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.