck at the airfield,” he said, “and that evening the same soldiers came back. It would have been better not to see them.” The musicians dropped their instruments and started running with stretchers from the helicopters to the field hospital.
Matti Caspi describes a nearly identical scene at an air base, but dates it to a week earlier and places Cohen there. “I remember a surrealistic image,” he wrote. A Hercules landed and dozens of soldiers got out. Someone gave an order, they sat on the tarmac, and Cohen played “Bird on the Wire” with Caspi accompanying him. When the song ended they got on trucks headed for the Suez Canal. Another Hercules landed with new soldiers, and they played “Bird on the Wire” again. “Like a conveyor belt,” Caspi recalled, “we stood there all day and Leonard sang the song to the soldiers landing, and then they’d get on the trucks.” That evening the musicians took trucks over the canal, and found themselves carrying wounded soldiers on stretchers and loading them into helicopters. They realized it was the same soldiers they’d played for earlier in the day.
Whenever this happened, it seems to have been a moment when Cohen broke:
28. Helicopter lands. In the great wind soldiers rush to unload it. It is filled with wounded men. I see their bandages and I stop myself from crying. These are young Jews dying. Then someone tells me that these are Egyptian wounded. My relief amazes me. I hate this. I hate my relief. This cannot be forgiven. This is blood on your hands.