CANR

• The Best Place on Earth: Stories Random House (New York, NY), 2016
• Songs for the Brokenhearted Random House (New York, NY), 2024
• The Art of Leaving: A Memoir Random House (New York, NY), 2019

1. Songs for the brokenhearted : a novel LCCN 2024018726 Type of material Book Personal name Tsabari, Ayelet, 1973- author. Main title Songs for the brokenhearted : a novel / Ayelet Tsabari. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Random House, 2024. ©2024 Projected pub date 2409 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780812989021 (Ebook) 9781443447898 (Canadian edition) (Hardback) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. The art of leaving : a memoir LCCN 2018045724 Type of material Book Personal name Tsabari, Ayelet, 1973- author. Main title The art of leaving : a memoir / Ayelet Tsabari. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Random House, [2019] Description xii, 319 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780812988987 9780812988994 (ebook) CALL NUMBER PR9199.4.T82 Z46 2019 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. The best place on Earth : stories LCCN 2015018415 Type of material Book Personal name Tsabari, Ayelet, 1973- author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title The best place on Earth : stories / Ayelet Tsabari. Edition First U.S. edition. Published/Produced New York : Random House, [2016] ©2013 Description 256 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780812988932 (hardcover : acid-free paper) Shelf Location FLS2016 077084 CALL NUMBER PR9199.4.T82 A6 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2)

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Ayelet Tsabari

  New and upcoming books
  September 2024

  thumb
  Songs for the Brokenhearted

  Collections
  The Best Place On Earth (2013)
  thumb

  Novellas and Short Stories
  Below Sea Level (2013)
  Borders (2013)
  Brit Milah (2013)
  Casualties (2013)
  Invisible (2013)
  The Poets In The Kitchen Window (2013)
  Say It Again, Say Something Else (2013)
  A Sign Of Harmony (2013)
  Tikkun (2013)
  Warplanes (2013)
  Songs for the Brokenhearted (2024)
  thumbthumbthumbthumb
  thumbthumbthumbthumb
  thumbthumbthumb

  Anthologies edited
  The Journey Prize Stories 29 (2017) (with Kevin Hardcastle and Grace O'Connell)
  thumb

  Non fiction hide
  The Art of Leaving (2019)
  Tongues (2021) (with Leonarda Carranza and Eufemia Fantetti)

• Ayelet Tsabari website - https://www.ayelettsabari.com/

  Ayelet Tsabari is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Vine Awards, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019.

  Her first book, the story collection The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction.

  The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, was nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and has been published internationally.

  She’s the co-editor of the award-winning anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language. Ayelet teaches creative writing at The University of King’s College MFA and at Guelph MFA in Creative Writing. Her debut novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted is forthcoming with Random House and HarperCollins Canada in September 2024.

• Kenyon Review - https://kenyonreview.org/2016/07/best-place-earth/

  July 16, 2016•KR Blog•Uncategorized

  The Best Place on Earth: In Conversation with Ayelet Tsabari
  By Rosebud Ben-Oni

  Add to Reading List
  Share:
  Share on Facebook
  Share on Twitter
  Share on Facebook
  Go To Reading List
  The Best Place on Earth: In Conversation with Ayelet Tsabari
  By Rosebud Ben-Oni

  best-place-us-cover

  Recently, I had the pleasure to correspond with Ayelet Tsabari, whose debut short story collection, The Best Place on Earth, won the 2015 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and was a 2016 Editor’s Choice in The New York Times.

  Born to a family of Yemeni descent in Israel, Tsabari is also a documentarian, and one of her films won an award at the Palm Spring International Short Film Festival. She now lives in Toronto, in “a lovely neighborhood downtown that is very community oriented.” Here we talk about her book, which challenges the dominant male Ashkenazi narrative prevalent in Israel; the restlessness of Tel Aviv; and “the grandness and passion of those early friendships” between teenage girls that, when over, leave us burned out yet wistful.

  Rosebud Ben-Oni: In “Say it Again, Say Something Else,” a seemingly natural yet ultimately complicated relationship develops between two very different young women, Lily and Lana. While there’s a whole host of themes here—coming-of-age, immigration, racial tensions, homosexuality—what struck me as most significant in this story are those of loyalty and betrayal, especially at the story’s end. Growing up in Israel, did you have any similar encounters?

  Ayelet Tsabari: I find friendships between teenage girls fascinating, even when they’re not further complicated by the other factors you mentioned. So yes, I had similar—yet very different— encounters as a girl. They were similar in their emotional intensity, the love was so consuming, and the betrayal was crushing. I remember telling one of my friends (who has remained my friend to this day) that she was dead to me and really meaning it. She still has the letter I wrote to her, in which I dramatically mourned her. Sometimes I miss the grandness and passion of those early friendships.

