Matti Friedman
Matti Friedman Discusses his Book “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai” with Philip Rubenstein
Matti Friedman Discusses his Book, “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai”, with Philip Rubenstein
- Well, welcome, everyone. This is the late slot on a Monday for Lockdown University. I have to say, usually I’ve done the earlier slot, so I just feel very privileged today. This feels like the cool slot. So it’s wonderful to be joined by Matti Friedman, who’s the author of “Who by Fire.” And over the next hour, Matti’s going to tell us all about the book and how the book came about. So we’re going to spend the first 45 minutes in conversation, and then after around 45 minutes, we’ll just open up for questions from everyone else. So if you’ve got anything at all you want to ask or any comment you want to make, please, just feel free just to post in chat. So let’s introduce Matti, who, as you’ll have seen from the description, Matti’s an award-winning journalist, and author. Canadian-born, and we’ll hear about the relevance of that, and now living in Israel. And “Who by Fire” is book number four. And Matti’s other books are “The Aleppo Codex,” which is the story of how a 1000 year old Hebrew Bible made it from Syria to Israel. And he also wrote “Spies of No Country,” which, has that been televised into a series? Is that right, Matti?
There’s an attempt to televise, it hasn’t quite-
An attempt, okay. So, and this recounts the exploits of a group of Arabic speaking Jews who were recruited to go into deep cover in Beirut at around kind of the 1948 period. And then there’s Matti’s most personal book, which is “Pumpkinflowers,” which is his account of serving in, I guess, it was the war that wasn’t a war, or wasn’t called a war, which was the ongoing conflict in Lebanon between the first and second official Israel-Lebanon wars. So, this fourth book, which is “Who by fire,” I mean, I guess the first question to ask, Matti, is, do you feel that there’s a kind of a common thread that links all of these books or your interest in writing certain subjects?
First of all, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here with you and with all of you. I wish I could do it in person, but I guess this is better than nothing. Because I see myself as a reporter, primarily, I think I didn’t have a conscious idea of what kind of books I was writing. And I just tell myself, you know, I’m just describing the world as I see it and not trying to dig too deeply, and not trying to make too much of my own writing, which is after all, you know, journalism. It’s more like being a carpenter than like being a sculptor. And only in the past year or so have I really tried to ask myself that question. What is the line that connects these projects? And what exactly is it that I’m trying to write? And I think there are a few answers, and I’ll just give you the short version. One is identity. I’m clearly preoccupied with questions of identity. That theme pops up in almost every book, and sometimes multiple times, people moving from country to country, changing their names, being different people in different places. In the book about spies, it’s an obvious example of people who, you know, have a double identity as their profession. But in the story of my own military service, I recount how I served as a soldier in Lebanon, and then returned to Lebanon as a Canadian tourist in order to see the battlefield through the eyes of a civilian.
And that is clearly about identity. And even in this book about Leonard Cohen, he too is playing with his own identity as he moves from the outside world into this war in Israel. And he too changes his name and wants people to call him by a different name when he’s at the front. And then references that in the song that he writes at the front, where there’s a reference to changing his name. So clearly, that’s something that preoccupies me, which I guess makes sense as someone who moved from Canada to Israel when I was 17, you know, began using a Hebrew name instead of the English name that appears on my Canadian passport, and began to speak a different language. And so that, I think, has always interested me. And I mean, there are other answers as well. I’ll just say one more, which is that I’m very interested in the Middle East and in the unexpected ways that Zionism in Israel have played out in the Middle East. And, you know, I came to Israel when I was 17, this is 1995, with a very European idea of what the country was. And this story about Herzl in Vienna and Zionism as a response to violence against Jews, and the Holocaust, of course. And then arrived in Israel to find that at least half of the Jewish people in Israel actually come from the Islamic world. And that this is a very Middle Eastern story, and it has a lot less to do with Warsaw than it does with Aleppo or Kurdistan. And that is very interesting to me. And that’s also a theme that has popped up in a few of the books, which is, of course, me trying to explain, primarily to myself, what on Earth this place is where I have landed and where I’ve been living for almost 30 years.
It’s interesting, I mean, you talking of Israel, I mean, you seem to kind of find these fragments of a story, which is connected somehow to Israeli history, but which has somehow been marginalised. And then you kind of, you dig deep and then you investigate, and you rummage around, and then you bring things to the surface. And suddenly, you’re right in the centre of Israel and right in the centre of Israeli history.
That’s lovely to hear it put that way. And I think that’s true. My stories are never the main stories. I’ll never write a book about the Six-Day War or, you know, the broad story of the founding of Israel. I’m always working on the margins and finding some strange story that seems to be unimportant, but actually, can open a window through the side or through some unexpected angle into the centre of the story, but never from the angle that one would expect. And I think that that was purely a function of my first job as a journalist, which was working for a bi-weekly news magazine called “The Jerusalem Report.” So we came out once every two weeks. Biweekly or bimonthly? It came out every two weeks. Let’s put it that way. And because we came out every two weeks, we couldn’t cover the news, because by the time the magazine was printed and came out, the news would be old. So I couldn’t cover the story that all the other reporters were covering. I needed some strange story that would still be fresh two weeks in the future. And I was just trained as a very young journalist to look for those weird stories, some kind of story that would still have something compelling about it and that no one would know about even two weeks in the future. And that just became my modus operandi as a reporter. So I’m always looking out for these strange stories that seem not to matter. I mean, Leonard Cohen’s concert tour didn’t exactly change the world. It didn’t even change the war. And yet, it tells us something really interesting about that war and really interesting, I think, about the country where this happens.
Well, I mean, you call it a strange story, and as you say, even big fans of Leonard Cohen had no idea of the existence of the tour. I guess, in part because it was never properly documented. And it just seems unlikeliest of a series of happenings that was never planned. Just give us a sense of the book and what it’s about.
