Ayelet Tsabari’s latest book, Songs for the Brokenhearted, is the novel she was always meant to write | Canada Voices

Songs for the Brokenhearted is the novel Ayelet Tsabari was born to write. Inspired by her own Yemeni Jewish background, Tsabari – who is Israeli-Canadian – has created a multigenerational love story set around events that shaped Israel’s history: in 1950, during the immediate aftermath of the founding of the State of Israel; and 1995, when the Oslo Accords brought about hope for peace in the Middle East – and then the death of that hope, with the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

It is a book about othering and identity, about personal loss amid political turmoil, with universal themes in a very specific slice of Israeli history. It is a great Yemeni novel, heavily researched over 15 years – exposing the racism her people have experienced in Israel. As the novel explains, “Yemini” in its female form became synonymous with the word “maid.”

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Her third book and first novel is intended to be a love story for the author’s community, especially the women. “It feels like my life’s work,” says Tsabari, noting at 51, she may be too young to say that. “But it does feel like that.”

Timing, however, can be everything in publishing. Putting a novel like this out into the world as war rages in Gaza, killing tens of thousands, and Israel has become a pariah – in cultural circles too – can have consequences. Even a book that is critical of Israel – and it is – can get short shrift in a moment that has many in the literary community shunning the country as a whole – not just its government – including its culture. More than 1,000 writers and others including Sally Rooney, Rachel Kushner and Canadians Rupi Kaur, Miriam Toews and Dionne Brand have signed a letter pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”

Tsabari notes that she was invited to only one writers’ festival this year – Vancouver’s, where we spoke – and that media coverage has been sparse. The book has received less attention than her debut collection of short stories, even after the kudos and awards for that book and her second, the memoir The Art of Leaving.

“It’s not great and it’s disappointing. There were certain expectations for writing a book that is, like I said, my life’s work, and a book the publishers really thought would go places. I actually apologized to my editor the other day and she’s like, please don’t apologize for world events,” she told me.

“It is disappointing to write something you worked on for years and had hoped … it would be received more widely. But there’s also perspective,” she continues. “Some people have lost everything. And children continue to die in Gaza. And the hostages are still there, including girls that are 18, 19. And babies.”

She knows she can’t definitively attribute the lack of attention and invitations to the political situation and the fact she was born in Israel and lives there, but it’s an easy conclusion to arrive at.

As for the boycott calls, Tsabari says she understands the thinking – and has herself avoided products from the settlements – but struggles to understand how a cultural boycott benefits anyone. It hurts Israeli authors, many of whom are fighting for change, and Israeli readers, who need global perspectives more than ever.

“My sense is that silencing writers is always counterproductive.”

Songs for the Brokenhearted deserves attention. It is a sweeping novel told from three perspectives. Its central character is Zohara, a Yemeni woman in her 20s who returns to Israel in 1995 after a death in the family. In the same timeline, her nephew Yoni, also grieving, becomes targeted by the Israeli far right and radicalized. In 1950, at an immigrant camp, Yaqub, a Yemeni immigrant, falls in love with a singing woman. But the woman, also Yemeni, is married.

It is one of the crowded immigrant transit camps where thousands of Yemeni Jews lived in terrible conditions at the time. The chaos was such that there were allegations that babies were abducted from the camp and given to Ashkenazi couples – Eastern European Jews, often Holocaust survivors who were unable to conceive. The parents were told that their children had died. This is known in Israel as the Yemenite Children Affair.

“The way they were told of their children’s death was often very callous. Just like: ‘You’ll have other kids, you’re still young.’ It was a real dehumanization,” says Tsabari. In the novel, the disappearances are compared to Canada’s Sixties Scoop targeting Indigenous children.

In Israel, there were inquiries, which dismissed the allegations. But younger generations are doing detective work of their own. “Most people will never know, but obviously there has been a terrible injustice that happened to these families because they were not shown bodies, they were not shown graves,” she says.

There’s a story from her own family: an aunt whose parents were told that she had died after she had been taken to the hospital for a common cold. “Her father would not hear of it. He just tore the hospital down and found her,” Tsabari explains.

It’s one of the echoes from her own life that appears in the novel – although it is not autobiographical. Her grandmother was a polygamous second wife; in the acknowledgments, she thanks her for demonstrating “what feminism could look like in a traditional, patriarchal society.” Tsabari also sings traditional Yemeni songs, like the women in the book.

Zohara, the novel’s central character, joins the army feeling enthusiastic and patriotic, but loses her zeal and develops strong political views, in part as she awakens to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

A friend recalls playing as a child on the ruins adjacent to her elementary school; nobody told the children that it had been an Arabic village. Zohara reads an essay, “Reflections of an Arab Jew,” which contributes to her awakening.

The book captures the hopefulness of the Oslo Accords, when the characters feel there is finally a chance for peace. And then, the dissolution of that, the disillusion. “This country is finished,” someone says in the wake of Rabin’s assassination.

Tsabari herself was an ethicist from a young age, she says, and attended left-wing protests from the age of 17. “It was a slow thing that happened over time. But the idea that the occupation was wrong, I think that was very early for me.”

She hated being in the army, which is mandatory in Israel, where she had an office job. “I was a miserable soldier.”

The novel is not starry eyed about the founding of her country. “Our textbooks described that time as this magical coming together of Jews from around the world, skipped over the hardships, the hunger, the losses, the discrimination,” she writes. “And of course, there was little mention of the Palestinian tragedy. The Arabs, the story went, fled en masse. A sad but uncomplicated history, palatable for children.”

The author has received some backlash in the past for airing dirty laundry when Israel has enough reputational problems of its own. She has been called a self-hating Jew; accused of selling her soul, her Israeli identity, for fame.

Tsabari was born in Israel and moved to Vancouver when she was 25. Here, she formed attachments with Arab friends, leading to her own reawakening of identity.

After 11 years in Vancouver, where she attended the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, she relocated to Toronto, and did her master’s degree of fine arts in creative writing at the University of Guelph. There, she began early work on Songs for the Brokenhearted. In 2019, Tsabari moved back to Israel to be closer to her family. She writes in English and teaches at Nova Scotia’s University of King’s College MFA program in creative non-fiction.

On her arm she has tattooed a line of poetry written by her father, in his original handwriting. “I’ll join forgotten words into verse, unravel the tangle.” She got the tattoo to mark her 50th birthday.

Since the Oct. 7 attacks and the war in Gaza, Tsabari is brokenhearted for her own country and feels shunned by some in her larger community. Why have writer friends blocked or unfriended her? “I’ve always been critical of Israel, but I’m not anti-Israel. And I’m pro-Palestinian. And the pain that I feel about my country, what’s happening in Israel, is immense.” She is devastated by the deaths in Gaza, and doesn’t think the war makes her safer.

“I am still traumatized. And I’m dealing with a traumatized child.” Her daughter is 11.

She shows me an app on her phone, with shelling alerts in northern Israel one hour earlier, two hours, four hours, five hours. “This is what life has been in the north since October 8.”

Wanting to help, Tsabari volunteered to work on homes at a kibbutz that was attacked on Oct. 7, 2023. “We clean whatever we can, we fix whatever we can – like broken glass, bullet holes everywhere.” Working in a child’s bedroom, her friend worried: How to clean the Lego sets, pieced together, without destroying them?

Tsabari feels there is an expectation that she cannot write with love about her homeland, even if it’s a country she has plenty of criticism for – which is apparent in the novel. That she’s not entitled to that love.

“Can’t I be on the side of humanity? And can’t I grieve for what happened to my people?”