Who is on fire. Leonard Cohen on Sinai. Friedman M.

In October 1973, Leonard Cohen went to Sinai, where fierce battles were going on between Israel and Egypt. These 18 days will go down in history as a war day: it began on the holy day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kipur, the day when the fate of everyone in the new year is decided: to whom to go into oblivion, who will be born, who will die from the water, and who is from fire, How is it in one of the prayers of this day. Cohen went to the front with his weapon - a guitar. Together with Israeli artists, they traveled along Sinai, performed in front of the fighters on the front and rear, in the back of the truck and on board the ship - at night, between the battles, where they would have to. But during his lifetime, Cohen told almost nothing about it.

Journalist and writer Matti Friedman (Code of Aleppo, Bezrivnaya Spies) decided to restore events half a century ago. He found witnesses of those concerts, studied the archive of Cohen, his notebooks and manuscripts, re-read and listened to all the singer’s interviews to trace his path by bit and try to understand what the war in the life of the Pacifist poet.