  RB: My favorite story was “The Poets in the Kitchen Window,” set during Operation Storm; as a poet myself, young Uri, already in bullied in school for writing verse despite “having never heard of a Yemeni or Iraqi poet, or any Mizrahi poet,” resonated with my own early schooling in which Latina/o poets and other poets of color were largely excluded. Did have the same experiences in school? Who were your favorite authors growing up?

  AT: Uri is close to my heart as well. Like Uri, and like you, I never read Mizrahi writers or writers of color growing up, and never found myself or my family reflected in the books they assigned to us in school. I actually believed that there were no published Yemeni writers in Israel (of course they existed but I didn’t know that, because they had not received media attention, and were not taught in schools). It made me feel as though our stories weren’t worth telling and as though my dream of becoming a writer myself was far-fetched. The exclusion of Mizrahi writers (and Palestinian writers) in the school curriculum, to me, is an act of erasure that has yet to be rectified, and one which puts limitations on children’s dreams. It infuriates me. So as a result, my favorite poets growing up were all male and Ashkenazi, like Yehuda Amichai (whom I still love), Natan Zach, David Avidan.

  RB: In “Causalities,” I had a lot of empathy for Yael, who, at the very beginning, cheats on her boyfriend Oren (who’s stationed in Gaza and dealing with his own fears) with a complete stranger in the bathroom of a bar and then, without understanding why herself, gives him a forged gimel form to get out of the army for a couple of days. And that although she tries to escape her past, it follows her right to Tel Aviv, agitating her—whether at work, when a friend of a woman she’d wronged “jabbed [her] veins so many times that [Yael] still [had] scars,” or at home, where, even with “the shutter closed to block out the heat and noise,” one still hears the city, particular Allenby street’s never-ending noise: “buses and people and cars and sirens and vendors and street cats and taxis and car alarms. In the evenings, when it cools down, we open thein windows and the city barges into our home.” And even though Oren seems to be devoted her, and needs her, she can’t seem to be there to return his calls? Is it perhaps because of these agitations, whether past or present, that Yael is someone who is never quite there, no matter how loud the city, no matter how disloyal her actions?

  AT: I think Yael’s desensitized behavior has a lot to do with where and how she grew up, in a southern town often hit by missiles—a war zone. I see her behavior as a defense tactic. Not to mention the war she’s witnessed at home, between her parents. She is a young woman who had been toughened by her circumstances, and that’s why I think she has such little patience for Oren’s displays of weakness. To me, writing about Yael was also a good way to write about how life in Israel, and the mandatory army, can shape people—women specifically—who feel a need to “act tough” in order to survive. I think you can see it with other female characters in the collection as well: I’ve been told before that the women in the collection are strong, assertive, sexually aggressive—these are characteristics one might associate with men. And on the flip side of it, I was interested in Israeli Jewish ideal of manliness, and its impact on people’s lives, especially when they are not naturally inclined toward these prescribed roles. Many of my male characters—men like Oren, Uri, or David in “Below Sea Level”—challenge the stereotypical Israeli man image.

  RB: The collection ends with the title story, “The Best Place on Earth,” which takes places in both Vancouver and Jerusalem and in which Naomi, upon discovering her husband’s past indiscretion, goes to visit her sister Tamar’s home on Hornby Island. You yourself live in Toronto now. Why did you choose Toronto? Do you see yourself ever returning to Israel for good?

  AT: I moved to Toronto from Vancouver after I was accepted to an MFA in Creative Writing here. I love Toronto; it’s a great city, diverse, vibrant, and safe, and I live in a lovely neighborhood downtown that is very community-oriented. But my family and I are actually at a crossroad these days: we don’t know if there’s a future for us here, as we don’t have a family in the city, and now that I have a child, it seems more important than ever before. So I honestly don’t know where we might end up. Most of my family still lives in Israel and I miss it terribly. Mostly the people, but also the place itself, the colors and smells of it, the warm weather and the Mediterranean Sea. I feel quite torn. I guess, like many of my characters, I am still searching for my place.

  RB: I was struck by how close Naomi and Tamar are, particularly by the image of “two girls in nightgowns under a long streetlight, the sounds of fighting and crying from their home faint, blending with the buzz of traffic and mosquitos and television sets from other homes.” Their ritual of smashing plates against the walls of Mahane Yehuda market in Jeursalem and then against that of the Co-op on Gailano Island seemed to be both an act of rebellion against and release from the pain caused by loved ones. You grew up in a large family. Did you and your siblings have this kind of closeness?

  AT: Yes, which goes back to why I can’t seem to shake Israel off. I grew up in a close knit family—I have five siblings—and despite the geographical distance we remain close. I really miss the physical closeness, though, the everyday, the frequent visits, the Friday night dinners and Saturday morning jichnoon. I often wonder, just like Tamar in that story, how my life might have been like had I stayed in Israel. In fact, I have tried to create a sense of family everywhere I’ve been, and that’s why community is so important to me.

