In 1950, in an Israeli refugee camp, Yaqub sees Saida for the first time. Both are Yemeni Jews who have packed up and left Yemen in search of a more stable life. And Yaqub is in love — but Saida is married.
In 1995, Zohara gets a call while she’s on vacation in Thailand, telling her that her mother Saida has died and for the first time in ages, she must go home to Israel, and confront the wreckage of her life, her difficult relationship with her mother, and the realization that she doesn’t really know that much about her parents, her life and how her family came to Israel.
Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari is a brilliantly complex family story, set amidst the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, and told by Yemeni Jews, a group which is both Jewish and Arabic, and suffers from a considerable amount of racism. Tsabari is unspooling a family saga, with secrets, buried truths and tragedies, and also applying a critical lens to identity, religion, and a colonial state. I confess that I had not read many (if any!) books where Mizrahi Jews were represented, and this was a really rich look at the Yemeni Jewish culture and struggle, dealing with microaggressions and tangled identities. Tsabari does an excellent job in explaining the myriads of issues, cultural clashes, and even the different ways racism presented.
Tsabari is unspooling a family saga, with secrets, buried truths and tragedies, and also applying a critical lens to identity, religion, and a colonial state.
This is also a slow burn of a family saga, moving between 1950, where Yaqub and Saida are briefly in contact, and 1995, where Zohara is grieving and also learning more about her mother’s life and artistry. The spectre of her brother Rafael lingers over the book as well; Zohara reveals in fits and starts about the brother who went missing from the refugee camp, part of a larger disappearing of Yemeni babies in Israel, and the lack of information that hangs over the family 45 years later.
Each part of the novel begins with a few lines of Yemeni poetry, from unknown poetesses — the long tradition of Yemeni women singing and creating their own songs is a heavy feature in the novel and really lends to the story. This is a story rife with love and care for creating art, and particularly marginalized forms of art.
I enjoyed Songs for the Brokenhearted immensely. It’s a beautiful novel, and one with so many interesting and informative layers, as well as being a careful and respectful family story. It’s not conclusive, but it is very real. It’s been a privilege to start out the reading year for TMR with this one.
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
Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.