Right, so you, I mean, you’re picking up on this surreal aspect of it all, which is that it’s the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli army is in disarray. It’s been attacked, surprise attacked on two fronts by the Egyptians and by the Syrians on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. The army was completely unprepared. They were in this kind of euphoric state after the 1967 victory in the Six-Day War. They didn’t expect to have any kind of problem. And then, out of nowhere, this devastating attack comes and the army is falling back and Israel is losing thousands of soldiers. And out of the smoke of battle in the Sinai Desert strides Leonard Cohen, this great 1960s character from the village, and “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne.” And there he is. All of a sudden, he’s at the front. And what is he doing there? It’s unclear. How did he get there? It’s unclear. What exactly is he looking for? No one really knows. And when I heard about that story, I just realised this is a story someone has to tell. So it happens in this war in 1973, which is really one of the darkest moments in Israeli history. Really a crisis that still echoes in our history. It’s exactly 50 years this year. And for many Israelis, that war never quite ended because of the shock of the attack, ‘cause of the number of fatalities. I mean, Israel loses 2,600 men in three weeks, and this is a country of just barely 3 million people at the time. So we’re talking about a devastating trauma for people. And somehow, Leonard Cohen became part of the story. So one of the things that Israelis know about the Yom Kippur War is that Leonard Cohen was there. And this makes very little sense, and yet seems to be very, it suggests that something, you know, there’s something there that needs to be investigated. So that’s what I set out to do.
So, I mean, as you say, I mean, Israel is in a state of kind of shock and dumbfoundedness and has been knocked off this invincible perch that the country thought it was on after the victories of '67. And Leonard Cohen is also not in a great state himself. I mean, he’s also discombobulated. I mean, for very different reasons though, isn’t he?
Right, so it’s really an artist in crisis meeting a country in crisis. Leonard Cohen is a big star by that time. He’s already had his major first hits. So those two that I mentioned, “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne.” He’s a member of that village scene, Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Nico. He’s played at the biggest festivals. He played, a few years before the war, he was playing at the Isle of Wight Festival, which was a bigger festival than Woodstock in '69. And he’s a major figure. And yet, in 1973, he’s really hit a wall and he’s living on this Greek island called Hydra. And he’s living with a woman named Suzanne, who is not the Suzanne from the song “Suzanne.” She’s a different Suzanne. They have a child who’s about a year old. So he is a father for the first time, he’s 39 years old, which is a prime age from male crisis, or so I’ve heard, I couldn’t speak from experience, but that’s what they say. And he’s in a very dark state of mind. He’s trapped, personally. He is unhappy in his relationship, And he feels like he’s really played out professionally. He has nothing left to say. He’s done with the music business. He’s very frustrated. He’s already announced that he’s retiring. He’s told several reporters that he is retiring from the stage. That has been published in Europe and in the United States. So people think Leonard Cohen is basically finished. And that would make sense, right? Because he’s 39. Like rock stars don’t usually make it to 39, certainly not in those years when the thing to do is die at age 27. That was what you did if you were really serious about your music. And that’s what happens of course, to Jimi Hendrix. That’s what happens to Janis Joplin. That’s what happens to Jim Morrison. And here’s Leonard Cohen, who’s really over the hill. You know, he’s pushing 40. So if he had flared out at age 39, no one would’ve been surprised. And then the war comes and something happens. And he goes on to have this incredible career that lasts until he is a man of 80. And I think the war has something to do with it. It revives him at a crucial moment in his flagging professional and personal life.
So given everything you’ve said, I mean, what are the impulses that make him jump on that plane to Israel? Is he escaping from, or is he going to?
A bit of both. So I think, you know, he needs to get out, he needs to get off this island. He has this line where he says, “Women will let you out of the house for two reasons, to make money or to fight a war.” So, you know, war presented itself and he used it to get out of an uncomfortable situation. He wasn’t cut out for monogamy. You know what I mean? He wasn’t exactly going to be that guy. And he was trying, and it wasn’t working. So that was part of what was going on. The other part of it is that he feels a very deep connection to Israel and to the Jewish people. Leonard Cohen grows up in a very serious Jewish home in Montreal. He spends his childhood at the synagogue called Shaar Hashomayim, which, to this day, is a very important institution in Montreal. It’s really the synagogue of the Jewish elite in Montreal. And his grandfather was president of this community. His great-grandfather was president of this community. So if you go to the synagogue today, which I did a few months ago, you’ll see oil portraits of his ancestors on the wall of the synagogue to this day. So this is a very important Jewish family in Montreal. His grandfather on his mother’s side is a Jewish scholar, Solomon Klinitsky-Klein, who is an expert in Hebrew grammar. So he grows up inside the Jewish tradition. He, of course, is very familiar with the Bible, which anyone who knows his music knows. But he feels that he’s deeply connected to the Jewish people, even though he has a lot of criticism of his own community and thinks that Judaism in the 20th century has completely lost its way. And that we’re too concerned with material things. And that we’ve lost the ability to speak to God. And we’ve kind of missed the whole point of religion. But with all of that critique, he is most definitely someone who sees himself as part of the Jewish people.
And when the Jewish people is experiencing a crisis, as they were in October, 1973, he just needs to be there. And he doesn’t even know what exactly he’s going to do. He doesn’t go to Israel to perform. He doesn’t take his guitar. And he’s already announced that he’s retiring. So he just shows up. There’s no entourage, there’s no groupies, there’s no roadies, no one knows he’s there. He just comes by himself and seems to intend to volunteer on a kibbutz. That’s what he tells people. He wants to pick grapefruit and help, you know, the men have been called up to fight the war, so they might need someone to pick the grapefruit. And here he is. October is not grapefruit season here, but he had this idea that, you know, that he would do something. It’s not exactly clear what. But he didn’t come with the idea of doing a concert tour. It’s only in retrospect that we know that he ends up performing one of the strangest and most striking concert tours of all time.
You know, it’s funny, you were talking about Shaar Hashomayim, Gates of Heaven, which is the synagogue, and you have a whole chapter on that. And I got a sense, reading the book, that you start approaching this as a journalist looking for facts on the ground. And the chapter on Shaar Hashomayim, there’s a description of the route that you have to take in order to get to the synagogue. And it’s very precise. And you almost seem to kind of lock onto the detail because it’s one of the few parts of the book where you’ve actually got some reliable detail because so much of this book is you just piecing a story together from fragments here and fragments there. And there wasn’t even any sense of all of the dates as to when all the concerts happened and in what order. And I mean, I think there’s a phrase you used somewhere about triangulating the facts, which I love. You know, it’s, if that happened there and that happened there, then, then maybe that happens on that date. So I mean, it must have been something of a challenge writing this book.