  RB: I’ve lived in Jerusalem as well, and there is so much more to the city than what the media portrays, a beauty in a “hard, raw and broken way. How it felt alive, a kind of beast, pulsating, breathing, vibrating under [Naomi]’s feet.” I don’t know if it’s a hate/love kind of relationship, but there’s also a beautiful, bitter truth of the contradiction of belonging there when Naomi watches the aftermath of a bombing on the TV and finds she doesn’t miss “this” and yet “she couldn’t even fathom living anywhere else.” I find this akin to being Jewish, in a sense; that no matter how much you try to distance yourself from the religion, the culture, Israel, you will never completely sever this tie. I’m wondering if in the end, what is “the most beautiful place on earth” is not Jerusalem itself but this eternal tie that binds Israel to the diaspora?

  AT: I totally agree about the inability to distance ourselves from our identity, from our Jewishness, and in my case, my Mizrahi-ness too, which is something I tried distancing myself from as a child and a teenager. But as far as the enteral tie between Israel and the diaspora, I think you’re coming at it from a diasporic perspective, if you know what I mean. Your tie to Israel and my tie to Israel are obviously different. I cannot fully understand the way Jews in the world feel about Israel, because Israel isn’t a metaphorical home to me but an actual home, the place of my childhood. Does this make any sense? Your question did make me think, though, if maybe the best place is the in-betweeness, or the search for a home and a belonging, which is a very Jewish theme, or the act of wandering, the movement between places. In my twenties I wanted to believe that. I romanticized wandering and wore my nomadic lifestyle on my head like a crown, but it wasn’t a sustainable choice and eventually I got tired of travelling and living without some stability. So what is the best place on earth, then? Ultimately, the place where you feel most at home. In my case, it might have to be wherever my husband and child are. And other times, or actually at the same time, it is the page.

• PRISM - https://prismmagazine.ca/2017/12/17/between-us-the-stories-we-keep%E2%80%A8/

  Interview by Jasmine Sealy

  Welcome back to Between Us, a conversation series that explores how we define Canadian immigrant literature, and how writers’ journeys to Canada shape their work. Here, writers discuss the tensions and freedoms that come with access to stories of home-place, and the many ways immigrant stories contribute to the Canadian cultural imaginary.

  In our third instalment we’re thrilled to feature Janie Chang in conversation with Ayelet Tsabari. These women are friends whose careers followed similarly extraordinary paths; both published their debuts with HarperCollins, one of the biggest publishing houses in the country. When Tsabari’s short story collection, The Best Place on Earth, was picked up by HarperCollins, she chose not to hire an agent and instead navigated the complex contract herself; she says this experience made her so anxious she could no longer stomach coffee. When Chang’s first novel, Three Souls, was published, she’d never even heard of the expression “Can Lit.” She says that writing her second book was one of the hardest things she’s ever done. That novel, Dragon Springs Road, recently made it to the Globe and Mail’s Bestsellers list.

  In conversation with Jasmine Sealy, Chang and Tsabari talk about what it’s like when all your dreams come true, when all of sudden you go from writing in obscurity to fielding questions about cultural appropriation on a panel of your peers. They talked about arriving in Canada and building a life here, about the concept of home and its elusiveness. They talked too about the fragility of oral histories and of how easily they are lost between generations. They spoke of how important it is to tell our stories, even if we live in a place where they may not always be understood.

  How did you come to Canada in your writing and in your life?

  Chang: I came to Canada when I was fourteen because my parents decided to immigrate. I didn’t have a typical immigrant experience because I started speaking English when I was five years old so I didn’t have any language issues when I arrived in Canada. I’d always gone to international schools. My father worked for the UN so before coming to Canada I had lived in Taiwan, the Philippines, Iran, and Thailand. But it was definitely strange coming here and meeting classmates who had known each other all their lives. Before that all my classmates’ parents worked for multinational corporations or the UN or their country’s embassy and they would be in a country for two or three years and then move on to the next assignment. It felt strange to me that all of the kids in my grade ten class had also gone to kindergarten together. They had a history I wasn’t a part of.

  It was actually one of the worst years of my life. I found it pretty shocking to have classmates who didn’t respect their teachers, who would talk back. That was just not done in my previous schools. And then, coming from international schools where we were all guests of that country, all outsiders, to come here and be the only outsider, to feel left out. And of course there was racism. But again I would say I was spared the most difficult transitions of immigration because I didn’t have a language problem. And at some point I realized people were nicer to me because they thought I was born here. It made a big difference.

  As for how I came to writing, I always wanted to be an author. But earning a living was also a high priority! Then about ten years ago we had to move my mother into care because of her dementia. I would visit and look at all the other residents and think I really didn’t want to be ninety-five years old sitting in my rocking chair wishing I’d done something sooner about writing a novel.

