Ayelet Tsabari's luminous first novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted, explores the complex history of a Yemeni Israeli family and a daughter's journey to learning more about the mother she never understood.
Tsabari (The Art of Leaving) centers her narrative on Zohara, a frustrated Ph.D. candidate living in New York City in 1995. She returns home to the Tel Aviv area after her mother, Saida, dies. Zohara is still grappling with her divorce and finds herself undone by her mother's passing, though their relationship was always fraught. While she cleans Saida's house and sifts through her belongings, Zohara discovers a set of cassettes with recordings of Yemeni songs in her mother's voice, and a mysterious manuscript containing a love story she's never heard. As she struggles to reconcile these discoveries with the image she holds of her mother, Zohara realizes that most stories--even her own--are more complicated than she expects.
Although the novel is mostly Zohara's story, Tsabari draws in other perspectives, including that of Yaqub, a young Yemeni man who meets Saida in an immigrant camp in 1950, and Zohara's nephew, Yoni, whose grief over his grandmother's death spurs him to join student protests as political tensions rise to a fever pitch. Tsabari weaves together the intimate experiences of her characters' emotional lives with larger narratives about the Middle Eastern Jews who emigrated to Israel and the peace agreements of the mid-1990s that provoked strong reactions on all sides.
Tender, wry, and powerfully written, Tsabari's novel is a tribute to the bonds of family and sometimes conflicted but unmistakable gravitational pull of home. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams