Songs for the Brokenhearted is a new novel by award-winning writer Ayelet Tsabari, who garnered popular and critical acclaim for her short story collection The Greatest Place on Earth and memoir The Art of Leaving.
Tsabari provides firsthand views of people and issues in Israel that are not readily accessible to English-language readers.
Through its strategy of three simultaneous narratives set in Israel – two in 1995 and a third in an immigrant camp in the early years of the state – the novel tackles the complex heritage of Yemeni women, the unresolved tragedy of the missing Mizrahi children, and the historical connections between religion, culture, and political extremism in Israel.
The plot of Songs of the Brokenhearted
Like Tsabari, the protagonist of the novel, Zohara Haddad, is an Israeli-born Yemeni woman who built a life for herself abroad, which in Zohara’s case includes PhD studies at New York University and an American Ashkenazi husband.
When the novel opens in 1995, Zohara’s marriage has fallen apart, and she’s traveling in Thailand on a much-needed break to take stock of her life. When she receives a phone call from her sister informing her that their mother, Saida, has died, Zohara flies back to Israel, to her childhood home. There, for the first time, she begins to confront her difficult relationship with her mother. Though she had always experienced her mother as critical and emotionally distant, it was as a teenager attending an exclusive boarding school that she first felt ashamed of Saida.
“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.”
However, a very different view of Saida emerges in the chapter titled “Yacoub,” set in the Rosh Ha’ayin immigrant camp in 1950. Yacoub, who, like Saida, is a young Yemeni immigrant, first catches sight of her at the communal sinks:
“He was washing his hands before dinner. She was scrubbing dishes, using sand in lieu of dish soap, her face round and open, her eyes long-lashed and lined with kohl. She was dressed in a buttoned floral dress and a red cardigan – in the camp, they were all given used winter clothes that looked nothing like the traditional clothing they had left behind in Yemen… They looked up at the same time, and their eyes met. And it was as though his heart stopped. Or he was struck by lightning. Or some other terrible cliché he’d feel embarrassed by as soon as it crossed his lips.”
It isn’t a spoiler to say that the love story is doomed from the start. Saida is married and the mother of one-year-old Rafael, and traditional Yemeni norms discourage even brief contact between men and women. By interweaving Yacoub’s story of unrealized love through Zohara’s, drawing a line from 1950 to 1995, we are constantly reminded of who these people are, where they came from, and their struggle to make their way in a society that saw them as foreign, impoverished, politically naive, and culturally primitive.
This common and casual racism was the basis for what is today generally acknowledged (despite decades of denial and refusal to investigate) as a secret but unofficial scheme on the part of medical authorities that involved taking babies and young children from (mostly) Mizrahi families and placing them with adoptive Ashkenazi parents.
Saida is haunted by the hope that Rafael didn’t die in the hospital, as the nurses told her, but was adopted, grew to adulthood, and could possibly be tracked down. Zohara describes her, years later, staring at a group of soldiers: “When the group dispersed, she stood up quickly. ‘Wait here,’ she ordered without looking at me. She called one of them, a gangly Yemeni boy, and he hesitantly turned to her. She asked him where he was born, who his parents were. I could tell he didn’t want to talk to her. When we walked away, she was crying. ‘Why are you crying, Ima?’ I asked, and she said, ‘Nothing, hayati.’ She wrapped her arm around me, and we walked like that until the bus station.”
TSABARI’S ACCOUNT of Saida’s life goes beyond this horrific episode as she delves into her family history, uncovering the rudiments of her mother’s story, a harrowing picture of what it meant to be a woman in traditional Yemeni society begins to emerge.
Illiteracy, child marriage, and polygamy were all common features of women’s experiences, leaving them unequipped and unable to determine the course of their own lives. When Zohara starts participating in her mother’s neighborhood singing group, she hears truths that she had intuited but never fully considered.
“‘The Yemeni women’s lives were hard,’ Yael said, and everyone nodded. I realized she was speaking to me. ‘They were not allowed the freedoms men had. They were told to be submissive, silent. I remember the poet Bracha Serri saying there was no greater insult for a Yemeni woman than to be considered unquiet. They couldn’t celebrate their loves. They couldn’t be passionate.’ Women murmured agreement. ‘The songs were their way of speaking their heart, having a voice.’”
A third plotline follows Zohara’s fatherless 17-year-old nephew Yoni as he is recruited into a right-wing religious movement that opposes the Oslo Accords. Angry and grieving the death of his beloved grandmother, Yoni begins attending morning and evening prayers at a local synagogue, where he’s befriended by Baruch, a religious political activist whose message resonates with issues that Yoni is only beginning to understand.
Through Yoni’s story, Tsabari traces the signposts leading up to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, depicting the rhetoric, the protests, the propaganda, the influence of right-wing rabbis, the death curses, and also the fear, confusion, and uncertainty of the times.
Tsabari is at her best when writing from the first-person point of view of Zohara, a character whose life trajectory parallels her own. As an Israeli who lived in Canada for many years, where she mastered English and studied creative writing, Tsabari brings to the character a deep and subtle understanding of the challenges of being an immigrant, an outsider who must learn to live within a foreign language and culture, and also come to terms with her own heritage.
Alongside her protagonists, Tsabari has created a sizable cast of minor characters. She skillfully conveys both the weight of Jewish history and the looming but opaque future very much present in everyone’s daily routines.
From Nir, a left-leaning Yemeni who runs his parents’ makolet, to Hodaya, a young religious girl who is also drawn into Baruch’s circle, to Shuli, Zohara’s freewheeling aunt who has built a life for herself in Eilat, Tsabari avoids easy stereotypes and showcases the tectonic forces that move and shape Israeli society.
This cast of characters and their stories offer an authentic mosaic of the people who make up Israeli society, portraying the tensions, the long history, and the unresolved traumas that continue to impact the country to this day.
- SONGS FOR THE BROKENHEARTED: A NOVEL
- By Ayelet Tsabari
- Random House
- 352 pages; $21