  Ayelet, can you describe your experience of coming to Canada?

  Tsabari: I came following a guy. I always hear other people’s immigration stories and mine feels so frivolous and flighty. I never really planned on staying. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was twenty-five and I met a guy and fell in love. He was from Vancouver. I remember people saying, “What a big sacrifice you made for him.” And I said, “That’s not a sacrifice, if he was from Ethiopia I probably would have moved there.” Falling in love with someone from another country satisfied my wanderlust. Canada sort of happened to be where he lived. A couple times I thought I was going to go back. Now when I’m in Israel—and many immigrants say the same thing—I often feel like a stranger there too.

  Every time I talk about my immigration story and my journey into writing it sounds so passive, like the kind of character nobody would ever want to read in fiction. I’ve always written, ever since I was a little kid. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. But then coming to Canada, it was a skill that wasn’t transferable. My English wasn’t good enough and I didn’t feel like it could ever become good enough to be able to write in it, even if I could communicate in it. I made it really hard for myself and I thought it was impossible.

  For many years I just didn’t write at all: my Hebrew was becoming a bit atrophied because I wasn’t using it in my everyday life. I was very unhappy. Writing felt like an unrequited love, I was longing for this thing that I couldn’t seem to get back. Then, slowly, English became a larger part of my life. It was forcing its way into diary entries or little scribbles. For a while I was writing intermittently in both Hebrew and English, which was an incoherent mess, and then English started taking over.

  Ayelet, in your non-fiction story “Soldiers” you mention that the ritual of leaving was something that had become very familiar to you, and in a sense, home itself had become synonymous with leaving. Can you speak to that?

  Tsabari: My father died when I was ten and I think when you lose a parent at such a young age you lose your homeland. At that point of your life your parents are still the answer to the question of where you’re from. I felt like the earth fell from under my feet and there was no longer a strong sense of home in my life. I just started leaving again and again. It was the one steady thing I could hold on to. Some people find comfort in staying and having a home and a steady job. For me the comfort was in knowing I didn’t have to stay anywhere for too long. I lived in boxes. I didn’t have furniture. I was always ready to go.

  Janie, you have travelled extensively and lived in many different places. Does this concept of the rituals of leaving resonate with you?

  Chang: It’s so interesting to hear how Ayelet feels because for me Canada is home. It’s the only place I’ve ever lived for longer than three or four years. After a while I realized I had friends here I’d known for decades. I feel very invested in being Canadian. Not invested to the point where I would eat poutine but it’s definitely home. It means a lot to me to have that stability. For example, we’ve lived in the same house since 1990. And I always get a thrill when the plane lands at the Vancouver airport and I see the North Shore mountains. I feel very grateful to be home again. I love traveling but I also really need that feeling of knowing I can come home. And this is home.

  Tsabari: I’m still searching. I’m not entirely sure. I used to say, “Oh, I have many homes.” I used to think that was wonderfully romantic. But I remember saying that to my brother and he just looked at me deadpan and said, “Or none at all.” And I see that now. I don’t know if it’s just too late to find that place, or maybe I just haven’t found it yet. I love Canada and I feel like I am . . . but see, I resist it still. I paused. Am I? Am I Canadian? I feel like I’m many things. I feel Israeli first and foremost, probably because I came of age there and left as an adult. I feel like I’m also Yemeni because my family came from there; these are my roots. I definitely feel like a Canadian writer, which is an interesting thing, maybe because my writing came of age here. But I’m still not sure about home. When I’m pushed into a corner I say, “My home is the page.”

  Chang: That makes me think about the difference between feeling like you are Canadian but then wondering if other people think you’re Canadian.

  Tsabari: How does that manifest in your life?

  Chang: It’s when I start speaking that people believe I am Canadian. But even so, because we’re visible minorities people will always be second-guessing. There isn’t another country I would call home, yet because of the way I grew up, I think I only really feel comfortable being a guest in someone else’s country. Because then there’s no pressure to integrate or fit in.

  You both have access to stories outside of the Canadian context. What are some of the freedoms or tensions that emerge when writing about these for a Canadian audience?

  Tsabari: I have to admit that at first I wasn’t sure that my stories would be of interest to a Canadian audience. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to own my voice. Or if I would be published if I wrote stories that were set in Israel and have little to do with Canada. I may be wrong, but I feel like with American literature it’s different. Junot Díaz for example is embraced as being a great American writer despite writing about Dominican culture. Nobody refers to him as an “immigrant writer.”

  So, in the beginning I was trying to be more “Canadian” in my writing. I decided that Canadian writing is this and that. That I need to “show and not tell.” To be very sparse and sort of polite in my writing. I tried to write stories that were set mostly in Canada, maybe the characters were Israeli but it was incidental to the story. But it just wasn’t really working, and it ended up making me miserable. By then I was doing the MFA in Creative Writing at Guelph and I had a great teacher, Camilla Gibb, who said just stop. Just do what you need to do. Write what you need to write, in your own voice. Reading transnational authors freed me and made me realize there is room for my stories in the world, and hopefully within Canadian literature.

