Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
Few novels available in English explore the experiences of Israeli Jews with backgrounds in the Middle East and North Africa. Helping to fill a void, Ayelet Tsabari’s debut novel “Songs for the Brokenhearted” provides an eloquent representation of the complexities of life within a Yemeni family in Israel.
The book begins in 1950 in a transit camp teeming with immigrants who have come en masse from Yemen to the newly established State of Israel as part of Operation Magic Carpet. Against the backdrop of the tent city’s dreadful living conditions, a romance rapidly blossoms between two recent immigrants, Yaqub and Saida. But at 19, Saida is already married to a much older man and has a child, so her relationship with Yaqub cannot continue.
The novel then shifts to 1995, as Israelis are in the throes of polarization around the Oslo Accord (signed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO negotiator Mahmoud Abbas) and frequent terrorist attacks.
Strikingly, it also shifts into the first-person voice, as the book unconventionally intersperses chapters recounted by an omniscient third-person narrator with chapters narrated in 1995 by Saida’s daughter Zohara, the novel’s protagonist. Zohara is a graduate student in New York whose marriage to an American Ashkenazi Jew has recently collapsed. When her mother dies unexpectedly, Zohara flies home to Israel for the funeral.
Zohara’s relationship with her mother had been a pronouncedly ambivalent one (she felt closer to her father, who had died years earlier), as was her relationship with the traditional Yemeni culture in which her mother had been immersed. Being sent to an elite and predominantly Ashkenazi boarding school as a teenager only compounded the shame and alienation Zohara felt regarding her family’s background.
Her return home becomes an opportunity to understand the family members, friends and neighbors she left behind from a new vantage point.
They include her older and more traditional sister Lizzie, with whom she has long had a tense relationship, and Lizzie’s 17-year old son Yoni, who, distraught by the loss of his beloved grandmother, has turned to religious observance and is enticed into an anti-Rabin extremist group.
But most of all, it is a repaired connection to her mother that Zohara seeks, whether consciously or unconsciously, and to the world from which Saida emerged.
An unexpected path appears when Zohara finds a box full of her mother’s cassette tapes, some of which are home-recorded, labeled only with dates. Upon inserting one into the cassette player, she is stunned to hear her mother singing traditional songs. Zohara recalls: “My mother’s distinct voice filled the room, unaccompanied, sounding deep and young and clear. My skin broke out in goosebumps. My dead mother was singing in Yemeni to me. What was she saying?”
Soon the very traditions Zohara had long avoided are making their way into her life, her mother’s songs becoming her own. “I sang in her kitchen, as I washed the dishes. I sang along with the radio. When I drove. When I cleaned … I could almost hear my mother’s voice accompanying me, harmonizing.”
A friend informs Zohara that Yemenite song is passed down from mother to daughter. And so it happens here, that Zohara inherits the tradition, albeit unconventionally. She is eventually invited to join a group of older Yemeni women who sing informally at a local community center.
As Zohara speaks with the adults of her parents’ generation, she is better able to grasp her parents’ lives, including secrets that were kept from her. And she more fully appreciates the pain her mother lived with — having been unable to pursue a life with her only true love, Yaqub, and having had her first child taken from her when she was in the immigrant camp. Zohara also comes to recognize her mother’s attempts to subvert the limitations on women’s agency within traditional culture in small ways.
Raised in a Yemeni family in Petah Tikva, Tsabari made a splash in 2015 when she received the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her collection of stories, “The Best Place on Earth,” which focused on Mizrahi characters. The book was also notable for having been written in English, Tsabari’s second language, during a long period of living as an expatriate in Canada. Although Tsabari moved back to Israel in 2019, she continues to write in English.
There is much thematically in “Songs for the Brokenhearted” that is recognizable from Tsabari’s short stories and her follow-up 2019 memoir, “The Art of Leaving.” But the form of the novel allows her a welcome sort of freedom and the ability to go deeper with her characters, who are fully drawn.
The narrative can occasionally feel weighted by the need to explain and interpret historical and social issues. But that’s also the cost of introducing a great number of topics that will likely be unfamiliar to the majority of the novel’s readers.
And these are indeed topics that are important for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of Israeli society. I find it maddening that, amid the widespread pillorying of Israel in recent times, one sometimes hears Israeli Jews being inappropriately characterized as “white.” The erasure of Mizrahi Jews, who constitute nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population, though not new, is always upsetting. And it is additionally important to acknowledge the complexity of their experiences, which have included discrimination and injustices. Writing lyrically and empathetically, Tsabari evokes many of these issues in a novel that manages simultaneously to be both educational and moving.