4

According to Whose Plan?

It wasn’t easy to reach Israel in the first days of the war, not just because of flight disruptions but because thousands of people across the world were trying to get there, besieging the El Al counters at Heathrow and Orly. Many were young Israelis trying to join their reserve units, like Isaac in Tokyo and Shlomi in London, who appear here later on. The airline had priority lists from the army, and at first you weren’t allowed on a plane if you couldn’t serve in a tank or a hospital, which was a sign of how things were going. Some of the people at the airports were civilians desperate to get back to their families in Israel. Some weren’t even Israelis. In Florida, for example, a Jewish eye doctor heard the news in synagogue on Yom Kippur and was on a plane with his operating instruments the same day. Another American doctor was operating on soldiers four hours after landing from Pittsburgh. A surgeon from Cape Town, South Africa, pushed onto a flight, landed at Lod, and was sent directly to the front in Sinai.

In those days a distress call from Israel affected some like the Bat Signal of the comics, or Susan’s horn in Narnia. It might seem hard to understand now. It was even then. Many of the people who responded surprised themselves, like my father, who was a graduate student in Toronto in June 1967 when war broke out between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Like many Jews who grew up in the West after World War II, he had little to do with Jewish ritual and couldn’t speak Hebrew. If Jews in Israel had staked their futures on citizenship in an embattled Jewish state, my father and his peers were counting on the goodwill of a majority that seemed open to having them. Wars in the Middle East were not part of his life. But in June 1967 he found himself calling the Israeli consulate in Toronto to ask how he could fly over to help this country where he’d never been and where he didn’t know a soul. They thanked him and said he wasn’t urgently needed.

Another person with the same idea was the fiery, dissolute Montreal poet Irving Layton, one of Cohen’s mentors and closest friends. Layton was born Israel Lazarovitch and changed his name, as many did, but not his allegiances. Aviva Layton, the poet’s partner for two decades and the mother of his son, remembered him heading off to the Israeli consulate in 1967 to volunteer for the army at age fifty-five, coming back crestfallen that they wouldn’t take him. “At that time,” Aviva said, “before we had any political stances about Israel one way or another, it was just an atavistic Jewish thing.”

The sentiment might belong to an older generation, and to a time when Israel was more vulnerable. But it shows up as recently as 2016 in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Here I Am, in which an American-Jewish family falls apart as Israel is struck by catastrophe and invaded. The main character gathers his courage and surprises himself by heading off to the war. Entering a Long Island airport to be vetted by the Israelis, he finds other volunteers singing “Jerusalem of Gold,” a patriotic song from the 1967 war that Jewish kids learn at summer camp. “I had written books and screenplays my entire life,” the character reflects, “but it was the first time I’d felt like a character inside one—that the scale of my tchotchke existence, the drama of living, finally befitted the privilege of being alive.”

Cohen was born in 1934, so he remembered World War II and what it meant not to have a Jewish state. Israel was created in 1948, when he was fourteen. In 1961, when Cohen was twenty-seven and Israel was thirteen, he’d addressed the country in “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal,” which appears in his second book of poems. The grandfather is his mother’s father, Rabbi Solomon Klonitzki-Kline of Kovno. Having escaped Europe for the new world, and witnessed the fates of those not as lucky, the old rabbi—in the words of his Canadian grandson—considers this twist in Jewish history:

Soldiers in close formation. Paratroops in a white Tel Aviv street. Who dares disdain an answer to the ovens? Any answer.

I did not like to see the young men stunted in the Polish ghetto. Their curved backs were not beautiful. Forgive me, it gives me no pleasure to see them in uniform. I do not thrill to the sight of Jewish battalions.

But there is only one choice between ghettos and battalions, between whips and the weariest patriotic arrogance…

One early expression of Cohen’s take on war and communal allegiance appears in his protest song “Story of Isaac,” which he wrote four years before the events that interest us, at the height of the war in Vietnam. The text is based on the story from Genesis about how Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son because God told him to. It ends,

And if you call me Brother now,

forgive me if I enquire:

Just according to whose plan?

When it all comes down to dust

I will kill you if I must,

I will help you if I can.

When it all comes down to dust

I will help you if I must,

I will kill you if I can.

And mercy on our uniform,

man of peace, man of war—

the peacock spreads his fan!

The song, which is blunter and more topical than Cohen usually allowed himself to be, includes the lines “You who build these altars now / To sacrifice these children / You must not do it anymore,” but Cohen wasn’t a pacifist. One of his most enduring songs remained his rendition of “The Partisan,” an ode to armed resistance, while “Story of Isaac” eventually dropped off the setlist. He didn’t want to be confused with John Lennon. “I don’t have to have a song called ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ ” he said in an interview seven months before the Yom Kippur War. “I could write a song about conflict and, if I sang it in a peaceful way, then it would have the same message. I don’t like these slogan writers.”

Neither did Cohen believe in the world of Lennon’s “Imagine,” where people live without nation or religion. Cohen took an interest in Eastern spirituality, using the I Ching a lot in those days, and eventually spending years in a Buddhist monastery, Mt. Baldy in California. But he never thought he’d turned his back on his origins. “A lot of people who think that I’ve changed my religion look very suspiciously or even scornfully or even express great disappointment that I’ve abandoned my own culture, that I’ve abandoned Judaism,” he told a Swedish interviewer at the monastery in 1997. “Well, I was never looking for a new religion. I have a very good religion, which is called Judaism. I have no interest in acquiring another religion.”

He once responded with scorn to his fellow Montrealer, the writer Mordecai Richler, who’d rejected the Jewish community and the country that produced him and suggested in 1964 that Canada dissolve itself into the United States. Cohen thought the only culture worth anything came from loyalty to a language, a group, a place, and that a world without those differences would be unbearable. “Only nationalism produces art,” he said. He thought Judaism and Canada were worth preserving, and indeed that they had a few things in common. “The Canadians are like the Jews—they’re constantly examining their identity,” he said. “We’re on the edge of a great empire, and this throws the whole thing into a very special kind of relief.” Cohen didn’t let his loyalties define him. But he maintained them.

Armed with this complicated set of attachments, and escaping attachments that were more personal and possibly more complicated, he arrived alone at Ellinikon International Airport in Athens, en route to Tel Aviv.

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