  Janie, did you feel at all limited within the categories of Canadian literature when you started out?

  Chang: I was pretty clueless. I didn’t even know the term “Can Lit.” All I really wanted to do was write a novel based on my grandmother’s life because her story had always haunted me. I probably had an easier entry into the world of publishing because of authors like Amy Tan and Lisa See who’d already moved stories about Chinese women into the mainstream. I write about the China of a certain era because I’m heavily influenced by my parents’ stories about the China they knew, and to me that China is more real than my own limited experience. Plus I didn’t feel qualified to write the “Chinese immigrant story” because I didn’t have the typical immigrant experience.

  At the same time I don’t think I’m quite ready to write the immigrant story because, as I said, it was one of the worst years of my life. Moving here as a teenager and watching your parents trying to function in a new society where they had no friends of influence or any sort of connections.

  Janie, on your website you share true stories from your family history that have been passed down through generations. Why is recording these histories important to you?

  Chang: A lot of cultures have a tradition of oral storytelling but it’s so ephemeral. All that’s needed to break that link is for someone to die, or in the case of my mother, to decline into dementia, and those stories are gone. Now that I’m a storyteller it really bothers me when stories are lost, even if they’re not my stories.

  Ayelet, you’ve written about being a Yemeni Jew living in North America where much of what is thought of as Jewish is actually Ashkenazi culture. How do you navigate these complex histories on the page?

  Tsabari: By the time I wrote the book I was just done worrying about where it might fit or who the audience was. All I could do was tell the stories. I wanted to write about my community. And sure, it is complex and I needed a lot of help from readers and editors to tell me if things were clear or not. For me, this was my reality and it was obvious but when I moved to Canada I realized nobody knew what I was talking about. My culture was invisible for most Canadians. So I said okay, this is something you can do: introduce them to new stories. And hopefully they want to read it.

  Like Janie says, it’s heartbreaking the stories that are being lost. And a lot of these are immigrant stories because when you come to a new country you feel like you have to leave your stories behind, to become more Canadian or to become more Israeli in the case of my ancestors from Yemen. I feel like a lot of things were lost in that transition. I’m trying to grab them at the last moment before they’re gone.

  Chang: You hear stories of children of immigrants who say their parents refused to talk about the past. Because often they left their homes out of necessity and they just don’t want to relive those terrible times. So the stories get left behind. Like those old covered wagons travelling across the prairies, you have to throw out anything that isn’t essential for survival. Just to survive mentally and emotionally there are things you need to throw out the wagon.

  Ayelet, is preserving your family stories a priority for you?

  Tsabari: It is an oral tradition as well in my culture. My grandmothers were both illiterate. I’m still working on unearthing stories from my community, especially the women’s stories, which have not been written down. Writing about Mizrahi characters, Jews who came from Middle Eastern countries, was a mission of mine when I started to write. I knew that not just in North America, but also in Israel, the stories that are told are predominantly Ashkenazi, predominantly European, despite the fact that about fifty percent of the Jewish population is Mizrahi. We’re still marginalized and there’s still a lot of racism experienced by Mizrahi Jews. Growing up and not seeing my family’s stories in literature put limits on my dreams as a child, on my self-worth. And when I read books by Israeli authors that featured Yemeni characters, those characters were one-dimensional, caricatures. There are not many books published by Yemeni authors in Israel. So you’re not listening to our stories, you’re not publishing books written by Yemeni writers, but you write our stories in a way that is disrespectful and stereotypical.

  Chang: Ayelet, what are you saying these days when people ask about cultural appropriation?

  Tsabari: I was at a conference in the US with a bunch of Jewish writers and I was one of two writers of colour. And at some point I had to explain what we mean by cultural appropriation, which is a position that I find a lot of writers of colour constantly have to be in. That position of explaining and teaching. Frigging Google it! I’m not here to explain shit to you. But I had to step into that place, because I felt like only one voice was being heard. I think there’s a basic misunderstanding about what it means. A lot of writers are annoyed by the expectation that they should only write about what they know; they think they cannot write in-depth, beautiful characters of colour in their books. That’s not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about cultural appropriation. I have seen our stories being used by people who should not be using them and it felt like theft. But I have also seen characters from my community portrayed beautifully in books and I loved it. What do you think, Janie?

  Chang: Well, I’m asking because we’re both writers of colour and these days when you’re on a panel or workshop the question always comes up. It’s difficult because I think the sensitivity needle moves depending on the culture and how threatened its survival is. Also common sense and rational discourse are getting lost because it’s the extreme views that get the most attention. A lot of what I find offensive can be avoided by writers paying attention—it goes beyond doing the research. It’s about being careful, responsible writers. Of not being lazy. Of avoiding characters who are stereotypes or clichés. And that’s true for any character you’re going to write.

