Ayelet Tsabari is the author of the new novel Songs for the Brokenhearted.
I’m on my second day of recording the audiobook for my forthcoming novel at a studio in an industrial Tel Aviv neighbourhood, when my voice gives out. The director asks me to repeat a certain line, give it more energy. But I’m trying so hard to just make a sound, that I can’t focus on the acting part. It’s an unsettling feeling, losing one’s voice, something we so often take for granted. I open my mouth and there’s a gasp of air where sound is meant to come.
We cut the session short.
Ayelet Tsabari's grandmother, Salha, was married off young to avoid a forced conversion to Islam under a decree targeting Jewish orphans in Yemen. In her research into her family history, Ms. Tsabari found historical records and archival information scarce.
Elderly Jewish Yemeni women in Israel spoke with Ms. Tsabari as she sought to understand her roots. Some had stories of hardship similar to her grandmother's.Photos courtesy of Ayelet Tsabari
A number of years ago, I spent a few months interviewing elderly Jewish Yemeni women in Israel. The lives of these women had fascinated and inspired me for years. The longer I spent living in Canada, the more I was craving a connection to my roots, to a Jewish Yemeni heritage that as a child growing up in Israel and wishing to belong, I had often snubbed.
Trying to glean our history in libraries and archives proved frustrating. Israeli history books focused on the European migration to Israel – a reflection of who wrote them – and to make matters worse, in late-19th-century and early-20th-century rural Yemen, where my family came from, documents were rarely issued, photos not taken. We didn’t even know my grandparents’ exact ages. The dearth of written narratives was even more glaring when it came to women, since they never learned to read and write.
The stories I heard during those interviews were often heartbreaking. Many of the women were child brides, some (like my own grandmother) were married off to circumvent the Orphan Decree, which had the Yemeni authorities convert Jewish orphans to Islam. Some told me about living as a second or third wife, about husbands and mothers-in-law who abused them. Others cried when speaking of the babies that had disappeared from the immigrant camps in Israel, an unsolved tragedy known as the Yemeni, Balkan and Mizrahi Children Affair, reminiscent of the Sixties Scoop.
When I asked about their dreams, one described herding sheep on a hill as a child after their migration to Israel and watching enviously as other girls went to school. An illiterate woman in a northern village sheepishly said she thought she would have made a good psychologist, that people told her she was a good listener and gave good advice. Often, the women burst into song. They’d grab a pot and drum on it for rhythm. I didn’t understand the Yemeni Arabic lyrics but I felt the pain, the longing, the depth of emotion.
It was during one of those trips that I met the woman who would become my singing teacher, Gila Beshari. Gila lived in a village near Jerusalem where everyone was Yemeni, and when she opened her mouth to sing, chills ran through me. She told me of the repertoire of women’s songs that had developed in Yemen.
While the Jewish men’s songs were devotional and sung in Hebrew, the women’s songs were a form of oral poetry sung in Arabic and focused on their domestic lives, love and loss, jealousy and desire. The songs were memorized, passed on from mother to daughter, and unlike written poetry they had a dynamic quality, changing and evolving each time they were performed.
I used to envy my friends for their literary traditions. Now I realized we had a rich, ancient literary tradition of our own – a feminine one! – that hadn’t been written down. I also realized that as a Jewish Yemeni woman, if I were to really immerse myself in this study, I had to learn to sing.
Ms. Tsabari learned Yemeni traditional songs with the help of Gila Beshari. Together, they sang one such song, Yuma and yaba, in the trailer for Ms. Tsabari's novel, playable in the Instagram post below.Courtesy of Ayelet Tsabari
The novel I’ve been recording, or trying to, tells the story of Zohara, a thirtysomething Israeli Yemeni woman, distant from her family and heritage, who returns home to Israel upon her mother’s sudden death. As she cleans her mother’s home, she finds tapes of her mother singing. The discovery leads to shocking revelations about her mother’s life.
For the next couple of weeks, I try to nurse my voice back to health. I drink ginger tea, mix honey with oregano oil, gargle saltwater. Still, my voice sounds hoarse, raspy. I joke that Zohara’s voice is just sexier than mine, but I’m becoming nervous.
I go see an ear, nose and throat specialist who sends me to do a videostroboscopy, a procedure in which they’ll insert a tiny camera into the throat to get a first-row view at my vocal cords in action. But it will take weeks to find an appointment. It won’t help me now.
These same two weeks are those following the Israeli assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran. The entire Middle East is on edge. The Islamic Republic of Iran has threatened to retaliate and the odds of a regional war seem higher than ever.
I give up my nightly walks in the neighbourhood, map out potential shelters on every drive I take. I stock the bunker in the basement of our building with bottles of water and cans of food. When I e-mail to ask the studio owner whether they have access to a shelter, he says no. During sirens we stand in the stairway, he writes.
A sign at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art points the way to a protected space this past summer, when tensions with Iran and Hezbollah led the museum to shelter artworks underground in case of rocket attacks.OREN ZIV/AFP via Getty Images
As a girl, I sang in choirs and singing groups. But as I grew gangly and awkward, I became too self-conscious and mortified by the idea of performing. As time passed, I gave up any musical aspirations I may have secretly harboured.
The only reason I could sing at all, I believed, was because of my heritage. It was common knowledge in Israel that all Yemenis could sing. Ofra Haza, my idol growing up, and probably the most famous Israeli musical artist in the world, was Yemeni. There were many other Yemeni singers in Israel, in rates that were disproportionate to their percentage in society. People have credited the Yemeni style of praying, which was musical and melodic, as a reason for the phenomenon.
