Giving Yemeni Jews a voice in literature

In one of the epigraphs to her debut novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted, Ayelet Tsabari quotes the Indian writer Arundhati Roy: “There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless.” There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard”.

Tsabari explains that she chose this quote because Songs for the Brokenhearted, which won a prestigious 2024 US National Jewish Book Award for fiction, “is about voice and voicelessness”. Especially as it applies to Yemeni women, who were known for their singing voices, yet were often silenced by a patriarchal society. One of the novel’s storylines also centres around Israel’s horrific Yemenite Babies Affair, which was silenced for decades and remains tragically unresolved.

Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. As an adult, she lived in Canada for 20 years, where she began writing in English. Even before her award-winning Songs for the Brokenhearted was published, Tsabari had great success in North America and beyond. Her collection of short stories, The Best Place on Earth (2015), won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and has been translated into French, Italian, Estonian and Hebrew. Her memoir in essays, The Art of Leaving (2019), won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir and has been translated into Italian and Romanian.

Yet Tsabari, who now lives in Tel Aviv (she moved back some seven years ago to be close to her family) is largely unknown in Australia as she doesn’t yet have an Australian publisher. Although she’s always wanted to be published here, “crossing all the way to that area of the world isn’t an easy thing to do”, she says.

Indeed, I hadn’t heard of Tsabari until a friend in the US recommended her work. Having now read The Art of Leaving, Songs for the Brokenhearted and some of Tsabari’s articles, I can echo my American friend’s sentiments: this Israeli-Canadian author is a special voice.

Songs for the Brokenhearted is a Yemeni family saga spanning three generations. It’s the story of Saida, who meets Yaqub in an Israeli immigrant camp in 1950, and of Saida’s daughter Zohara, who returns to Israel in 1995 after Saida dies.

Set mostly in Israel, the book moves between the 1950s, when thousands of Yemeni Jews arrived in Israel, and the 1990s, during the negotiations for the Oslo accords and the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin. Central to the novel are the songs of Yemeni Jewish women – an oral tradition created by illiterate women as a way to express their hopes and feelings.

“Everyone talks about Yemeni singing voices, it’s like a phenomenon,” says Tsabari. Ofra Haza is probably the best-known Yemeni Jewish singer, famous for Chai, which came second in the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest. (Haza was also a formative influence on Tsabari; in The Art of Leaving, Tsabari describes Haza as “her childhood idol”.) And remarkably, three out of Israel’s four Eurovision wins were by artists of Yemeni heritage: Izhar Cohen (1978), Gali Atari from Milk and Honey (1979), and Dana International (1998).

“That's one of the things I was trying to reconcile in the novel, that tension between having those well-known singers and being known for their voices, yet being so silenced. Especially when it comes to the Yemenite Babies Affair,” she says.

Until I read Tsabari’s work, I’d only vaguely heard of the Yemenite Babies Affair – which is also known as the Yemenite Children Affair, or the Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan Children Affair. Between 1948 and 1952, thousands of babies and toddlers, most of them Yemeni and the rest Mizrahi, went missing from Israeli transit camps and hospitals. (Over 1,000 children were reported missing but some estimates claim that as many as 4,500 children disappeared.)

The parents were told their children had died, but they never saw a body, grave or death certificate. They also never saw their children again. The families believe their children were abducted by the Israeli authorities and given to childless Ashkenazi families.

In The Art of Leaving, in sentiments similar to the racial discrimination which led to the forcible removal of Australia’s First Nation children from their families, Tsabari writes that “during the late forties and early fifties, the patronising belief that Yemenis were unfit to parent and had more children than they could manage helped rationalise [these] heinous crimes.”

Yet while Australia’s Stolen Generation is undisputed, the Yemenite Babies Affair is still horribly unresolved, despite three formal Commissions of Inquiry by the Israel government. Those Commissions, says Tsabari, “generally came up with the same result of, well, we don't really know what happened [to all those children]. Most of them died.”

Yet almost 60 children were unaccounted for. Compared to the number of children that went missing, that number doesn’t sound like much, Tsabari observes. But when you think about 60 children whose whereabouts are unknown, “that's a lot!”

The Israeli government denies there were any systematic abductions of Yemenite and Mizrahi children. And in an article titled The Myth of the Kidnapped Yemenite Children, and the Sin it Conceals, the head of the Israeli state archives at the time relevant files were unsealed wrote that “there are no documents that tell or even hint at a governmental policy of kidnapping children.” Yet individual testimonies, including Tsabari’s uncle’s wife who was nearly kidnapped the same way that many other testimonies detailed, tell a different story.

“I know people who sat through that those Commissions [of Inquiry],” says Tsabari. “The people who testified felt very unheard. There was never any real acknowledgement that something terrible happened. And that’s why I made Zohara’s brother one of those missing children.”

Tsabari is referring to having written the Yemenite Babies Affair into Songs for the Brokenhearted. In the novel, Saida’s first child, Rafael, is sent to hospital by nurses at the immigrant camp. Rafael is never seen again; a grief his mother never recovers from.

Fiction aside, “what really happened to those children is a mystery,” says Tsabari. “I don't know if we'll ever really know,” she adds. “It feels like a lot of the people who knew have taken it to their graves.”

It's only later, after I interview Tsabari, that I’m struck by the irony that her novel about voice and voicelessness – released in a post-October 7 world – has been ignored in some circles (or, in the words of Arundhati Roy, “deliberately silenced”) simply because she’s Israeli.

Although Tsabari expected more exposure for Songs for the Brokenhearted than for her first two books – since it’s her third book and “was kind of anticipated” – she’s received less publicity this time around; fewer festival invitations and radio interviews.

Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Tsabari attributes this to “being an Israeli author who lives in Israel and writes about Israel”. She also mentions a foreign translation deal she lost after it was almost signed. “It’s disappointing,” she says.

At the same time, Tsabari says that winning the National Jewish Book Award “was amazing”. She emphasises that despite her disappointment at not receiving the invitations to non-Jewish literary festivals that she’d expected, “I'm really grateful for everything the book has achieved and the readers that that it did reach. And I think the National Jewish Book Award is a big part of that.”

When I ask Tsabari how her writing has been received in the diaspora compared to Israel, I’m surprised when she tells me she chose not to have The Art of Leaving translated into Hebrew (“it felt a little bit too exposed, too close”), and that Songs for the Brokenhearted isn’t yet available in Israel – she’s currently working on the Hebrew translation. She’s also working on a book of essays, some of which have previously been published, about Jewish and Yemeni identity in the aftermath of October 7. And she has a novel she’s just started envisioning.

Writing Songs for the Brokenhearted was Tsabari’s way of rectifying her childhood experience of growing up in a Yemeni neighbourhood in Israel and never reading a book with Yemeni characters, or one written by a Yemeni author. “As a teenager and young adult, I loved reading family sagas from the world,” she tells me. “In Israel, there's all these stories of the Ashkenazi Jews and the halutzim (pioneers) and the kibbutz. And I always dreamt of reading and then writing something that would celebrate us [Yemeni Jews].”

Despite the difficulties of being an Israeli author right now, Tsabari has said that by “writing an entire novel about Yemeni Jews, a novel that told our stories, described our food, our songs and music, detailed our traditions and history, gave voice to our sorrows and pain”, she’s been able to honour her community and Yemeni Jews more generally. “It’s a dream come true.”