  Janie, do you feel sense of frustration, like what Ayelet described, when you’re asked about cultural appropriation, as a person of colour? This double burden of not only diversifying the panel but also fielding these types of questions?

  Chang: I was on a panel in Toronto recently with two other writers—one gay, one of colour—and our books were so different we wondered why we were on a panel together. I joked that maybe we were the token diversity panel.

  Tsabari: That happens a lot.

  Chang: I feel the term “cultural appropriation” has already become shorthand, glossing over something that’s very complex. There are individuals at both ends of the spectrum who feel very strongly. You can’t win arguments, all you can say at this point is: here’s my take on it.

  I will say that as a writer of historical fiction set in China, I don’t feel that being of Chinese blood gives me a free pass. I still feel a great responsibility to do the research and to portray that era—its class structure, status of women, the issues of a country in transition—as accurately as possible while still speaking to the issues of our time.

  Jasmine Sealy is a Barbadian-Canadian writer. She has been published in anthologies by Véhicule Press and Caitlin Press and her work has also appeared in The New Quarterly, Adda Stories, and Geist Magazine. Between Us is a collaborative project by Emma Cleary and Jasmine Sealy. Read instalments one, “The Language of Home,” and two, “The Work of the Heart.”

  December 17, 2017 at 4:23 pm Interviews, PRISM Online Ayelet Tsabari, Janie Chang, PRISM

• 19 - https://nineteenquestions.com/2015/12/28/ayelet-tsabari/

  Ayelet Tsabari
  December 28, 2015 by Nineteen Questions
  Ayelet TsabariInterviewed by Nicole Boyce

  Ayelet Tsabari is the author of the short story collection The Best Place on Earth, which won the 2015 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. In 2013, she was named as one of ten Canadian writers to watch by CBC Books and in 2014 she was awarded a Chalmers Arts Fellowship. A graduate of the MFA program at Guelph University, Ayelet teaches creative writing through the University of Toronto and the University of Guelph.

  I first came to Ayelet’s work through her powerful non-fiction, for which she has won a National Magazine Award, a Western Magazine Award, and the EVENT Creative Non-fiction Contest (twice!). In both her fiction and non-fiction, I admire the way she depicts complex characters and relationships with confident, energetic prose. It was a pleasure to speak to her via email during her recent research trip to Israel.

  You’ve been writing your whole life, having published your first poem at age ten. What drives you to write?

  I can’t explain it. It’s like love. I feel like it chose me, not the other way around.

  The Best Place on Earth, your debut collection, was published before you signed with an agent. What was this publishing experience like? When you later signed with an agency, how did you know you’d found the right fit?

  It was as crazy as you can imagine! The Best Place on Earth was my MFA thesis at Guelph. After I graduated and defended it, I sent a query to HarperCollins and to my surprise received an email back an hour and a half later requesting to see the manuscript. Two days later I was sitting in their offices. It was wonderfully unexpected. I was shocked, and elated, and freaked out. I considered getting an agent at that point, but it didn’t seem to make much sense since I had already sold the book. So I took How to Be Your Own Literary Agent out from the library and studied it, asked for help from my mentors, and ended up negotiating my own contract and advance.

  I’m glad I did it: it was empowering and I learned so much from that experience. But I also knew that for my next book I’d want an agent acting on my behalf. I was lucky enough to have agents approach me once my first book was published and I really struggled to decide which one to go with. At the end, I chose Inkwell, a literary agency based in New York. I can’t say I knew I was making the right decision at the time—I was torn between them and a wonderful Canadian agent—but in retrospect I couldn’t be happier. What they’ve done for me in the short time that they’ve represented me is amazing. And to be honest, the little girl from Israel who dreamt of becoming a writer found their fancy Fifth Avenue office hard to resist.

  You’ve lived in many cities, including Tel Aviv, Vancouver, and Toronto, and you’ve graduated from two writing programs—SFU’s Writer’s Studio and the MFA program at the University of Guelph. What role do you think writing communities play in shaping a writer’s work?

  I desperately need a writing community and I feel extremely lucky to have two, one in Vancouver and one in Toronto. Writing can be a lonely pursuit so when I first started hanging out with writers it was such a relief. I found my people! And they could talk about semicolons and narrative positioning and the ethics of CNF all day long! It was bliss. But it’s the support of my writing community that I cherish most; my writer friends read and comment on everything I write and they inspire me with their incredible talent and bright minds. I feel like I’m a better writer for it, and I couldn’t have done any of this without them.

  In addition to being a writer, you’re also a teacher and professional photographer. How have your other jobs influenced your writing?

