Water Music: Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
In one form or another, so many Israeli novels feature an archaeological dig; that is, beneath the contemporary setting lies a biblical subtext that adds a layer of meaning to the modern situation. Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted borrows from Genesis as the novel opens with a convoluted time frame when Yaqub (Jacob) meets his beloved at a modern drinking hole: “Years later, when they are old, sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea, someone would ask them how it all started, and he’d say, as soon as he saw her on the other side of the drinking fountain at the immigrant camp, he knew.” The time is 1950, the place Rosh HaAyin, but Tsabari renders the scene timeless and without boundaries in her singing prose. If biblical wells are places of erotic encounters and fertile fantasies, then Yaqub, his beloved Saida, and other Yemenite immigrants in Israel draw on the waters of the biblical tradition. From fountain to sea, Tsabari sings of the ordeals of a community trying to integrate into Israeli society.
This introductory chapter concludes with another reference to the sense of exile and displacement among Yemenis in Israel: “On the banks of the Yarkon River, she sang (like an angel. No, like bells. No, like clear water drawn from a deep well).” With echoes from Genesis and Exodus, Songs for the Brokenhearted draws from the waters of the Yarkon River, the Mediterranean Sea, and oceans beyond borders in the settling of citizens from 1950 to 1995. Part One, “August 1995,” begins with Zohara, the protagonist, who is on vacation in Thailand where she gets a long-distance phone call from her sister in Israel, informing her of the sudden death of their mother. Her exotic surroundings reflect her inner turmoil: “The South China Sea was a glassy, turquoise blue. I half-expected the idyllic image to disintegrate in front of me.” In a traumatized society that includes suicide bombings and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the lives of many characters are shattered, but also healed through a collective resilience. Tsabari reintegrates her characters through songs, stories, and therapeutic waters.
In its oscillating narrative, the next chapter returns to Yaqub in the immigrant camp, 1950. At his favourite spot by the Yarkon River he thinks about his uncle who died on the journey to the Holy Land. “Like Moses, who made it as far as Mount Nebo, only to be turned away.” This novel covers the same terrain from Abraham leaving home to Moses wandering through the desert. The Yemeni Jews have their dreams shattered once they confront the harsh reality of their impoverished conditions in Israel that include discrimination by European or Ashkenazi Jews. Like his biblical namesake, “Yaqub discovered the river one day, as he wandered from the camp.” His limited wandering reflects the broader scope of the novel’s wandering over the biblical span of more than forty years during the second half of the twentieth century. The river becomes his refuge: “The Yarkon River — El Auja, the local Arabs called it, the meandering — was wider and more vigorous than the stream they had running through their village back home.” This river meanders alongside the characters’ trajectories, stories, and songs — braiding the novel’s structure of a double time frame.
Like music, its flow is constrictive and expansive: some sabras bathe in its green waters and sail in boats where it spills into the sea. From source to mouth, its lyrical quality evokes Eden: “It was a small, lushly green oasis surrounded by willows and eucalyptuses.” A snake enters this oasis where he and Saida are tempted by the fruits of knowledge. For Yaqub the book of knowledge is S.Y. Agnon’s novel, A Simple Story, from which he quotes: “No matter how black your life may be, you can always find a better one in books.” The colour refers not only to fate, but also to the skin of Yemeni Jews. If Agnon opens a window into his own heart, so too do other Israeli writers who appear in the novel — Yehuda Amichai, Amos Oz, David Grossman, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Dvora Omer, and even the Hebrew translation of Anne of Green Gables. Like Yaqub, Zohara is an avid reader of books about unfulfilled love and hearts of darkness.
Just as Yaqub quotes from Agnon, so Zohara reads a verse about expansive waters:
Take me to the north end,
Take me to the Atlantic Ocean,
Place me among other people,
whom I had never met before.
Zohara follows that transatlantic route as she travels to New York to pursue a PhD in literature, and to place herself among others. After her displacement, Part One ends with Yaqub and Saida tossing stones into the water: “They sat there, holding hands, trembling with the gravity of their situation, while the Yarkon River gushed toward the Mediterranean Sea.” The river overflows with the characters’ emotions, drowning sounds but also carrying them abroad.
More people from the camp discover the river: “By the river margins, the papyrus bloomed like a fountain.” In this lyrical transformation the marginalized immigrants emerge, and the fountained papyrus yields paper for writing songs and stories, the poetry and prose of an emerging culture. River and paper are intertwined in the telling: “He took a step toward the river, stuffed his hands into his pockets and stared at the roots of the paper reeds swaying underwater.” To which Saida replies fatalistically: “This is life, Yaqub.” That life includes the loss of her son, Rafael, whose name means healing and who disappears in a hospital shortly after his birth, his whereabouts never uncovered, like so many other abducted infants. Generations go missing in this orphaned community where undercurrents disturb roots and dominant narratives of history.
One of Zohara’s male friends (Nir) tells her that living away skews her perspective, which she interprets as an accusation of her trying to pass as Ashkenazi, for her identity is as fluid as the Yarkon. The river flows between identities — east and west, Arab and Jewish, Israeli and diasporic. Zohara imagines her dual identity: “Like two transparencies, one placed over the other, I could slide into the skin of the ghost Zohara who stayed, everything restored, the unlived life resurrected.” Songs for the Brokenhearted is a translucent palimpsest with biblical subtext and meandering identities, for Zohara’s name means to shine; and her rays of radiance shine through the wonder of running water and hidden clues within her family.
Rummaging through her mother’s belongings, she discovers Yaqub’s first words, which appear at the beginning of the novel. Tsabari excavates the text within the text to expose the faultlines of first and last communities: “The first words said, ‘Years later, when they are old, sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea, someone would ask them how it all started’.” The genesis of the drinking fountain, the journey across the sea. Accompanying this vision of the watery world is the phenomenon of the first rain, yoreh in Hebrew which derives from teaching. “There was a quality to the first rain that was beyond a weather event …. It invigorated and renewed.”
The rain fills the river and makes her more hopeful, as the waters wash away and heal the loss of her parents and her brother, Rafael. Tsabari’s countercurrent along the Yarkon instructs and delights with the first songs for broken hearts. Rain teaches soil and roots, while Zohara’s radiance photosynthesizes plants and souls. By turns, her bittersweet song of songs eulogizes and rhapsodizes rivers of exile and redemption from Yemen to the Yarkon.
About the Author
Ayelet Tsabari is the author of The Art of Leaving, finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and has been published internationally. She’s the co-editor of the anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language and has taught creative writing at Guelph MFA in Creative Writing and The University of King’s College MFA.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : HarperCollins Publishers (Sept. 10 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 400 pages
ISBN-10 : 1443447897
ISBN-13 : 978-1443447898