Yes, I mean, when I started out, I thought maybe there was some, you know, somewhere there was some list of concerts or I went to the Israeli Army archives. And you know, I assume that someone had organised this tour for Leonard Cohen, and maybe there was a document there that would say, you know, on this date, he was at this base, on this date he was at that base. And they just basically, they kind of laughed at me when I said the word organised. I said, “Who organised the tour?” And of course, anyone who knows Israel or the Israeli military knows that nothing is organised, there’s no organisation. And certainly, in the middle of a war, no one was organising anything. So it turned out that there was no documentation of this tour at all. In fact, it’s completely subterranean history. There’s no official record of it happening. We just know it happened because soldiers saw him. And we have photographs in personal albums, and we have a few scraps of radio interviews. And he wasn’t accompanied by any official crew. There’s no video of it at all. So it has to be put together. And that was one of, and that took a lot of work, of course, but that’s what made it such an interesting story.
If it had been an easy story, someone would’ve done it long ago. I think, I was lucky in that it’s a story that was in the basement. It existed as a personal memory, but it didn’t exist in any official sense. And even Leonard Cohen himself almost never talked about it, which is also interesting. So I kind of set out with very little and I, for over a period of several years, I just tried to track down soldiers who had seen these Leonard Concert Cohen, Leonard Cohen concerts, excuse me, in Sinai. And, you know, someone would give me the number of someone else, you know, I’d find some guy named Moshe and he’d say, “Well, I didn’t see Cohen, but I know my friend, Ruven, saw Cohen.” And I’d call Ruven and Ruven would pass me on to Rahel. And Rahel would pass me on to Miri. And that’s the way it works in Israel. It’s a very kind of close-knit country where people know each other. So I got passed around over a few years. But the major problem for me was that I had no idea what Cohen thought about any of this because Cohen never talked about it.
Yeah.
And I actually, when I initially had this idea, Cohen was still alive. So I just realised, in 2016, that the publisher, the Canadian publisher of my books is also Leonard Cohen’s publisher. I just had this kind of flash of understanding. And I said, “Great, I can get to Leonard Cohen.” So I asked my editor at McClelland and Stewart, that’s the publisher and editor named Doug Pepper. I said, “Can I get to Leonard Cohen? Can you get me to Leonard Cohen? I want to write a book about his experience in the Yom Kippur War.” And he said, “You know, I don’t see why not. So just write an email, explain what you want to write in this book, and we’ll get it to Cohen’s people and we’ll set up a meeting.” So I said, “Great.” And I just kind of sketched out the idea. I pasted in that great photograph, and I think we’ll see momentarily, of him with Ariel Sharon. There’s a great photograph of Cohen standing next to General Sharon in the middle of the war. I thought that would kind of jog his memory. I put it all together, sent it off, went to sleep, woke up the next morning with an email from my editor in my inbox and the subject line was holy . Holy expletive. And it was just a link to Cohen’s obituary.
Oh.
He just died. I missed him, you know, by, you know. I kind of felt like I’d killed them by hitting send. It had obviously happened around the time that I hit send on the email. And I was pretty-
I’m sure you didn’t, Matti.
Well, thank you, I really hope not. I was very distressed by this because I really realised that without Leonard Cohen, I have no book. I can’t write a book based on only external testimonies about Leonard Cohen. I need the man himself. What am I going to do? And then as if, you know, as if a divine intervention had happened.
Yes, exactly, the gates of heaven opened. And I found, in a university library in Hamilton, Ontario, which is a city not far from Toronto, it turned out that there was an unpublished Cohen manuscript in a box that he’d written immediately after returning from the war, in which he described the entire experience in a kind of unfiltered way right after his return. So ultimately, I think that was probably better than interviewing him as an elderly man. And that ended up, I mean, you’ve read the book, so you know, but that ended up being a big part of the book, because we get to hear Cohen’s voice, this kind of wild version of Cohen, describing what had just happened to him in this war, which had clearly been quite a powerful and upsetting experience.
It’s amazing. I mean, that the whole book feels like a big bashert. And I mean, the way you’ve described that process, you know, is just another bashert in the whole process. I mean, it’s just extraordinary. So I mean, and his relationship with Israel at this point, when he lands, I mean, he’s got this phrase that, he calls it his myth home, doesn’t he? And I love the description of that that you have in the book that you write. You say his myth home, this idea of the myth home, it’s quite tenuous, and you describe it as it’s like being in love with someone you don’t really know, which I thought was great. So he lands and he finds himself in a cafe where artists and musicians hang out in Tel Aviv. And we’re just going to see a clip of Oshik Levi, who’s a famous Israeli musician, talking about meeting him. I dunno if you want to introduce the clip, Matti, and say anything about it.
Sure, I mean, well, first of all, Oshik Levi is a very famous Israeli singer who, at the time, was at the height of his fame. And Cohen, after bumming around the country for a few days, not knowing exactly what he’s going to be doing, ends up at this cafe in Tel Aviv. And if anyone here has been to Tel Aviv in the past couple years, you know, it’s a very hip city. But in 1973, it wasn’t. And there were only two hip cafes where the artists hung out. One was called Casit and one was called Pinati. And Cohen goes to one of these cafes and is sitting in a corner when he’s recognised by a few Israeli musicians, who one of them says, “Oshik,” he says, “Is that Leonard Cohen?” Is it possible that Leonard Cohen is in Israel in the middle of the Yom Kippur war? And the others say, “No, no, it’s not Leonard Cohen.” And he says, “It’s Leonard Cohen and I’ll prove it to you.” And he goes over to Leonard Cohen, and actually, that’s how the whole concert tour gets going.
So let’s have a quick look and we’ll, oops, we’ll just hear him talking. Oops, sorry, just bear with me. Okay, here he is. Oh.
Back to Tel Aviv, and we go to sit in the coffee that, usually, the artist sit in, at Cafe Pinati on Dizengoff Street. And I saw Mr. Cohen sitting with Uri Levi. And I’m like, “Cohen, what are you doing here?” I come and sit with him and he said, “Listen, I heard that the Jewish people in the war, and I come to help. What are you going to do? I think I going to go to work in the kibbutz?” So I said, “What, you are going to work in the kibbutz? You come with me tonight, and you want to sing?” He said, “Listen, my song is very sad, I don’t know.” I said, “Everything is going to be alright.”
I love that clip because you’ve just got that kind of cool Israeli confidence that he has. You know, don’t worry, we’re going to get in a car. We’re going to go into a war zone. Everything’s going to be fine. Just trust me.
And Cohen does, I mean-
And he does.
