In the early ’70s, Leonard Cohen was in crisis. His life felt meaningless, although, in theory, it shouldn’t have. He’d spent the past decade doing all the things people were supposed to do in the ’60s. He’d joined shadowy religious orders and dabbled in Eastern mysticism. He’d written a sexy experimental novel that thrilled the young and enraged the establishment. He’d reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter and played to crowds of ecstatic flower children. He’d taken all the drugs, smoked all the cigarettes, slept in all the iconic hotels—the King Edward, the Chelsea, the Chateau Marmont. If the ’60s counterculture were a mountain, he was the rare mountaineer who’d made it to the summit.
And what had he found there? Not much, except rock and thin air. In the book Who by Fire (2022), journalist Matti Friedman tells the mostly unknown story of Cohen’s post-’60s funk and the series of events that brought him out of it. In 1973, Friedman explains, Cohen was living with his on-again-off-again girlfriend Suzanne Elrod and their son, Adam, on Hydra, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. He spent his days in a fog of self-loathing. He hated the hippie scene. He hated poetry. He hated folk music. (“I just feel like I want to shut up,” he told a journalist from Melody Maker.) It wasn’t his first or last depressive episode, but it was surely one of the deepest.
Salvation, Friedman explains, came in an unlikely form. On October 6, 1973, 1,500 kilometres southeast of where Cohen was living, Egyptian troops began streaming eastward across the Sinai Desert, toward Israel, moving in tandem with Syrian forces, which invaded from the Golan Heights in the north. The attack was a surprise timed to coincide with Yom Kippur, the end of the Jewish new year—a day of fasting, prayer, and atonement. The Egyptian and Syrian armies were looking to recapture territory that Israel had annexed in 1967. But unlike that previous war, which the Jewish state won within six days, this one left Israeli troops inundated and fearful of defeat. On Hydra, Cohen caught the news from the Levant while toggling between radio stations. “I wanted to go fight and die,” he wrote. Then he boarded a plane to Tel Aviv.
