“Your culture is unrepresented or mocked when it is, your past erased, your history dismissed, left out of history books or being rewritten to match the desired narrative. You are left wordless, unable to narrate your own experiences.” 

— Songs for the Brokenhearted, Ayelet Tsabari. 

Who gets to shape the story of a people? Where are the voices on the margins–-the voices of those whose histories are excluded from textbooks and official archives, instead passed down from generation to generation in half-forgotten songs, letters and oral history?

In her novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted, Ayelet Tsabari gives platform to the voices of the Yemenite Jewish community, bringing the songs and memories of Yemenite women to the fore and awakening intimate stories of love, passion, grief and resilience. Set between 1950s Rosh HaAyin and 1990s Israel, the novel unfolds through the perspectives of three characters: Yaqub, a recent refugee in a Ma’abarot immigration camp; Zohara, a disheartened Israeli PhD student in New York dismissive of her Yemenite roots; and Yoni, Zohara’s teenage nephew, who becomes caught up in the complexities of Israeli politics.  

While the novel powerfully engages with the political turmoil shaking Israel in 1995–-particularly the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin—to me, its real power lies in the intimate, emotional terrain it explores. Songs for the Brokenhearted captures the tensions of cultural inheritance as Zohara, Tsabari’s protagonist, pieces together the story of her late mother, Saida, through the songs she left behind and the written traces of her love for Yaqub. Zohara is initially adamant in her rejection of her Yemenite heritage; she refuses to listen to Yemenite music and critiques her illiterate mother as overly ‘diasporic’. As if in rebellion, she constantly strives to assimilate with the dominant cultures around her.

However, she becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the contents of her research, primarily focused on Ashkenazi-dominated Hebrew literature. Zohara seems to carry a persistent sense of alienation: her Arabness marks her out as different in New York, while her Americanness distances her from her own community in Sha’ariya, Israel. 

But the news of her mother Saida’s death prompts Zohara to return to Israel, marking the beginning of her transformation as she reencounters her home culture. She soon discovers recordings of Saida singing, igniting a fascination not only with the tradition of Yemenite women’s song, but also with her mother’s hidden past. Listening to her mother’s voice, Zohara begins to comprehend the depth of love and pain embedded in her words. Depictions of Saida in both her youth and old age begin to overlap as stories told by Yaqub emerge alongside Zohara’s discoveries.

Saida, though deceased by the novel’s opening, looms large. Dismissed in life as uneducated and old-fashioned, she is revealed in death to have been passionate and subtly rebellious, full of longing and nostalgia. It is her voice– muffled on cassette tapes— that guides Zohara back to the heritage she once rejected.

Indeed, Saida’s voice is the connecting thread throughout the novel. It is her voice that first ignites the love between her and Yaqub, and that years later, becomes the bridge between Zohara and her past. As Zohara is welcomed into the feminine space of the Yemenite community’s singing group, she begins to connect with the stories of the women around her. There, she is exposed to their vivid memories of child marriage, cultural shame surrounding sex, and the practice of polygamy in Yemen. Rather than presenting these as grounds for judgement, Tsabari uses these insights to raise fundamental questions about the hierarchization of cultures in Israel and the distortion of Yemenite and Mizrahi narratives. 

Just as the novel’s oscillating chapters allow readers to inhabit multiple spaces and time periods, Zohara herself wonders, ‘Was my mother communicating with me through the tape recorder?’. Tsabari emphasizes the power of the multigenerational connection between Saida’s voice and her family, and between sidelined traditions and dominant narratives. Through Zohara’s growing fascination with Yemenite women’s song, Tsabari challenges the lack of Yemenite Jewish representation in academia and traditional media. Songs for the Brokenhearted, then, extends beyond its novelistic nature; it is a subtle yet potent act of cultural reclamation on the literary level. In a culture that has often silenced Mizrahi women through shame and neglect, Tsabari’s centering of these voices is deeply political, insisting that erasure is not neutral, and that to forget is also to wound. 

Historical silence is perhaps the novel’s most poignant and chilling theme— particularly, through the subplot of the disappearance of Saida’s son, Raphael, from an immigration camp in the 1950s. Anyone familiar with the Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan Children Affair– where hundreds of families reported their babies were taken without consent or pronounced dead under suspicious circumstances– knows how enduring and deep a wound it is in Israeli history. Tsabari excavates this painful history through her characters, whose efforts to discuss Raphael’s disappearance are repeatedly met with skepticism, highlighting the ongoing erasure of the affair, even decades after the disappearances. Tsabari’s focus on the generational nature of such trauma illustrates a refusal to be silenced. This is particularly evident in the character of Zohara’s nephew, Yoni, who writes about his grandmother and Raphael in a school essay, hoping that “maybe by writing their story he could write her, write them, back into existence”. In a way, that’s exactly what the novel achieves.

While reading Songs for the Brokenhearted, the poem Israel, 1969, written by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges came to mind. [I translated roughly from the original Spanish]:

“Without words, Israel has told them: You will forget who you are. You will forget the other version of yourself that you left behind. You will forget of the person you were in the lands where you dwelled day and night. You will no longer reminisce about them. You will forget the language of your parents and will learn the language of Paradise. You will become an Israeli, and be a soldier.” 

The poem resonated with me when reflecting on Zohara’s initial view of her Israeli identity. She does not understand the Judeo-Arabic dialect spoken by the Yemenite Jews around her, and pursues a career researching a literary tradition that does not speak for her Yemenite identity. However, through Zohara’s transformation, Tsabari’s novel traces a reverse trajectory: How does one return to the land left behind, and more specifically, to one’s language?

A major part of Zohara’s reconnection with Yemenite culture and with her mother revolves around the act of translation, through which she gains access to a language and culture that feel foreign to her. Contrary to what Borges insinuates in his poem, it is this linguistic reconnection that leads Zohara to deepen ties with her community and, ultimately, to feel a sense of belonging in Israel. Like her mother’s described arrival in Israel decades earlier, by the end of the novel, Zohara, too, arrives anew, as if reborn into a heritage she once abandoned. 

That return to voice and origin becomes an act of both resistance and healing in the novel. Yaqub’s writing, Saida’s songs, Zohara’s research and Yoni’s essay each offer different methods of resisting marginalization and cultural erasure. Whether it is the fight for forbidden love, the act of “voicing a woman’s pain in a culture that silences their voices”, or challenging dominant historical narratives, words are presented as a layered and powerful form of protest. Through the novel’s shifting timelines, readers accompany Zohara as she slowly reconstructs her mother’s life– from the songs she recorded to fragments of a love story buried in old notebooks. 

In this act of recovery, Zohara— like Tsabari herself— becomes a bridge between past and present, amplifying the marginalized voices of the Yemenite Jewish community and bringing their untold stories to light. ◦

Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted is available for order here.

Einav Grushka is a Master’s degree student at Tel Aviv University with Moroccan Jewish heritage. She was previously Deputy Editor in Chief of The Cambridge Language Collective and an editor for Panoramic magazine at the University of Cambridge. Her work primarily focuses on literature, music, modern art and history.