  I find teaching endlessly inspiring; teaching the craft of writing to others keeps you learning and thinking about it and finding ways to impart it in articulate and effective ways. It is also highly rewarding. That’s why I got into teaching, wanting to do for my students what my writing teachers had done for me. Teaching also satisfies my need for stimulating human interaction to balance all these hours alone staring at a computer screen. As for photography: I see it as a perfect accompanying vocation to writing. It provides a welcome break from words, as well as a way to observe people and the world while being hidden behind a camera, removed, which is a very writerly thing to do.

  One thing I love about your writing is its precision. “Casualties,” for example, is both vivid and polished—though the story has a raw quality, not a word feels wasted. What is your revision process like?

  Thank you! I love revision. I write long, raw, and messy so a big part of revision for me is cutting mercilessly. Once I finish a raw draft I give it some time to rest and then I print it out and read it and write notes. I find that I look at the work differently when it is on paper. After repeating that a few times, I pass it on to one of my great readers, whom I rely on to give me brutally honest feedback. A few times, when the regular process didn’t work as I had hoped, I shelved the story, gave it a few weeks, or months, or sometimes even years and then started from scratch. “Casualties” is a great example. I originally wrote it in Hebrew as a soldier in the Israeli army. Then, years later, I wrote it in English in third person, revised it numerous times, workshopped it with friends, but something still didn’t work. So I left it for a while, and about a year later started it again—this time in first person—and I knew I had found my story. The voice was so strong in my head. It had to be told in that way.

  How did the experience and challenges of writing your first book—a short story collection—differ from those of writing your upcoming book, a memoir?

  I find all writing hard. But I have a lot more anxiety about publishing a memoir, understandably. It is extremely revealing. Every now and then I catch myself and wonder what on earth was I thinking. But you write what you have to write. Life is too short to censor yourself.

  In 2014, you made the commitment to read only books by writers of colour. What did you take away from this experience? Did the experience affect your own writing?

  I wrote about it at length on my blog. Reading always influences my writing, and reading only writers of colour made me more aware of others’ experiences of race and ethnicity, and strengthened my resolve to tell Mizrahi stories and write marginalized characters.

  You’ve written about the difficulty you had seeing yourself in literature as you grew up, and how this shaped your decision to write about Mizrahi characters in The Best Place on Earth. How do you think readers and writers can support greater diversity in publishing?

  First and foremost, by reading widely and outside our comfort zone. By demanding to see diverse authors in festivals and libraries. If you write reviews, you can make a point of reviewing more books by diverse authors. And talking about it, like we’re doing here now, always helps.

  On your blog, you’ve written about fearing how others would react to your work, both on a personal level—when you wrote about your mother in “Yemeni Soup and Other Recipes”—and on a political level, when you began writing about Israel. Do you have any advice for new writers, when it comes to writing about topics that scare them?

  I don’t have an easy answer. Writing and putting your work out there are acts of great bravery, and there’s always a level of anxiety attached to it, especially because writing is so solitary, and publishing is so public. The contrast is jarring. But what’s the other option? Writing what’s safe? Who’s going to want to read that? Not writing at all? That’s just going to make us miserable. So you do what you have to do, write what you must, and keep in mind that you can’t please everyone, and that most likely people will not care as much as you think.

  In your non-fiction piece “Soldiers,” you write about a friendship in your twenties and how your perspective on that relationship—how and why it ended—has changed since you initially wrote about the events. Can you speak a bit about that change in perspective?

  Memoir is not a work of history, but a work of memory, and memory is a shady, unreliable character. Once you write a version of the events down, that version becomes the truth. It becomes the story. That’s what happened with “Soldiers.” I began to believe in what I wrote years ago and it became the memory. Just as retelling stories slightly changes and reshapes them. It’s the nature of storytelling.

  The novel you’re currently working on—about the Yemeni community and their immigration to Israel—has a historical aspect, with the story set in the 1950s and 1990s. How do you approach research for your fiction?

  I love doing research. I love meeting people from my community and talking to them. In fact, that is what I am currently doing in Israel, interviewing elderly Yemeni women for my Chalmers Arts fellowship. I also spend time digging in archives and in libraries whenever I’m in Israel. However, research is a risky business. It’s endless: I can lose myself in it, and may never start writing. I’ve learned that it’s better for me to write and research at the same time, rather than try to complete the research beforehand.

  Is there anything you wish you’d known, when you began looking for your place in the writing world?

  That it’s all about working hard. Like anything in life, you just have to sit your ass down and do the work. But I wouldn’t have listened back then anyway. I just wanted to party and for my book to write itself.

  Nicole Boyce is a Vancouver-based writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in Echolocation, NoD Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and has been shortlisted for The New Quarterly’s Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award. Nicole is enrolled in the MFA program at UBC, where she’s studying non-fiction, fiction and comics. She is the former Prose Editor of PRISM international.

