Buried Stories Resurface

Ayelet Tsabari remembers the first time her family accessed illegal cable in the mid-1980s in Israel because it was also the first time Yemenite-Israeli singer Ofra Haza appeared on her screen. In her memoir The Art of Leaving [September 10, 2024], Tsabari describes how it felt almost illicit to be viewing “someone who looked a little bit like family” brimming with confidence and achieving high levels of fame. It made her recognize her hunger for depictions of the Jewish immigrant Yemenite experience and the unmet need to see their reflections in cultural mirrors that so many other girls and women must have felt.

It is therefore not surprising that when Zohara, the protagonist of Tsabari’s new novel, Songs for the Broken-Hearted (Publisher, Price, 2024), tries to connect to her recently deceased mother, she uses Ofra Haza as a starting point to access the experience of Mizrahi women. Looking in her mother’s closet and reflecting on her style, Zohara recollects, “Other Yemeni mothers in the neighborhood, younger ones, wore fashionable jeans and pencil skirts, blow-dried their curls in waves like Ofra Haza, highlighted their locks and wore makeup,” but Zohara’s mother is different. Zohara spends the novel untangling these differences and mysteries, encountering a lively mix of Mizrahi, Israeli and Jewish American characters who help her assemble the ways her own identity has developed in relation to real and stereotyped Mizrahi women. At the center of her struggle to understand her mother and herself is the question Zohara’s sister, Lizzie, poses: “How many of us really know our parents? Especially old Yemeni parents. Especially women. They didn’t want to be known. They were taught to be quiet, to take no space. They believed their stories had no value.” Tsabari uses the sweeping scope of a novel to reveal the struggles and stories of Yemenite Jews that have remained too long unknown or undervalued on the margins of Jewish history and storytelling.

The story of Zohara in Songs for the Broken-Hearted seems to closely mirror Tsabari’s own: she is a young girl who is becoming a writer and is searching for her authentic voice. But the novel enlarges the scope of this narrative by moving among the perspectives of three different generations of Yemenite Israelis—Yaqub, Zohara and Yoni—all dedicated to trying to understand one Yemenite woman, Saida. Yaqub was one of the first Yemenite immigrants who came to Israel in the 1950s and who were packed into immigrant camps in Rosh Ha’ayin. Many remolded themselves–or were encouraged to do so–to fit their new surroundings.

Yaqub falls in love with Saida, a married woman with a child, and uses writing as an outlet for his unexpected passions while struggling to grasp the lack of opportunity in his new country. Zohara is Saida’s daughter, and her story is set in 1995 though it flashes back to her complicated upbringing in Sha’ariya, “a sleepy Yemenite neighborhood” on the outskirts of Petah Tikva. Following her mother’s death, she tries to piece together her mother’s past as well as her own. Yoni, Zohara’s teenage nephew, has his own chapters which echo the grief expressed by Yaqub and Zohara. They all mourn different aspects of what they lost in Saida’s passing, set against the backdrop of Rabin’s assassination and what was lost with the radicalization of the entire country.

The novel brims with smaller stories, and with the anxiety that those stories will never be told or cannot ever be fully known. Saida, the woman the three narrators all thought they knew, reveals glimpses of her depth only in the trail of recorded songs she leaves behind.

At the novel’s center is the broader buried national story of what is referred to as “The Yemenite Children Affair,” “Yemenite Babies Affair” or “Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan Children Affair.” The Affair refers to the estimated 1,000 to 5,000 babies and children who were taken from Yemenite families when they arrived in Israel between 1948 and 1954. Families were told that their children had died, but with no death certificates or bodies returned to families over the years that claim has been challenged. There have been accusations that these children were taken from new Mizrahi immigrants and given to European Jewish families who’d lost their children in the Holocaust. Though at the time the devastation and pain of the Mizrahi families were not honored, since then protests, government commissions, the declassification of over 40,000 documents and multiple lawsuits have pushed the government to solve the mystery of what happened to these children. In 2021 the government took responsibility and “promised compensation for families affected,” but there are still many loose threads to this story.

Songs for the Broken-Hearted cannot solve the mysteries surrounding the Yemenite Children Affair, but it gives voice to the open wounds of its victims by following the tragedy as it befalls one mother and affects multiple generations of a Yemenite family that must deal with the heartbreak and mystery the loss left in its wake.

As Zohara tries to understand the Affair, her aunt explains: “It can’t be solved. You know how it is with Yemenis, there’s no written documents or photos. My mom never learned to write so there’s no diaries or anything. There’s nothing.” Tsabari’s novel is written in response to this “nothing,” and is a beautiful new addition to a tapestry of artistic work by Yemenite women capturing the multifarious ways that being descended from Yemenite Israeli immigrants has shaped their art.

In lieu of the government fully discovering or revealing what happened to these children, many artists have attempted to give the story shape and depth over the years by depicting what it feels like to carry inherited stories filled with holes and gaps. In 2022, Tamar Nissim’s exhibition “Contagious Truths” at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute’s Kniznick Gallery at Brandeis University used videos, photography and objects to reveal the tensions and racist perceptions between the Mizrahi immigrants and the nurses who denigrated them by making them feel as though they were unhygienic and not fit to care for their own children. As a descendent of this trauma, Nissim places herself and her daughters in her artwork and uses interviews with family members and other survivors in the work to stress the intergenerational personal nature of this trauma.

Also in 2022, Shanit Keter Schwartz premiered a solo show, Daughter of the Wicked, in Los Angeles, depicting her experience growing up in Israel as a Yemenite immigrant and then her later return to Israel after moving to New York to find a sister who was taken from her family as part of the “Yemenite Children Affair.” In 2019 ADD Content and MGMT Entertainment announced that they planned on making a TV series dedicated to depicting the Yemenite Children Affair, though it is still unclear what shape this series will take.

Like these other recent pieces of art, Tsabari’s book deepens the contours of the stories around the Affair, giving voice to the truths that even the declassification of 40,000 documents has not been able to reveal. This novel is a testament to the unknown and is also critical of a society that doesn’t expend more energy exploring the lives of the many unnamed and anonymous women left out of the history books. Each section opens up with a different poem written by an unknown Yemeni female poet, encouraging readers to think about the women who sang these poems and providing access to an artform previously transmitted only orally.

After Yaqub gets married he becomes a teacher, and one of his seventh-grade students (who happens to be named Ofra) challenges him: “Why do we study Bialik and not Shabazi?” she asks. “Why don’t we learn about the first immigration of the Yemenis in 1881, who came before the Biluim [European Jews]? Weren’t they also pioneers?” Tsabari’s book forces readers to ask questions about how history is framed, who it leaves behind, and from whose perspective it is being told, and why.

While Zohara cleans up her mother’s house and packs up her own things, she looks at her old bookshelves through a new lens and asks similar questions: “Why were there so few women on my bookshelf? What was up with the stereotypical depiction of Mizrahi and Palestinians in some of these books I used to love?” Tsabari’s novel is a response to this question.

Na’amit Sturm Nagel is pursuing her doctorate in English literature at the University of California, Irvine, focusing on Jewish American literature.