I guess that was kind of, that was the guy he was, and that was the state of mind that he was in. But you know, this guy named Oshik Levi, who he’d never met and who he’d clearly never heard of, says, “Yeah, we’re going off to the war, why don’t you come with us?” And according to, and the book has a kind of a longer description of what happens. Cohen says, you know, “My songs are depressing. They’re not the kind of songs that soldiers need to hear in a war.” Because I think he thinks soldiers need to hear some kind of upbeat kind of military type music. And of course, they don’t. That’s not true. They’re quite happy to hear music from Leonard Cohen. And Oshik says, “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” you know, “It’ll be fine.” They all pile into a Ford Falcon owned by Oshik. They pick up a few other musicians who happen to be, you know, very high level musicians. Again, Cohen’s never heard of any of these people. One of them is Matti Caspi, who, in Israel, is really considered a musical genius on the level of Cohen. At the time, he was just 23 years old. They pick up a comic, a kind of a comic singer named Puppick Arnon. And there’s a woman of a famous star of the stage named Ilana Rovina. And together, with this kind of strange pickup band of musicians, they get into the car and they go off to look for the war.
So they head down south towards the Sinai. And do they know where they’re going? Have they got any idea? Is there any plan at all?
Right, so I asked Oshik about it, and he’s quoted in the book, you know, as describing how this all worked. Their first stop was an air force base in Israel proper, where the air crews were flying over Sinai, but it was in Israel proper. And then they get on an aeroplane and go down to Sinai. And the descriptions of the concerts are wonderful because I think the few people who do know about this tour, might imagine that it was kind of a Bob Hope type tour, like a USO tour or like, if you remember that scene from “Apocalypse Now” where the Playboy bunnies land-
Yeah.
In a helicopter on the stage and you know, at some rear base and some kind of-
Suzy Q was playing, I think.
Yes, exactly. And I think people might imagine that it was something like that, but it wasn’t. It was these singers in a jeep driving through the desert. And Oshik describes it. They would drive along some desert road and they would see a few artillery pieces parked in the sand, and they would stop and they would get out, and they would ask the soldiers if they wanted to hear any music. And the soldiers didn’t always say yes. But if they wanted to hear music, then they would set up a stage, they would improvise a stage using ammunition crates, and they would use the jeep headlights as spotlights. And Cohen would stand up on the ammunition crates and play “Suzanne.” And the scene just seems so strange. It’s so distant from the Yom Kippur War. You know, this song “Suzanne” is, as many of you I’m sure know, “She brings you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.” And it’s a song about a beautiful woman in the port of Montreal. What does that have to do with the Yom Kippur War? It’s like an alien transmission. And yet, somehow it worked. Something about that communication was very powerful. And the soldiers responded to Cohen in a very, very strong and memorable way. And part of it was the fact that he was an alien from outer space. And part of it was the fact that he was clearly someone who understood what it was like to be very close to the edge. And he had actually been playing, not long before the war, he’d been playing at mental hospitals in the UK and he’d been playing for the patients. And he was a guy who had an affinity for people who were close to the edge or going over the edge. And he was obviously familiar with the edge himself. And soldiers are not exactly mental patients, but they’re not that, I’ve been one, you’re not that far away. And some of them, of course, will be in the future. So you’re staring into an abyss. And Cohen got that. And there was something about that that enabled this communication, even though Cohen didn’t speak any Hebrew, and many of the soldiers didn’t speak English. So there’s some kind of non-verbal communication going on in these concerts, which made them very different from any other concert that he did at any other point in his career. No one’s charging for tickets. No one’s selling records. No money is changing hands. Everyone is completely sober. So it’s not a night on the town, something very different is going on. And it was very important for everyone involved, for the singer and for the audience.
There’s a quote that you have in the book from Joan Baez when she talks about the effect of Leonard Cohen’s music. And I’ve just got it here. She says, “People think a song has to make sense, Leonard would prove otherwise. It doesn’t necessarily make sense at all. It’s just coming from so deep inside of him that it somehow or other touches deep inside of other people. I’m not sure how that works, but I know it does.” And I mean, is that what was going on, do you think?
Yes, I love that description from Joan Baez, because I think that is more or less what was going on. T.S. Elliot also has a great line where he says, poetry, I’m killing it, but it’s something like this. “Poetry, if it’s good, can be,” or “Can speak before it’s understood,” or something like that. Forgive me, T.S. Elliot, that’s not exactly what you said, but that’s the general gist of it, that there’s some kind of communication with poetry and music that can happen even if you don’t understand the words. And there was something that Cohen had that enabled that kind of communication. In fact, in those short clips that we just saw, where you see Cohen in concert, that was his concert at the Isle of Wight Festival, which was an absolute disaster. The whole festival was just chaos and the crowd’s throwing Molotov cocktails at Jimi Hendrix and, you know, like storming the stage when Kris Kristofferson was on stage, and it was a totally wild, chaotic “Lord of the Flies” situation. And Cohen comes on stage after midnight, and he looks bedraggled, you can see it in that clip. He looks completely bedraggled. He’s totally out of it or so it seems. And he gets up on stage and he has this kind of blank stare, and he asks the crowd to light a match. He says, “Please light a match so I can see you.” And he just kind of hypnotises them. He just calms them down. And he does this kind of magic. He works this kind of magic where there’s some kind of non-verbal communication. So I think you can look at Cohen and say, this guy’s not much of a performer. His voice isn’t great. He’s not the world’s best guitarist, you know. But he had an incredible ability on the stage, which was the ability to understand the audience and establish some kind of communication with them. And that is exactly what he was doing in Sinai.
Yeah. There’s a, I wanted to show, I mean, there’s some fantastic photos that you have. Yeah, it was just this one here because, nope, sorry, about this, right, because you’ve just got, you’ve got Cohen in the middle and the eye is initially drawn to him. And then you just look at all of the soldiers and you look at their eyes and their expressions and it’s, I mean, it’s almost incomprehensible what’s going on in everyone’s head here.
Yeah, I love that picture too. And these are mostly unofficial photographs. Most of the photographs in the book were taken by soldiers who happened to pass by and happened to have a camera. And you get these incredible scenes, which are, as I was describing before, not concerts really, not what we would think of as a concert. So it’s not like he’s necessarily on stage and the audience is seated. He’s just sitting on the sand. He has a guitar, he’s kind of kneeling on the sand. And these soldiers who are in the midst of this absolutely crazy situation, it’s the worst moment of their lives for many of them, maybe for all of them. And here’s a guy who’s just showed up, a star from the great world beyond Israel. Some of them know who he is, many of them don’t know who he is. And you have this really just unique kind of meeting of an artist in crisis, and soldiers in crisis, and a country in crisis. And there’s some kind of very unique communication, which you can kind of feel in the photographs. In many of the photographs, the soldiers, you know, they’re paying attention. And Cohen seems transported in an interesting way. It’s not a normal concert.
