‘A meeting of two crises’: a country at war and a singer who felt washed up

MATTI FRIEDMAN has chronicled the story of how Leonard Cohen’s strange, impromptu tour in ’73 became a pathway into the memory of the War for Israelis.

In 2016 Matti Friedman asked his publisher for a favour. The Canadian-Israeli journalist wanted to write a book about Leonard Cohen’s Yom Kippur War tour and its almost mythological impact on Israelis. “But I couldn’t write the book without asking Cohen about it and I didn’t know how to contact him. Then I realised that my Canadian publisher was also Leonard Cohen’s publisher.

Hs editor agreed to approach Cohen and set up an interview. Friedman was thrilled; the idea had been stewing inside him for seven years and this would be the first, giant step. He wrote a summary of the book, attached a famous photo of Cohen standing next to Ariel Sharon, surrounded by soldiers to jog his memory, sent it off and went to bed.

When he woke the next morning, there was an email from his editor and the subject line had two words: “Holy Shit”.

The email contained a link to Leonard Cohen's obituary.

Friedman was flattened. Cohen had not spoken about the tour to media or friends at the time and now his only chance to ask the singer about it had evaporated, literally overnight. “I thought, ‘I’ve got no book: what am I supposed to do?’”

Friedman did what every good journalist does. He started digging until he found something, a footnote in a Cohen biography that led him to an unpublished manuscript the singer wrote about his experience on that tour. It was fictionalised – Cohen was a poet, after all – but unmistakably based on the tour.

The singer was dead, but Friedman had found a way to get inside his head, unmediated, from beyond the grave. “It was unfiltered and it was exactly what I was looking for. It was divine intervention,” he says.