In my years of studying with Gila, I learned that the public segregation between men and women in Yemen created and sustained female bonds, a sisterhood. The ritual of storytelling and singing was how women came together – often while doing housework or craftwork – to share their joys and sorrows. In a patriarchal society where women’s voices were silenced, this was their way to express themselves, to tell stories and remember.
The day I joined my mother and her sisters in singing a Yemeni women’s song I felt like I had graduated. “How does she know the songs?” my aunts asked my mom, astonished. My mother beamed with pride.
Israeli and Palestinian leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shake hands at the Clinton White House in 1993, when U.S.-assisted peace talks brought about the Oslo Accords. Ms. Tsabari's novel is set during this period.Ron Edmonds/The Associated Press
My novel is set in the nineties, during the Oslo peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. For my research, I watched videos of the Israeli right-wing demonstrations against the negotiations and the left-leaning government led by then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The character of Yoni, Zohara’s nephew, was born out of my wish to understand how some young people became radicalized during that time, a time I remembered as hopeful and optimistic (although I can see now how flawed the process was), until Mr. Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing fanatic.
Toward the end of the writing process, I started participating in demonstrations against the Netanyahu government and its proposed judicial reform. Often, I sought out the anti-occupation activists and joined them. I may have been protesting on the exact opposite of the political spectrum as Yoni in my book, but like him, I felt intoxicated by the chants and the energy, by being a part of the crowd. I even brought my child with me. I wanted to teach her that she has a voice and should not be afraid to use it.
Since ancient times, women’s voices have been ascribed dangerous qualities. In Greek mythology, the sirens were said to lure men to their deaths with their singing. In Irish folklore, the banshee was a female spirit whose voice warned of impending death. And according to Orthodox Jewish tradition, women’s voices could lead men to have “impure thoughts.”
During a recent demonstration in Tel Aviv, one that was meant to bring attention specifically to the plight of Israeli women held hostage by Hamas, women held hands and screamed. No, screaming isn’t right. It was more of a wail. A primal, blood-curdling howl that sent shivers through my body, brought tears to my eyes.
A protester, her mouth gagged and hands tied, takes part in a recent anti-Netanyahu demonstration in Tel Aviv to demand the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.Florion Goga/Reuters
I return to the studio for a third day of recording during the height of the Iranian threat. I have just received an e-mail from the Canadian government advising me not to travel to Israel at this time. The Canadian authorities must not realize I now live here. I had moved back home to Tel Aviv in 2018 to be closer to my family and my aging mother, and the Jewish Yemeni community I had missed so much while living in Canada.
My voice has not fully recovered. As I drive to the studio for an evening session, I search for a healing sounds playlist on Spotify but instead of calming my nerves it triggers me, sounding like the beginning of a siren.
Only then, it dawns on me: I’ve lost my voice while recording a book about voice and voicelessness. I think about my character Yoni, who suffers from chronic hoarseness, and who wonders in the book what it was that made him lose his voice. Was it all the things he couldn’t say? Was afraid to say?
In one of the essays I’ve published since Oct. 7, I wrote about feeling muzzled. The public discourse has become so binary and radicalized that even calling for peace and empathy can be seen as controversial. Or was it the feeling of futility, the helplessness, that silenced me? The loss of faith in my own voice? Faced with the horrors of this war, as so many innocent people have been killed, children senselessly bombed – supposedly to make me safer – and so many people have lost everything, I wonder: does it even matter? Does writing even matter?
I think of that vacant, useless feeling in my throat. Something I counted on, as safe as a home, has failed me. I think of the howl of the women at the protest. I remember a heart-wrenching picture of Palestinian women embracing, weeping after an Israeli attack in Khan Younis, one with her mouth open in a silent cry toward the sky.
I remind myself I used my voice to write this book. Set in a critical time in Israeli-Palestinian history, the devastating effects of the Nakba and the occupation, and the themes of home and return, are threaded throughout the novel. I remind myself that by amplifying the marginalized, silenced voices of Yemeni Jewish women and by tracing the injustices and prejudice they’ve suffered in Israel, I strove to tell a bigger story that complicates and expands readers’ understanding of this land and its people, offers nuance, maybe provides context, and hopefully promotes empathy for all those living between the river and the sea. I said what I came to say, however small and insignificant it may seem now. And isn’t that what novelists aim to do? Write from a place of empathy, authenticity and courage? Offer perspective and meaning beyond what we see in the news, by giving us a sliver of what it means to be human in this complicated, heartbreaking world?
Somehow, I manage to complete recording that day. For at least a few hours, I get my voice back.
The sun sets on Tel Aviv's beach this past summer. In Ms. Tsabari's novel, the protagonist comes to these shores to sing.Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
In my book, Zohara finds that singing helps heal her. She swims to the wave-breakers at Tel Aviv Beach and sings. She also discovers the benefits of singing together – something research has proven reduces stress, releases endorphins and oxytocin, lessens depression and despair.
My neighbourhood choir meets every Tuesday. It is an amateur group and everyone is welcome. No auditions required. We are all women, a sisterhood, and many are like-minded; women I cannot only sing with, but also speak my mind and heart to without fear.
In my novel, one of the elderly Yemeni women Zohara meets in a singing group says: “We didn’t talk so we sang.”
For 2½ hours every week we don’t need to talk. We sing and my spirit is momentarily lifted. We sing, and I feel comfort, even a glimpse of joy. We sing, and I have my voice back.