Excerpt from Songs for The Brokenhearted: A Novel by Ayelet Tsabari ©2024. Published by HarperCollins Canada. All rights reserved.
An Excerpt from Chapter 1
We weren’t close, my mother and I. “A daddy’s girl,” she called me in a caustic, accusatory tone. As though she had nothing to do with how distant we were, as though she didn’t make me feel like I could never live up to my missing brother, hadn’t sent me away the first chance she had.
She often told me her pregnancy with me was her most difficult one, as if that, too, was my fault. Everything hurt! she announced, throwing her arms up with an exaggerated dramatic flair. Her feet, swollen beyond recognition, no longer fit into her slippers. Eating even the smallest bites gave her violent reflux that sent her retching. Breathing was strenuous; my feet kept kicking and pressing on her diaphragm. At night she’d be woken up from indigestion, from back spasms, from leg cramps, from bad dreams. She knew I had to be a girl. Boys were good to their mothers, aiming to please. Only a girl would put her mother through such misery. Especially one born a decade after her sister, when my mother—dispirited and drained after years of trying in vain—thought she couldn’t have another. Especially when my mother wanted, more than anything, a boy. A male heir to replace the one she had lost.
She labored at home for two days before her friend Bruria took her to the hospital, where she gave birth without fuss. “In Yemen, women didn’t cry and yell at birth like they do here, where the whole world hears you.” She clucked her tongue in disapproval. “Giving birth was a private business. If you had to yell, you yelled quietly.”
I was the only one of her three children to be born in a hospital. The only one, she claimed, who didn’t like the taste of her milk, who flailed and thrashed when being held, needing space. “And every time I sang to you, you cried!” she said, raising her eyebrows as if, of all my transgressions, this was the most offensive of all.
My mother was a beautiful singer, blessed with one of these rare voices that give people chills. Silky, deep and lucid, it was the voice of a bigger woman. With her exceptional range and control, she could easily have been a professional had she chosen to, like her sister Shuli. But my mother wasn’t interested in a music career. She was too shy to perform. Or maybe it was the God thing. Judaism regarded women’s voices as obscene, immodest. The sound of women singing could lead men to have impure thoughts. Although my mother’s religious observance was not of the strict, uncompromising kind. “We, the Yemenis,” she used to say, “our religion is the best. It’s easygoing, not fanatic.”
When I was little, she sang along with the radio, often while cleaning (but not while cooking, a task she had approached joylessly and doggedly). Sometimes, she hummed melodies I didn’t recognize, strung together Arabic words I didn’t know. Still, I could feel the sorrow, the longing for other times, other places.
Was she singing about Rafael, my missing brother?
Later, in high school, I began to roll my eyes at her singing, cringed at the way her voice trilled and undulated. It sounded foreign, Arabic, and utterly uncool, nothing like the popular music sung by Ashkenazi singers on the radio, or the Russian-sounding nationalistic songs we had been taught in the school choir (melodies that were, in fact, often borrowed from Russian tunes). And the depth of emotion in her voice, the earnestness—it made me uncomfortable.
It wasn’t just her singing. I became ashamed of many things during my time at Schneider, an elite boarding school for gifted children in Jerusalem I was sent to at fourteen. I didn’t want to go to. I didn’t care about the scholarship, wasn’t pleased by the honor, having been handpicked along with other Mizrahi teens—whose parents, like mine, immigrated to Israel from Middle Eastern and North African Arab countries—to enroll in a school my family could have never afforded. Sure, I was dying to get out of the house, but on my own terms and not yet. Her sending me off at that age, so soon after my father had died, felt like an abandonment, a betrayal.
Later, I wondered if my mom would have sent me to Schneider had she known of the price, how it would make me reject my heritage, my past. Her. It was there that I became embarrassed by her accent, the guttural het and ayin consonants, the rolling resh. Her Arabic name (why couldn’t she Hebraize it, like everyone else?). Mortified by the fact that she was illiterate, that I had to read the dosage on her medicine for her. Her faith, her superstitions. The unfashionable flowery headscarf she covered her hair with, in accordance with Jewish law. (“If men find female hair so tantalizing,” I announced, “they should cover their own eyes!”) The tang of spicy fenugreek emanating from her skin, the stains of turmeric that lingered on her hands. “Does your mom make lung soup?” an Ashkenazi girl asked me one day when we talked of our mothers’ food. Another girl turned to me in shock and disgust, pretending to gag. “That’s not a thing, is it?” Whenever I was home from school, I became repulsed by the way she ate, how she sucked on the bones, dug into the back of chicken thighs, not wasting a morsel.
Once, she surprised me at school—she had been in Jerusalem for a shiva—and when I saw her small figure stomping down the hall, with her headscarf, her shapeless dress, a basket filled with food in each hand, my heart fell. I dragged her toward the dormitories and closed the door. “You can’t show up like this,” I said, my voice shrill. “Other mothers don’t just show up.” Her face crumpled, wounded.
Ayelet Tsabari is the author of The Art of Leaving, finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and has been published internationally. She’s the co-editor of the anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language and has taught creative writing at Guelph MFA in Creative Writing and The University of King’s College MFA.
Publisher: Harper Collins (September 10, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 400 pages
ISBN: 9781443447898