I mean, one of the interesting things about the book is the book starts and ends with Leonard Cohen, but in the middle, we’re just introduced to an array of characters, mainly soldiers, who’ve all crossed the path of Leonard Cohen on this tour. And I mean, there was Joel the psychologist, for example, the story of, can you tell us the story of near misses?
Sure, that’s one of my favourite stories in the book, even though it’s really a story about someone who didn’t see Leonard Cohen, because Joel happens to be the father of a friend of mine. And he’s a psychologist, and at the time, he was a very young soldier. He was an immigrant from the United States. And he was in synagogue on Yom Kippur and got sent off to the war. And then he had a series of lucky breaks in the war where he was supposed to be in one unit and then was assigned to another. And then the first unit got completely shredded in the war. He was supposed to be in one vehicle. And then we got moved to another vehicle, and the vehicle he was supposed to be in hit a mine. He was nearly missed by a shoulder launched rocket fired by another soldier, one of his friends. So he has a series of near misses. And then he’s in the desert in the middle of the war. And he falls asleep. It’s the afternoon, he falls asleep on the sand and he hears a voice. This is how he tells the story. He hears a voice as he’s sleeping, and he knows who it is because he is, you know, he’s a young American. He has Leonard Cohen records, he knows exactly who it is.
But he knows it’s impossible, it’s impossible that Leonard Cohen is in the Yom Kippur War in the Sinai Desert. So he doesn’t even really wake up. He goes back to sleep, and then he hears the voice again, and he tries to wake up again. He’s kind of trying to force himself to wake up. And he can’t, he’s so tired that he can’t. And he falls back asleep. And then eventually someone kicks him, you know, a couple hours later 'cause it’s time to wake up and they have to go out on some mission. And they say, “Oh, by the way, while you were asleep, some American Jew came by with a guitar.” And that’s when he realised that it wasn’t a dream. Leonard Cohen had actually been there and he’d missed that too. So Joel’s story was a story about near misses.
Yeah. And I mean, you look at Cohen and you wonder what he’s doing there. And he talks about sitting next to a disaster to lament. He says that’s how he reacts to a disaster. What does he mean by that?
First of all, Phil, did you mean to leave the photograph on, or did you want to cancel the-
Let’s take it off, yeah.
That’s such an interesting comment by Cohen where he’s talking about the way that different cultures respond to catastrophe or to tragedy. And he says that there are, in some cultures, you tear your hair and you know, and wail. And in some cultures, again, I’m not remembering exactly the wording, but in some cultures I think you kind of, you’re supposed to be stoic and kind of stare at it impassively. That might be your culture, Phil. And he says that our culture, we lament. You know, when there’s a tragedy, you don’t ignore it and you don’t necessarily tear your hair out. You sit by the-
By our culture, he means Jewish culture, doesn’t he, specifically?
Correct, correct.
Yeah.
He means, yeah, I think that’s it, which is also interesting, 'cause when he says us, he means the Jews. He doesn’t mean Canadians who are like the British, you know, more likely to be kind of, or to expect a certain impassive approach to tragedy. But he says, what we do is we lament, you know. And we have this tradition where, in fact, this week on Thursday, we have a fast day called Tisha B'av, the ninth day of the month of Av, where we lament the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem. And we read a book, which is called, a Biblical book, which is called the “Book of Lamentations.” So it’s really built into the Jewish religion. And he seems to be explaining his approach to the war. You don’t ignore the tragedy. You know, sometimes tragedies happen. And the thing to do is acknowledge that this is what’s going on. And sit there and look at it, don’t ignore it, and lament it. And I think he was explaining his approach to the war, which he experienced as something kind of tragic, and something very rattling, and something also very invigorating. So he had a series of very powerful contradictory responses to the war. But ultimately, it kind of reinvigorates his creative life. He has a great line when he leaves his community in Montreal, he gives a speech, which you can actually find on YouTube. He’s invited to address the community and tell the community what he thinks. And so he does. And the community doesn’t really like what they hear.
And he explains to them that Judaism has been completely betrayed in our times. And that we’ve become, instead of being vertical people, we’ve become horizontal. He says the Jews once had a genius for the vertical, which is a beautiful Leonard Cohen phrase, by which he means we communicated with God. We knew how to look up and communicate with God. And once he said, we had a vertical seizure. And he’s referring to Mount Sinai, to the revelation at Mount Sinai when the Jewish people stand at Mount Sinai and has a vertical seizure together. So some kind of, you know, divinely oriented communication, which he calls a vertical seizure. And he’s looking for that. He wants that, that’s what he is looking for. He’s looking for that vertical seizure. And he comes to the war, I think, looking for it and hoping to find it, because he’s desperate to create again, to kind of find his voice again. And one of the ironies of the story, which I think he was not aware of, or if he was, he never mentions it, is that that first vertical seizure happens, of course, at Mount Sinai. And where does Leonard Cohen go looking for his vertical seizure? He goes to Sinai. The whole story takes place in the Sinai Desert within a few dozen miles of Mount Sinai. So it’s one of the ironies of the story. And quite incredibly, he finds the vertical seizure. He has some kind of experience in the war, whether it’s what he was expecting or not, that allows him to find his voice again and to write again, and to get back on stage, which he does almost immediately after the war.
And his emotions and his views on where he is and on the conflict seem to change over the course of the time that he’s there. And I guess, and this brings us really to “Lover, Lover, Lover” and a song, of course, that’s, as you say, that’s written in bits and pieces between performances. So I mean, Matti, tell us about the song and how it comes about, and also, really, your sensational find in the manuscript.
Thank you. I mean, it is sensational for the small number of people who really, you know, love Leonard Cohen and think that every word that he wrote was important. I think it’s quite sensational, and I’m glad you agree. The song “Lover, Lover, Lover” is actually written at an Israeli Air Force base, or the first performance of it happens at an Israeli Air Force base where he’s singing to air crews that are facing death in the first week or two of Yom Kippur War when the Israeli Air Force is being decimated by these Egyptian and Syrian anti-aircraft batteries. It’s the darkest moment in the history of the Israeli Air Force. And he’s playing for them. And he kind of fine-tunes the song as he moves through Sinai and through the war. And I found, in the notebook that Cohen kept in his pocket during the war, which I found in his family archive in Los Angeles, I found the first version of “Lover, Love Lover” written in his handwriting as it came out his brain.
