Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai by Matti FriedmanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
When Israel was attacked by a coalition of Arab states on Yom Kippur of 1973, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was living in Greece, his personal and professional life at a point of stalemate as he approached the age of 40. Seemingly somewhat to his own surprise, he found himself on a flight to Tel Aviv with the vague idea of volunteering at a kibbutz. What he ended up doing was traveling around the front with other musicians, mostly Israeli, playing for and meeting with the troops. The trip was unpublicized and little specific has been known about it before now, although those who experienced it never forgot it. It also helped revivify Cohen’s creativity and inspired the song “Lover Lover Lover.”
In Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, journalist Matti Friedman attempts to reconstruct this time through interviews with those who were there as well as a brief unfinished manuscript by Cohen. We vividly relive the events of the war as young men and women, often only in their teens and twenties, grapple with the trauma of invasion and the loss of their comrades, as well as their reaction to those who came to offer a brief respite from those things. Intertwining with reflections on the Yom Kippur service itself, Friedman presents a powerful portrayal of a crucial time in the life of an artist and of a nation.
(Content warning: As is to be expected in a portrayal of war, this book contains some scenes of graphic violence.)
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