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The woman he was looking for was Rachel Teri, a beautiful volleyball player and flight attendant from a Yemeni family. They had met the previous year at a party near Tel Aviv. Someone said Leonard Cohen would be there, she told a journalist years later, but she didn’t know who that was. “Suddenly his manager came up to me and said Leonard wants to meet me,” she recounted. “I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ The friend I came with said, ‘Go, what’s the big deal?’ So I went with the manager, who brought me into a small room. Leonard was sitting there on the floor. There was a chair and he invited me to sit. Then he said, ‘I just want you to tell me, yes or no.’ That was all.”
She said yes, and they were photographed a few times by the Israeli tabloids, which took an interest in Cohen and the people he knew. American celebrities showed up occasionally in those days: Dylan came quietly around the same time, and Leonard Bernstein came much less quietly, with a film crew. Tel Aviv was a backwater and any international star drew attention.
Cohen didn’t find Rachel that day. But when he sat down at Café Pinati there was a good chance he’d be recognized. There are minor variations on the story of what happened next. In Cohen’s account, the central character was the singer Ilana Rovina, the product of a scandalous affair three decades earlier between one of Israel’s greatest actresses and one of its greatest poets. Cohen’s manuscript doesn’t mention anyone in the café except her, but she was with Oshik Levi, a shaggy-haired balladeer who was then at the height of his fame. After the Six-Day War, when the West was briefly in love with Israelis for its own complex and guilty reasons, Oshik had travelled as part of an Israeli folk music revue that packed halls in Europe and America. In Paris everyone who mattered came—Yves Montand, Charles Aznavour, Serge Gainsbourg. “At that time we were,” Oshik told me, switching to English, “de izraeli hero.” That’s how he got to see the world. He’d grown up in an Israel where the stern socialist arbiters of taste were still in control. They wouldn’t let the Beatles come because they might corrupt the youth. For years you had to tune into a Jordanian station, Radio Ramallah, to hear rock ’n’ roll. So on the izraeli hero tour they’d sing the old folk music, which they wouldn’t dream of listening to themselves anymore, and then he’d go off to see Hendrix or the Stones. He knew who Leonard Cohen was.
In Rovina’s account of the meeting at the café, Oshik turned to her and said, “The guy sitting over there by himself looks like Leonard Cohen.”
“You wish,” she replied.
Oshik said, “I’m serious, it’s Leonard Cohen,” and went over to prove her wrong.
“We invited him to sit with us,” Rovina remembered. “We said we were singers, and asked what he was doing in Israel. He said, ‘I heard there’s a war, so I came to volunteer for harvest work on the kibbutzim and to release a few guys to fight.’ We told him there was no harvest right now, and suggested he come play concerts with us. He said he was a pacifist.” Rovina was probably mistaken about Cohen describing himself that way, or she was using that word more generally to mean he was repelled by violence. Cohen never called himself a pacifist. In any case, she reassured him, “We aren’t fighting, just playing music.”
In Rovina’s memory, two other people were also at the table. One was Matti Caspi, an introverted genius who is now considered one of Israel’s best musicians, but who was then twenty-three and just beginning to make himself felt. The other was Pupik Arnon, a comic actor and occasional singer whose real name was Mordechai. As a short kid in high school he’d been stuck with the nickname Pupik, meaning “belly button.” Pupik starred in some of the most popular Israeli movies of those years. He was, by his own account, perpetually high. When I met him he was an ultra-Orthodox rabbi. Pupik didn’t remember being in the café for the first meeting with Cohen and thinks he and Matti Caspi joined afterward.
In Oshik’s memory, he was in the café by himself. Customers were drinking coffee and eating croissants, he recalled, even though soldiers were dying a few hours’ drive away. Tel Aviv has always been a bubble. Combat soldiers spoke of the city with contempt, and still do, while simultaneously dreaming of getting back there. Oshik remembered going over and introducing himself. Cohen said, “I heard you guys are in trouble, and I came to work on a kibbutz.”
