Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai is a 2022 work of narrative nonfiction by Canadian-Israeli journalist and author Matti Friedman. Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau on March 29, 2022, the book reconstructs Leonard Cohen's largely undocumented concert tour along the front lines of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. Drawing on Cohen's unpublished 45-page manuscript, pocket diaries held at McMaster University in Toronto, and interviews with Israeli soldiers and musicians who were present, Friedman chronicles how a singer on the verge of retirement found renewed purpose performing for Israeli soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula - and how that wartime experience shaped some of Cohen's most celebrated music.
In 2022 Sixty-Six Media announced the book would be adapted as a TV series.
Background In October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. The Yom Kippur War caught the Israel Defense Forces unprepared, leading to severe early losses and a national trauma that would reshape Israeli society for decades.
At the time, Leonard Cohen was 39 years old and living on the Greek island of Hydra with his partner Suzanne Elrod and their infant son Adam. He had recently announced his retirement from performing, describing himself as being at a creative dead end. In Friedman's telling, Cohen was "frustrated, perhaps even trapped, not just by his new family and by middle age but by his music." When news reached him of the Egyptian and Syrian attack, Cohen left Hydra, traveled to the Greek mainland, and boarded a flight to Tel Aviv - without bringing a guitar.
Cohen's initial plan was vague. He told people in Tel Aviv that he intended to volunteer on a kibbutz, as many diaspora Jews had done during the Six-Day War. In his diaries, he wrote of wanting to "stop Egypt's bullet." Friedman suggests Cohen was drawn by something deeper: a sense that Israel's existential crisis might offer an escape from his own. "I think that, for him, our crisis here in Israel was, in some ways, a way out of his own personal crisis," Friedman told Jewish Insider.
Synopsis After arriving in Tel Aviv and wandering through cafes in the city, Cohen encountered a group of Israeli musicians at Café Pinati, including singer Ilana Rovina and singer-songwriter Oshik Levi. The chance meeting led to the formation of an informal touring group that also included a young musician named Matti Caspi. What followed was a series of improvised concerts- often for a few dozen exhausted soldiers at a time - at desert outposts, air force bases, and field camps across the Sinai and along the western bank of the Suez Canal, after the IDF had crossed into Africa during the war's later stages.
The performances were nothing like conventional concerts. There was no stage, no sound system, no ticket. Cohen sat or stood among soldiers and sang, his voice carrying across the desert air to men who had been fighting and dying for days. Among those in his company were figures who would later become part of Israeli military lore, including Ariel Sharon - then a general - with whom Cohen drank cognac sitting on the sand in the shade of a tank. Of the encounter, Cohen wrote in his diary: "'Under my breath' I ask him 'how dare you?' But then, 'I want his job.'"
Over the weeks of the war, Cohen underwent what Friedman describes as a complicated inner transformation. He began asking those traveling with him to call him Eliezer, his Hebrew name. A deep identification with the Israeli soldiers grew and then complicated itself when Cohen witnessed injured men being brought off a helicopter. Assuming them to be Israelis, he suppressed his tears. Then he was told they were Egyptian. He wrote: "My relief amazes me. I hate this. I hate my relief. This cannot be forgiven. This is blood on your hands."
The book explores the tension at Cohen's core - between the particularist Jewish identity awakened by his time among the soldiers, and the universalist perspective he cultivated as a poet. "He has this conflicting approach which begins with a very strong identification with the soldiers and ends with disgust with the war," Friedman told Fathom.
Sources and research The primary documentary sources for the book are Cohen's own unpublished writings. His estate gave Friedman access to a 45-page manuscript that Cohen wrote immediately upon returning from the war - a raw, unfiltered account that was never published - as well as pocket diaries he kept during the tour. These documents are housed in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
"It felt a bit weird, because I'm not sure what he'd think about people seeing behind the curtain," Friedman said, "but I had the really incredible pleasure, for someone who loves Leonard Cohen, of looking through these notebooks and seeing drafts of his songs as they come out of his head. I saw the draft of 'Who by Fire' being written down and the draft of 'Lover, Lover, Lover,' literally the first time it is written on paper."
In addition to Cohen's papers, Friedman conducted interviews with Israeli soldiers who had attended (or just missed) a performance, and with musicians who made the tour with Cohen. These interviews led him to a "missing verse" of the song "Lover, Lover, Lover," which had been remembered by soldiers but never appeared on any recorded version. Friedman located the verse in Cohen's notebook:I went down to the desert
to help my brothers fight
I knew that they weren't wrong
I knew that they weren't right
but bones must stand up straight and walk
and blood must move around
and men go making ugly lines
across the holy groundCohen had crossed out the words "my brothers" in the second line, replacing them with "the children," before discarding the verse entirely - a revision that Friedman reads as Cohen stepping back from the tribal identification that the Sinai had provoked in him.
Musical legacy Cohen returned to Hydra after the war and, less than a year later, released New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), widely regarded as a turning point in his career after a period of diminished commercial success. The album featured several songs whose origins lay, directly or indirectly, in his wartime experience. "Lover, Lover, Lover" had been composed during the Sinai concerts; Cohen would later claim he wrote it for soldiers on both sides of the conflict, though its earliest lyrics, as Friedman discovered, were addressed specifically to Israeli fighters. Musician Matti Caspi, who was present during the tour, recalled watching Cohen revise the lyrics as the concerts progressed.
The title of both the book and Cohen's song "Who by Fire" derives from the Unetaneh Tokef, a liturgical poem recited during the High Holy Days that enumerates the fates God may decree for human beings in the coming year—"who by fire, who by water, who by sword." Cohen's setting of this text, released the same year as the war he had witnessed, captured a cultural mood in Israel that the war had opened: more inward-looking, more attuned to mortality and the soul, and less certain of the triumphant Zionist narrative of the preceding decades.
"After the war," Friedman observes, "Israeli music develops an openness to the old wisdom and God which hadn't really been acceptable to that point—it sounds a lot more like Leonard Cohen."
References
External links
Official book page at mattifriedman.com