That must have been so exciting.
So exciting! I mean, you really see the birth of something incredible and, you know, parts of it are, you know, rubbed out and there’s changes to it. And you just see, I also found the first draught of “Chelsea Hotel,” for example. It’s very exciting if you know that music. But the most exciting thing for me was discovering that there was a missing verse in “Lover, Lover, Lover.” There was another verse that the soldiers remembered him singing, but which I found no trace of initially, 'cause it isn’t in the song as it was eventually released. So one of the soldiers, this guy named Shlomi who met Leonard Cohen on the far side of the Suez Canal on Egyptian territory, close to the end of the war, they met in the desert. And this very kind of hallucinatory memory that Shlomi had. He said that, “I’ll never forget it. He played 'Lover, Lover, Lover.’” Of course, that was a song that no one knew because he’d just written it. “And I’ll never forget, he had a verse in there where he called us his brothers.” And the soldiers, that meant something to them because Leonard Cohen was expressing a kind of familial identification with them. And that meant something to them. And that was a striking memory. But there is no such verse in “Lover, Lover, Lover.” So I thought that Shlomi was just, you know, probably misremembering or something. And then in the notebook, I found the verse, I found the verse that he was referring to, and it’s the one you see on the slide. It goes like this. “I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight. I knew that they weren’t wrong, I knew that they weren’t right. But bones must stand up straight and walk, and blood must move around, and men go making ugly lines across the holy ground.” It’s not bad.
And you can see in Leonard Cohen’s notebook that after expressing this very powerful identification with the soldiers, he regretted it, because I think that’s, you know, for a guy like Leonard Cohen, you can’t be on one side of a war and you can’t, you have to be bigger than the Israelis, and you have to be bigger than the war. So he’s erased, the verse appears in the notebook, but he’s erased that first line, which is, I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight, which means Leonard Cohen is saying, I’m on the Israeli side in this war. He’s erased that line. And instead it says, written in his own handwriting, above the original line, it says, “I went down to the desert to watch the children fight.” So now he’s stepping back. Now it’s not his brothers, and he is not helping, he’s kind of a parent standing next to the sandbox watching these children fight. So he is really removing himself from the situation. And ultimately, he just erases the entire verse. And the origins of “Lover, Lover, Lover” are basically lost. It’s not that he keeps them secret, but he obscures them enough that, so that the song is no longer associated with the Yom Kippur War, and certainly not with his flirtation, with tribal identification with one side in the Yom Kippur War.
Yeah. Jewish particularism, it doesn’t seem to suit him, does it? And I guess he tried it on as a uniform, and then he cast it off and went back to kind of his role as the universalist poet.
Right, I think he, I mean, it’s an old argument in Judaism, which is, is our role to be, you know, or, you know, put it this way, are the prophets of the Bible speaking to the Jews, or are they speaking as Jews to the universe. And that’s an old Jewish debate about whether our role is tribal, whether our role is universal. I think Leonard Cohen would say that the most Jewish thing he could be is a universal poet. And that actually restricting himself to some kind of tribal identification would not be Jewish. And of course, there are many other different interpretations of what Judaism is. And he tried on different hats throughout his life, and he went back and forth, and I think eventually kind of comes back to a familial sense of himself. I mean, he’s buried. I mean, the last song he releases is called “You Want It Darker.” And in this song he quotes from the Kaddish, which is the Jewish Mourners Prayer, he says, “Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name.” That’s a quote from the Jewish Prayer for the Dead. And he has a singer, another male singer on that song who is singing a word in Hebrew, by the way. The voice belongs to the cantor from Shaar Hashomayim, from his childhood synagogue. So he’s gone back to Shaar Hashomayim, to the synagogue where he grows up. And then about six weeks after the song came out, he died and was buried next to his parents in the cemetery at Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal. So he doesn’t, it’s not that he tries on particularism and then leaves. You know, he is like many of us, I think. Like many of us, he’s wrestling with exactly what it means to be Jewish and we’re exactly that puts us.
Well, I thought we should listen to a couple of minutes from “Lover, Lover, Lover,” in part for people who don’t know it but also just to remind ourselves. And this is a clip from his 1976 concert in France where, and he introduces it in French, and he makes a point that he’s written this for the Egyptians and the Israelis.
In that order.
And you’ll see when this plays. Oops. What’s also interesting is, I mean, he also had the most fantastic musicians all throughout his career, who sang with him and for him. And in the very back here on the right is, for any kind of disco aficionados, is Laura Branigan. She’s the one with kind of the higher register in her voice. So I just thought we’d just play a couple of minutes of this. Oops.
♪ I asked my father, I said, father, change my name ♪ ♪ The one I’m using now, it’s covered up ♪ ♪ With fear, and filth, and cowardice, and shame ♪ ♪ Yeah, and lover, lover, lover, lover, ♪ ♪ lover, lover, lover ♪ ♪ Come on back to me ♪ ♪ Yes, and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover ♪ ♪ Come back to me ♪ ♪ He said, I locked you in this body ♪ ♪ I meant it as a kind of trial ♪ ♪ You can use it for weapon ♪ ♪ Or to make some woman smile ♪ ♪ Yeah, and lover, lover, lover, ♪ ♪ lover, lover, lover, lover ♪ ♪ Come on back to me ♪ ♪ Lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover ♪ ♪ Come back to me ♪
Just magnificent music, isn’t it? And quite an uptempo version to the one that maybe those of us, you know, who’ve kind of listened to that song in later years are used to.
Yes, I mean-
So Matti, I’m very conscious of time and just wanting to open up to everyone else. But just before we do, you’re going to have to just tell us what’s going on in this photo. I mean, this must be one of the most unlikely photos ever taken in modern Jewish history. Leonard Cohen standing next to General Ariel Sharon.