“I told him to come play music,” Oshik remembered. Cohen replied, “Look, my songs are melancholy, ‘Bird on the Wire’ and so forth, I’ll just get them depressed.’ I said, ‘It’s fine, just come.’ ”
Whatever the precise cast of the meeting at the café, Cohen was inducted there into the improvised musical corps that has followed the Israeli army into battle since the Independence War of 1948. When fighting starts, the country’s singers show up to play—it’s considered part of being a successful musician, a kind of tax you pay for not fighting yourself. The art, the artists, and the army are all mixed up. Some singers were once combat soldiers themselves. Many, like Oshik and Pupik, had come up through the military entertainment troupes that were beloved of both soldiers and civilians. The military troupes provided much of Israel’s upbeat, on-message, accordion-heavy soundtrack right up to 1973, when the war killed the genre, and the accordion.
One of the archetypes of this Israeli mix of the military and the musical came at the height of the 1948 war, when a composer in Tel Aviv wrote a tune for a song called “The Last Battle.” The lyrics were by a poet who was serving in the war himself. The singer, Shoshana Damari, learned the tune between two performances at the Li-La-Lo Theatre, and after the second performance someone showed up breathlessly to tell her about a group of soldiers who were having a last meal at a nearby café before leaving to fight the Egyptian invasion force in the Negev desert. Could she sing for them? She ran over to the café and performed the new song, whose lyrics might be a premonition of doom or a hope for peace: “Who knows, sister, if we’ll come back to you? Maybe this battle is the last…” The soldiers were headed for a place that became infamous as the Fallujah Pocket, and for seven of them it was the last battle.
As Cohen met his new friends at the café, dozens of musicians were already headed toward the front in helicopters and Hercules transports, in old buses, or in their private cars, like Oshik’s Ford Falcon. After Cohen agreed to come along, he mentioned that he didn’t have a guitar.
This odd detail raises a good question: What, exactly, did Cohen think he was going to do in Israel? If he didn’t bring a guitar, it seems he didn’t plan to perform. There’s no reason to think he knew about the tradition of Israeli musicians following the troops. And at the time, as his public comments showed, he’d despaired of his songs and said he was retiring. He wanted to “shut up.” That’s probably why he came empty-handed, and without telling anyone. He didn’t travel to Israel as Leonard Cohen the artist. He might not have been sure that’s still who he was.
Cohen’s manuscript about the war tends to raise more questions than it answers. He’s unwilling to explain directly what he was thinking. There’s the line about “stopping Egypt’s bullet,” which sounds heroic, and over the years there have been a few suggestions that he meant to fight. It’s hard to take this seriously. Cohen wasn’t foolish enough to think you could show up in a war, get a gun, and go off to stop a bullet. To the extent that he had a real plan, there’s no reason to doubt what the musicians heard him say in the café, which is that he thought he’d work at a kibbutz. Many Western volunteers had done so in the 1967 war, replacing workers called up to the front.
The question of why he really came is different, and more consequential, than the question of what he thought he’d do. Here, too, Cohen gives us few clues. But there is an important one buried in his description of the encounter with Aleece at the hotel, when he’s in Room 8 and she’s outside the door, waiting to come in. “The interior voice said, you will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose,” he tells himself. “This is a place where you may begin again.” This motivation seems even more genuine because it’s not presented as a declaration of intent, with dramatic trumpets, but as an aside in a story about something else. Cohen wanted a way out of his dead end. We know that he didn’t really give up in 1973. He was looking for a way to sing again and might have been seeking what he’d called a “vertical seizure,” a revelation like one the Israelites had experienced long ago in Sinai. This was the place where he thought it could happen.
After the musicians left the café, one of them made a call to an air force officer. The air force was hemorrhaging planes and pilots at a rate so shocking it was being hidden from the public, but someone there still found time to get a guitar for Leonard Cohen. None of the artists had any idea how bad things were, or what they were getting themselves into. Cohen climbed into the Ford Falcon and went off to find the war.