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Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari

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Songs for the Brokenhearted

A Novel

by Ayelet Tsabari

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Length 13 hours 3 minutes

Language English

Narrators Ayelet Tsabari, Assaf Cohen & Yossi Zabari

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Summary
About the author
About the narrator

A young Yemeni Israeli woman learns of her mother’s secret romance in a dramatic journey through lost family stories, revealing the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter in the debut novel of an award-winning literary voice

1950. Thousands of Yemeni Jews have immigrated to the newly founded Israel in search of a better life. In an overcrowded immigrant camp in Rosh Ha’ayin, Yaqub, a shy young man, happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But they weren’t supposed to; Saida is married and has a child, and a married woman has no place befriending another man.

1995. Thirty-something Zohara, Saida’s daughter, has been living in New York City—a city that feels much less complicated than Israel, where she grew up wishing her skin were lighter, her illiterate mother’s Yemeni music quieter, and that the father who always favored her was alive. She hasn’t looked back since leaving home, rarely in touch with her mother or sister, Lizzie, and missing out on her nephew Yoni’s childhood. But when Lizzie calls to tell her their mother has died, she gets on a plane to Israel with no return ticket.

Soon Zohara finds herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family—including dangers that lurk for impressionable young men and secrets that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, her heritage, and her own future.

Fiction Fiction - Literary

AYELET TSABARI is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the Vine National Canadian Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction. It was also chosen as a Best Book of 2019 by Apple Books and Kirkus Reviews. Tsabari was a co-editor, with Leonarda Carranza and Eufemia Fantetti, of the anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language.

Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction. It was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice book and was a Kirkus Review Best Debut Fiction of 2016 title. It was also nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Ayelet Tsabari is a graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio and the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. She teaches in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Guelph, the MFA in Fiction program at the University of King’s College and the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.