Yeah, it’s just a wonderful photograph. It’s taken by a soldier, a reserve officer from the artillery who happened to be by with a camera named Yakovi Doron from Kibbutz Yifat. And snapped this frame. And the frame is, I think, you know, maybe it’s the two Jewish archetypes of the 20th century. It’s the man of peace and the man of war. This kind of dissolute, I guess, you know, ‘60s poet from the village and his idea of what his Judaism is. And then you have the ultimate Israeli, General Ariel Sharon, Arik, who is the man of violence, the man, the protector of the people, you know, man whose profession is violence. And they’re standing next to each other. And it’s just kind of an amazing meeting of opposites. And Cohen remembered meeting Sharon and mentioned him in his manuscript. And he has these two separate responses to him. At one point he says, “How dare you?” Like how, you know, speaking to Sharon, “How dare you?” By which I think he means how dare you make decisions of life and death that are, you know, properly made by God. And then a few sentences later, he says, “I want your job.” Because Leonard Cohen, I think, was quite enamoured of military men and the military in general. And that was part of what was going on in the Yom Kippur War. But Sharon, for his part, seems not to have even noticed that he met Cohen in the war. He makes no mention of it anywhere. And I asked his son if he ever heard his dad mention that he met Leonard Cohen in the Yom Kippur War, and the answer was no. So-
He was probably preoccupied at the time.
Yes, I think he was.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, we’re going to just open up now to any questions anyone would like to ask. Lauren, did you have any questions that you wanted to put?
Q&A and Comments:
Q - [Lauren] Yeah, we’ve gotten a few. Someone is asking whether Leonard Cohen was a Zionist.
A - Wow, that’s a great question and I wish we could ask him because, you know, I think, and maybe he would, just to see him kind of twist uncomfortably as he tried to explain the answer to that question. So there’s actually, there’s a poem, this is the book “Who by Fire,” and there’s a poem in here that he writes in the early '60s about Israel. Leonard Cohen’s born in 1934. So he remembers the world without the state of Israel, and he remembers the war, and the Holocaust, and he knows what it means for the Jews not to have a state. And you know, he writes in this poem that, you know, “I don’t love seeing the Israeli paratroopers marching in Tel Aviv, but if there’s a choice between that and the ovens, then you know, I’m going to choose the paratroopers.” Basically, that’s what the poem says. And I think that is a pretty accurate summation of his approach. He wasn’t into nationalism, he wasn’t waving the flag. He didn’t leave Israel singing the national anthem and singing the praises of the state of Israel. He just wasn’t that kind of guy.
And I don’t know if he would like to put himself in a drawer of, you know, saying I am a Zionist. At the same time, he was clearly committed to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel. He came during the war. I mean, no one made him come, right. Most artists didn’t come. There are lots of Jewish artists, you know, Dylan was pretty famous at the time, Paul Simon, and those are the first two names that come to mind. No one came to Israel in the war. Leonard Cohen comes to Israel, and not just does he come to Israel, he shows up at the front, he puts himself in danger. He’s actually in danger. He crosses the Suez Canal right behind the Israeli army. So, you know, it’s hard to imagine a greater Zionist commitment than that. So I would claim him, you know, as someone who is a proud Zionist, I would claim Leonard Cohen as a Zionist, which just means to me someone who believes in the Jewish right to self definition and self-determination. But he was a guy who was uncomfortable, I think, with symbols and with tags. So, you know, I don’t want to put him in that box without his permission.
Q - [Lauren] Great. Someone’s asking, “How did you find the manuscript in Hamilton?”
A - I found it, thank you for that question which allows me to give credit to a great librarian named Chris Long at the McMaster University Library. Chris, this was during, actually, just before COVID hit, and I just heard that there was this manuscript. I saw it referenced in a footnote somewhere. It was very unclear where it was or what it was. And Chris Long went into the stacks at McMaster and found this absolute treasure, which is just gold. It was 45 pages of Cohen unpublished, unedited, unfiltered. And he scanned it and sent it to me from Hamilton. And I mean, it allowed me to write the book. I don’t think I would’ve had much of a book without that manuscript. So I really owe Chris Long, as many of us owe librarians, you know, if we think about it, I owe a great deal to librarians, so thank you for allowing me to express my gratitude to that one.
Q - [Lauren] We have another question. “Did Leonard Cohen have any connection or feeling about the Six-Day War?”
A - We don’t know too much about it. I didn’t see any place where he really describes it. But his instinct to go to Israel and volunteer in 1973 is clearly inspired by what a lot of Western, particularly Jews, did during the 1967 war or immediately after, where people are inspired to travel to Israel and help out. My dad, for example, was in Toronto that year and was just shocked by the outbreak of the war in '67 and went to the Israeli consulate to ask how he could help. And a lot of people had that instinct. By the way, they said, “We don’t need your help, but thank you. You would help us by staying in Toronto and not going to Israel.” But I think that was part of what was going on. He had that memory of '67, and he had the memory of an existential threat to Israel, which to us today, seems strange. It’s hard to imagine a situation where people think that Israel could be wiped off the map, you know, 25 years after the Holocaust. But that was very much on people’s minds at the time, and that was part of what was going on. This fear that our existence is tenuous, and that we’re all in this together. And sometimes a war in Israel was almost like the bat signal being projected, you know, in the “Batman” series where it was a distress signal, and it required all of us to drop everything that we’re doing and go help. And that was, I think, very much the '67 experience for many people. And it was what Leonard Cohen was doing in 1973.
Q - [Lauren] Thank you. Did he ever return to Israel, do you know?
A - Yes, he did, he did. He returned several times, most famously in 2009, which is actually when I got the idea for this book, because he, Leonard Cohen, again, as many of you probably know if you’re Cohen fans, his career goes into the '80s. It was kind of fading and he enters a Zen Buddhist monastery and disappears from the public eye for a while, and discovers that a former manager of his has stolen all of his money. So he is forced, as an elderly guy, to go back on tour. And it’s unclear if anyone wants to see Leonard Cohen, you know, he’s kind of, you know, he’s a has-been, and he’s last year’s man, as he would have said. And he goes back on tour and he’s in his 70s, and it turns out that he has ascended to the pantheon of great artists. And he’s filling stadiums and tens of thousands of people are coming out to see Leonard Cohen. And he has this incredible resurrection tour, which is what many of us remember of Cohen. He’s wearing a fedora and suit, and he’s this lovely, kind of an emissary from a more elegant time. And he sings “Hallelujah” and falls to his knees. And this is the coin that we remember. And that last, the first resurrection tour that he does, the last concert of that tour is in Israel. He comes to Tel Aviv and Israelis go crazy for Cohen.
And I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I didn’t understand why Israelis were so excited to see Leonard Cohen, who I associated with being, I associated him with my Canadian childhood. And, you know, I saw him as a Canadian hero. And it turned out that Israelis loved him, and I couldn’t figure out why. And then I read an article that was published around the time of his concert, about the Yom Kippur War tour, which was clearly a big part of why Israelis considered Leonard Cohen to be one of them, and why they had this powerful connection to him. And that’s when I had the idea to write the book. So he showed up in Israel, 50,000 people showed up to see Leonard Cohen in a country that’s the size of New York City. And it was an incredible concert. And that’s what planted the idea in my head. And that was his last visit, 2009.
