Songs for the Brokenhearted

July 29, 2024
In this heartfelt and lyrical debut novel from Tsabari (The Art of Leaving, a memoir) a Yemenite Jewish woman contends with her family’s origins. Zohara Haddad returns from New York City to her native Tel Aviv for her mother’s funeral in August 1995. She stays with her sister, Lizzie, and gets caught up in the family conflicts she’d hoped to leave behind. Their parents fled from persecution in Yemen in 1950, living at first in a squalid refugee camp with their infant son, Rafael, who was separated from them by camp officials, and whose unknown fate put a lingering strain on the family, causing Zohara to suspect her mother wished she had been born a boy. Now that she’s back in Israel, she angers Lizzie by attempting to warn her about her 17-year-old son Yoni’s involvement with a right-wing group. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated, Yoni happens to be in the crowd of anti-Rabin protesters and is arrested. At times, the historical background overshadows the central narrative, but for the most part Tsabari artfully plays up the religious and secular contrasts between East and West, and her well-developed characters, dramatic plot twists, and rich descriptions of Tel Aviv will keep readers turning the pages. This is transportive. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management.

August 1, 2024
A family's tangled past comes to light. In her debut novel, Israeli Canadian memoirist and short story writer Tsabari gently unfolds two narratives: one about young Yaqub and Saida, who fall in love in an Israeli camp for Yemeni immigrants in 1950; the other about Zohara Haddad, a graduate student, newly divorced, who returns to Israel from New York in 1995 after her mother, Saida, dies. The teenage Yemeni lovers are ill-fated: Saida is married with a child, and when her husband discovers the relationship, Yaqub is forced to flee. A few months later, Saida suffers an even more devastating loss. Forced to place her tiny son in the camp's nursery, she cannot find him one day when she goes to breastfeed. Although she's told that the child became ill and died, Saida, for the rest of her life, nurses the hope of finding the baby, whom she's certain was put up for adoption. Zohara discovers the complexities of her parents' lives when she cleans out her mother's house: Tapes of her mother singing unfamiliar love songs, a mysterious photograph, and stories written in someone else's hand all reveal long-hidden secrets. Tsabari sets Zohara's story in the context of the social and political unrest that has long vexed Israel and Palestine. The Oslo Accords have just been signed, inciting ferocious protests. Tensions flare between Ashkenazi Jews and Yemeni Jews, and stereotypes and superstitions abound. "Maybe," Zohara thinks, "Israeli anger was also a manifestation of helplessness, of grief. This was a nation of migrants, exiles and survivors, people who fled from genocide and persecution only to arrive at this place where wars never end...." With Zohara as a central character, Tsabari examines the effect of loss on a woman struggling to define herself as a Jew, a scholar, and an Israeli. A timely, well-crafted tale, imbued with cultural and personal sorrow.

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August 1, 2024
For her mother's shiva, Zohara returns to the Tel Aviv suburb where she grew up before attending an elite boarding school and eventually moving to New York. Divorced and disillusioned with the dissertation she's working on, Zohara is at a crossroads. In the months following her mother's death, she slowly gains new understanding about who Saida was. Saida married young and migrated from Yemen to Israel. In an immigration camp, she was separated from her young son, and he disappeared, one of many Yemeni children lost. When, decades later, Zohara finds tapes of her mother singing in the style of her home country, she confronts the possibility that Saida had a romance with someone other than Zohara's father and that the history Zohara has distanced herself from may be worth rediscovering. Tsabari's (The Art of Leaving, 2019) eye-opening novel brings together a web of relationships--including Zohara's nephew, who begins to find purpose through protests--to explore the complex legacy of the treatment of Arab Jews in Israel through one family's secrets, sorrows, and long-delayed joy.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2024

Tsabari, author of the award-winning story collection The Best Place on Earth, writes her first full-length novel. In 1950, thousands of Yemeni Jews are living in an immigrant camp in Israel, where married Saida falls in love with another man. In 1995, Saida's daughter Zohara returns to Israel after her mother dies; there she learns shocking truths about her family. Prepub Alert.

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