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lyrics and impressions from 
the tour. Long dug through the 
archives, scanned and sent the 
material to Friedman. “If I had 
to choose between interview-
ing an elderly Leonard Cohen 
about events from 40 years 
previous or having this actual 
manuscript with raw impres-
sions, short stories, lyrics — 
I’m not angry. The manuscript 
is a good alternative,
” Friedman 
said.

LEONARD COHEN’S 
EARLY YEARS
Cohen was born in 1934 
in Montreal to an affluent 
family in the garment and 
textile business. His grand-
father, a Polish immigrant, 
Lyon, was the founder 
of the Canadian Jewish 
Council. Leonard’s father, 
Nathan, served as one of 
the few Jewish Canadian 
officers in WWI, and his 
lingering injuries led to his 
death when Leonard was 
8. Leonard was bar mitz-
vahed as Eliezer ha-Cohen 
at Shaar Hashomayim, a 
synagogue where the cor-
nerstone was laid by his 
family in 1921.
Cohen was an accomplished 
scholar, graduated from McGill 
University in Montreal, and 
his first career of distinction 
was as a poet and novelist. 
The Leonard Cohen who first 
meets fame as the sensitive 
singer songwriter of “Suzanne,
” 
“That’s No Way to Say 
Goodbye” and “Bird on a Wire” 
did not emerge until 1969-1971 
with three albums. 
Friedman identifies Cohen 
as distinctly and proudly a 
Jew, even when Cohen spent 
years studying in a Buddhist 
monastery in California. He 
quotes Cohen as saying, “
A 
lot of people express great 
disappointment that I’ve 
abandoned my culture, that 

I have abandoned Judaism 
— I was never looking for a 
new religion — I have a very 
good religion, which is called 
Judaism.
”
Friedman said, “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.
” 

TO THE SINAI
As the Yom Kippur War 
begins, Friedman’s book 
immerses the audience into 
the gloomy, depressive depths 
of Leonard Cohen’s psyche. 
Cohen is 39, living in isolation 
on the Greek island of Hydra, 
with a 1-year-old son and the 
child’s mother, Suzanne (not 
of the famous song and not his 
wife). As Cohen wrote in the 
unpublished manuscript: “I 
live here with this woman and 
child, and the situation makes 
me kind of nervous.”
According to Friedman, 
“The crisis in Israel he sees 
as a way out of his depressive 
crisis. In interviews, he says he 
is giving up music and there is 
a line in the unpublished man-

uscript, ‘I’m going to stop an 
Egyptian bullet.’” 
As Cohen arrives in Tel 
Aviv, the story becomes inspi-
rational, mythical and murky. 
He walks into Café Pinati and 
while sitting there he is seen 
by Oshik Levi, a well-known 
Israeli musician, and the 
Israeli singer Ilana Rovina. 
Oshik turns to her and says, 
“The guy sitting over there 
by himself looks like Leonard 
Cohen.”

Cohen was then and there 
inducted into the improvised 
musical corps that has fol-
lowed the Israeli army into 
battle since the Independence 
War of 1948. “When fighting 
starts,” Friedman writes, “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 army seems to have no 
official record of how many 
concerts Cohen gave or where 
they were played. It is docu-
mented that the first two were 
at an airfield called Hatzor, an 
hour or two east of Tel Aviv.
Cohen, according to 
Friedman, requests that he be 
introduced as Eliezer. “I think 

it shows how powerful his 
tribal loyalty was.” 
Cohen introduces his well-
known song “Suzanne” as 
being “a song to be heard at 
home in a warm room with a 
drink and a woman you love.” 
Cohen was accompanied 
in several of the concerts on 
guitars by Oshik Levi and 23- 
year-old Israeli singer Matti 
Caspi, now an Israeli legend. 
They headed off into the des-
ert in an ancient Ford Falcon, 
sharing army rations, 
sleeping on cots, offering 
improvised concerts wher-
ever a crowd of soldiers was 
gathered. Friedman shares 
a photo of Cohen standing 
next to Gen. Ariel Sharon, 
future Israeli prime min-
ister just after crossing the 
Suez Canal.
At the second concert at 
Hatzor, Cohen introduced a 
song that has since become 
one of his most famous, 
“Lover, Lover, Lover.” The 
soldiers responded to the 
powerful lyrics that as 
Friedman says, “became a 
kind of talisman.”
And may the spirit of this 
song 
May it rise up pure and free
May it be a shield for you
A shield against the enemy
As Friedman wrote, “One of 
the duties of a priest, a Cohen, 
in Judaism is to stand in front 
of the congregation and call 
down Divine protection.”
Friedman quotes two sol-
diers, one now in his 80s, on 
the impact of Leonard Cohen 
in the Sinai. 
Field commander Patzi and 
Amatzia Chen: “What touched 
me very deeply was this Jew 
hunched over a guitar, sitting 
quietly playing for us — a Jew 
who came to raise the spirit of 
the fighters — since then, he 
has a corner of my heart.” 

Matti 
Friedman