Matti, you have to tell us how he ended that concert in Ramat Gan.
Right, it ended in a very memorable way. One of the important things to know about Leonard Cohen is that he was a Cohen, which, in Judaism, means a priest. He was from the priestly cast, which, in Judaism, there are no priests as there are in Catholicism. There are no intermediaries between people and God. But in the temple in Jerusalem, until 2000 years ago, there were priests who were in charge of sacrificing animals and running the ritual of the temple. And we still know who is descended from the priestly cast. Many of them are named Cohen, which means priest in Hebrew. So if you know someone named Cohen, they are probably descended from the temple priests. And the temple priests no longer have the job of sacrificing animals because we don’t do that anymore. Their job instead is to bless the congregation with a blessing called the Priestly Blessing, which is a short Hebrew blessing, 15 words, an ancient blessing, it appears in the Torah. And it’s a blessing that brings down divine protection. May God bless and protect you. May God turn his face to you. It’s a very beautiful blessing. And Cohen was a Cohen, but he wrestled with his priestly duties because he felt that he was perhaps not worthy of them, or perhaps that these kind of calcified rituals no longer had anything to offer us. He was much more a fan of prophecy than he was of priesthood, and he didn’t do much with it. And then in this concert in 2009, at the very end of the concert, after about three hours of just giving his soul on the stage, and the audience falls silent, and you can see this on YouTube, and he raises his hands in a very unique gesture which the priests make when they’re blessing the congregation. And he moves from English to Hebrew and he recites the Priestly Blessing. He blesses the 50,000 Israelis who are in this stadium with the blessing that he heard his father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather say in the synagogue, which is this blessing, you know, for peace and for God to turn His countenance toward us and bless us with peace. And it’s described by people who are at the concert as a religious moment. Like, the great, the high priest himself had shown up in Tel Aviv and had come with a blessing. And when he finishes the blessing, you hear 50,000 people shouting, amen, amen. It’s quite an incredible moment. And that’s how Cohen ended the concert. And that was his last communication with the Israeli public.
Q - [Lauren] Thank you. Someone is actually asking a question on how Leonard got into Zen. You talked a little bit about that just now, and they’re asking if you can elaborate a little bit on that.
A - Sure, I don’t know that much about it because it’s outside of the scope of my book about the Yom Kippur War, but Leonard Cohen, for many decades, was affiliated with a zen master named Roshi in California. The Buddhist monastery where he ends up is on Mount Baldy in California. And if you Google it, you’ll find lots of stuff about Mount Baldy and about Roshi. And Roshi was kind of a spiritual teacher for Cohen. And he was always very adamant that he was not replacing Judaism with Buddhism. That Buddhism, for him, was a practise. He once told a reporter, “I’m not looking for a new religion, I have a perfectly good religion.” That’s what he said. But he was a very involved with Buddhism throughout his life, and it seeped into his music as well. And he has a lot of interesting things to say about it. He wrote poetry in the monastery. He could also be quite cynical about it. So he wasn’t, you know, I guess, starry-eyed about Zen Buddhism. But he definitely got a lot out of it.
And he, I think, was a very kind of undisciplined person who was drawn to discipline. He needed some kind of discipline just to sort his life out. So that experience of being in the monastery, where he had to dress in a certain way, had to get up at whatever it was, four o'clock in the morning, say certain prayers, do these tasks, you know, and have this kind of gruelling, monastic lifestyle, that really drew him. It brought order to his life. And by the way, I think there was something similar going on in his attraction to the military. The thing that attracts him to Zen Buddhism is similar to what attracts him to the military in Israel, which is that, you know, he has a quote where he says, “If you can get a bunch of men together wearing the same clothes, clean clothes, and marching in the same direction, you know, that’s a major accomplishment because we’re so undisciplined.” And he had that kind of affinity for things military, which make order out of chaos. And at one point he describes his fellow Zen Buddhist monks as “the Marines of the spiritual world.” So there’s a lot going on there in Leonard Cohen’s mind. And far wiser people have written about it.
Q - And he’s Field Commander Cohen, isn’t he?
A - He’s Field Commander Cohen, right. So he is a monk who has a name that I can’t remember at the moment, but he has like a Buddhist name that he uses in the monastery. And at the same time, he’s Field Commander Cohen. He has a song called “Field Commander Cohen,” where he kind of, his band at the time was called The Army, you know, and he appeared in kind of pseudo military garb. And that was part of Leonard Cohen. He wasn’t a pacifist. He hated violence, of course, but he wasn’t a pacifist. And one of his great and most enduring songs is called “The Partisan,” which is an ode to armed resistance. Leonard Cohen’s father was one of the first Jews ever to be commissioned an officer in the Canadian Army. He fought in the Great War. And Leonard Cohen always treasured his pistol, which he was left when his dad died when he was young. So he had a, you know, he was drawn to the military. In some ways, he was drawn to violence even though he abhorred violence. And he was also drawn to Buddhism, even though he was a Jew through and through. So he was a complicated character.
Q - [Lauren] Thank you. And I think we have time for one last question, which is, “Is the book published in French as well as English?”
A - Oh, that’s a painful question for me because I wish that it was. And there are actually a few great articles published about the book in French, but the book itself has not come out in French. So, I mean, it came out in English, it came out in America and Canada. It came out in Hebrew. There’s a Russian edition. There’s a Serbian edition. There’s an Italian edition. But there is no French edition, which, or at least yet, maybe, you know, if whoever asked that question knows a great French publisher and wants to tell them to publish the book in French, I would love to see that happen, of course.
[Lauren] Great, well, thank you so much for joining us. This was an excellent webinar. And we will see everyone again soon.
Can I just add? Thank you, Lauren. I mean, for me, this last hour has been an absolute treat, 'cause the book is wonderful. It’s a completely engrossing read. I have to say, there’s a lot of stories that we haven’t had time to tell in this short time. And given it’s the summer, if anyone is looking for a summer read which is less than 200 pages, I can highly, highly recommend it. So Matti, thank you so much. And we hope you’ll come back to Lockdown sometime.
I would love to, Philip, thank you so much for having me. And thanks to the staff at Lockdown. And thanks to everyone who logged on.