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March 30, 2022
Matti Friedman's Playlist for His Book "Who By Fire"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Matti Friedman's book Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai brings to focus the singer-songwriter's life during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Friedman illuminates in this fascinating tale an extraordinary chapter in the career of singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) that left a lasting impact on the state of Israel. … This demonstration of the power of song will stun fans of the legendary artist."
In his own words, here is Matti Friedman's Book Notes music playlist for his book Who By Fire:
I’ve always enjoyed imagining the soundtrack to my books, but in a book about a musician it’s impossible to divorce music from the text. Who By Fire">Who By Fire tells the true story of Leonard Cohen’s strange concert tour at the Sinai front in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a fascinating and forgotten moment in music history. The soundtrack is built into the story.
Cohen was one of the most important cultural figures of the past 50 years, and this was one of the key moments of his life, but little has been written about it. He blundered into the war amid a personal and professional crisis, after he’d announced that he was leaving the stage for good. He was shaken by the experience of the war, and inspired by it, but almost never mentioned it afterwards. The tour has lived on as underground history, in the memories of soldiers who heard him play at the worst moment of their lives, and in between the lines of a few memorable songs. In Who By Fire I collected those fragments for the first time, and they cohered into an unusual story about humans and war and the power of art.
Here are some of the songs that played in my mind as I wrote.
This is a protest song that Cohen wrote in 1969, in the context of a different war entirely – America’s misadventure in Vietnam. It’s a retelling of the biblical story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, presented here as a prototype for the tendency of all generations to sacrifice their sons. The song includes memorable imagery, as one expects from Cohen, but is a bit more preachy than Cohen usually allowed himself to be; the singer usually directed his critical judgment at himself, almost always mixed with dark humor. And he was never a pacifist, taking a more complex view of human problems. But the song is a good indication of his mood in the anti-war years of the 1960s, before he was drawn into the Middle Eastern war at the center of my book. Cohen’s original version is here. I’m partial to the cover by Suzanne Vega.
A different side of Cohen’s character going into the Yom Kippur War, a side more enamored of violent resistance, is on display in another of his famous songs, “The Partisan.” (Despite the popular misconception that he wrote the song, it was actually composed during WWII by a Russian, Anna Marly, with lyrics by a French Resistance fighter, Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie. But it was Cohen who made it famous in English.)
When I spoke to Cohen’s friend and last manager, Robert Kory, he pointed out that Cohen rarely played “Story of Isaac” after the 1970s, while he played “The Partisan” until the end of his career, meaning that this song was a closer approximation of the way he felt. War is awful but sometimes you have to fight.
This song doesn’t have anything to do with Who By Fire. But it was released the same year, 1973, reminding us what the soundtrack of those days was like, and of the strange power of that era in popular music. As it happens, Dylan had also visited Israel not long before the Yom Kippur War. The country was still an impoverished backwater in those days, but some Western artists, particularly Jewish artists, were beginning to take an interest. In Israel today, Dylan is popular but Cohen is revered. Israelis consider him to be almost an Israeli artist. This is in part because of the memory that at one of the darkest moments in the country’s history, Cohen showed up.
One of the songs most beloved of Cohen fans turns out to have been written at an Israeli air force base. When he arrived after the war broke out in 1973, he wasn’t planning to perform. He seems to have intended to volunteer for farm work at a kibbutz. But he was recognized in a Tel Aviv café by young Israeli musicians who were going to play for troops and convinced him to come along. They all piled into a Ford Falcon and off they went. The first concert was at the Hatzor air base, where fighter crews were being shredded by Soviet anti-aircraft batteries along the war’s two fronts, against Egypt in the south and Syria in the north. Air force losses were so bad they were being hidden from the public.
In a break between two shows at the base’s movie theater, Cohen wrote “Lover Lover Lover.” I found the first draft in one of his notebooks, now kept by his family trust in Los Angeles, which generously granted me access. If you know for whom the song was first written and performed, some of the lyrics jump into focus, like the one where he hopes the song will serve as “a shield for you, a shield against the enemy.”
Cohen’s music is probably translated into Hebrew more than that of any other foreign artist. More covers come out every year. For an example of what that sounds like, check out this popular version of “Lover Lover Lover,” translated by Shlomi Shaban and sung by Shai Tsabari.
Cohen toured the Sinai front with a pickup team of talented Israeli musicians, including the 23-year-old singer Matti Caspi, whose status here today is legendary, like that of Cohen himself. While at the front, moving between burned-out tanks and platoons of stunned infantrymen scattered in the desert, Caspi wrote a song explaining that sometimes the only thing you can say about a war is nothing at all – if you have to sing, the most honest lyrics are just la la la. That’s the song Ein Lanu Milim, or “We Have No Words.” (It’s an observation that might have resonated for Cohen, who never wrote a song directly about the war.)
With bitter irony, Caspi set the stark lyrics to a happy tune, the kind you can clap along with. In this link, you’ll see the band performing the song after the cease-fire. Cohen was gone by this time, but the other musicians are onstage: Caspi, the singer Oshik Levy, the actress and singer Ilana Rovina, and the comedian Pupik Arnon. The performance is less upbeat than manic – the Israeli army had lost more than 2,600 fatalities in three weeks, much of the country was grieving, and it was a low point in the country’s history.
One of the most famous prayers from the Jewish liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is called Unetaneh Tokef. The text is about 1,000 years old, though no one knows for sure. (The name of the prayer, translated as “Let us relate the power,” comes from its opening phrase, “Let us relate the power of this day’s holiness.”) The text describes God’s judgment and the insignificance of human beings who are “like a broken shard, like dry grass, a withered flower, like a passing shadow and a vanishing cloud, like a breeze that blows away and dust that scatters, like a dream that flits away.” It also includes a macabre warning of the way our fates could play out in the coming year.
On Yom Kippur it is sealed:
How many will pass on and how many be created,
Who will live and who will die,
Who will reach the end of their days and who will not,
Who by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst …
Cohen had just been through this war that broke out on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and which is sometimes even called the War of Atonement. These ways of dying weren’t academic or poetic – he’d just been in close proximity with people for whom they were reality. Cohen didn’t like to spell out his creative process or sources of inspiration. All we know is that after he left Israel he wrote one of his classics, “Who By Fire,” where he takes this prayer, updates it with more modern ways to die, and applies a layer of dry humor, adding to all of those “whos” a question of his own: “And who shall I say is calling?” Today his song is undoubtedly known by more people than the original prayer. The war isn’t mentioned, but it’s there between the lines.
Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and author. Born in Toronto and based in Jerusalem, his work has appeared regularly in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, and elsewhere. Friedman's last book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for history. Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War was chosen in 2016 as a New York Times Notable Book and one of Amazon's 10 best books of the year. His first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the ALA's Sophie Brody Medal.
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