• Hey Alma - https://www.heyalma.com/israeli-writer-ayelet-tsabari-on-being-a-literal-wandering-jew/

  Israeli Writer Ayelet Tsabari on Being a Literal Wandering Jew
  By Emily Burack
  February 11, 2019
  Ayelet Tsabari
  “I cannot see myself not writing something Mizrahi, or Yemeni. Right now, I don’t have an interest,” Ayelet Tsabari explains to me in the midst of our conversation. “Of course, I might change my mind later, but now, whenever I think of ideas for stories and books, there’s always that component in it.”

  Tsabari’s desire to tell her story — and the story of her community — has been clear throughout her career. She entered the literary scene in 2016 with a collection of short stories centering on the Mizrahi Jewish experience, The Best Place on Earth, which won a plethora of awards. Now she’s back, three years later, this time with the story of her own life.

  Her new memoir, The Art of Leaving, begins with her father’s death when she was young, weaving through her childhood as a Yemeni Jew in Petah Tikva, Israel, her service in the Israeli army, her subsequent travels in India, America, and beyond, her past loves, and her large Yemeni Jewish family. It’s a story about leaving home to find yourself, which sounds cliché, but Tsabari’s writing is anything but.

  “Growing up,” Tsabari writes in The Art of Leaving, “I had often felt out of place in my own country, a feeling I couldn’t comprehend or name until much later. It had to do with my father; grief shakes the foundations of your home, unsettles and banishes you. It might have also had to do with the exclusion of my culture from so many facets of Israeli life, with not seeing myself in literature and in the media, with being taught in school a partial history about the inception of Israel that painted us as mere extras. Or perhaps that failed sense of belonging was an Israeli predicament, because how does one feel at home when home is unsafe, forever contested? When the fear of losing is so entrenched in us it has become a part of our ethos?”

  I had the opportunity to speak with Tsabari about the book, Ofra Haza, her mom, the 40+ books currently on her nightstand, and why she (probably) won’t translate the memoir into Hebrew.

  A large part of your memoir is about your travels away from Israel. One small passage caught my eye — how you titled your bank account during those years “The wandering Jew fund.” Did you view yourself as a wandering Jew? Or, do you still see yourself as one?
  There was something about it that I found romantic those years: the idea of wandering. It’s funny because I was attached to the romance of that, but I didn’t think of the tragedy of the wandering Jew, which was something that only occurred in retrospect.

  Often when you’re in the midst of your 20s, or even [later] for me — because I was a late bloomer – you don’t always have that much insight about what is going on and why you’re doing the thing you’re doing and the choices you’re making. That’s why writing the memoir for me was such a therapeutic… I hate saying it was therapeutic, because I don’t think it’s why we should be writing. You know, I shouldn’t say that, because for some people it is. But as a writer, as a professional author, I don’t think that’s why we generally write. But it is an element of [writing].

  Memoir is so crazy. It’s such an intense immersive experience. If I would’ve done it again, I probably would’ve done it with the support of a therapist. I think that would’ve been wise. I mean, I survived, but…

  You have the book now!
  I do, I do. And there is a sense of closure, in a way. Now that I’m done, there is some sort of relief for sure.

  You write about the stories of your assaults in the book — by your friend’s dad, and on the bus in Vancouver — what was that experience like, putting them down on paper?
  It took me a while to actually be able to write it. I often tell students that I understand the need to write something right after it happens, but if you’re trying to craft it into an actual piece of art, a memoir or a creative nonfiction, I always say it’s best to wait. [You should] write notes, have as many notes as you can, but it’s probably not going to shape itself into a story, a narrative, or a piece of art until some time has passed and you have a little bit more distance.

  And that was definitely true for both of these pieces. I needed the distance to be able to be just enough detached from it so I could not fall apart. And I would say that about a lot of things in the book; I would say that about my father’s death. You need some distance to really make sense of it, I think, in writing.

  Did it change your perspective, or give you that sense of closure you felt like you needed?
  I’m really glad I told the story about my friend’s father, because it was such such an unopened box in my body for a long time, and I think a lot of women who have experienced sexual assault have the same story. It’s like an ulcer in our bodies. There is something positive about the experience of letting it out and telling the story.

  On a sort of different note — and I apologize for my pronunciation ahead of this question! – you write about Ofra Haza. I can’t pronounce her name, I’m so sorry.
  No! You did a good job. That was good.

  As an American Jew, I only knew her as the voice in The Prince of Egypt.
  Yeah! [Laughs]

  And I went down a total deep dive after I finished reading your book…
  Oh my god!

  Into her Wikipedia and YouTube videos and all that. So one, just thank you for introducing me to her.
  Oh my god, I am so glad to hear that. Seriously, I really am.

  Can you talk a little more about what Ofra Haza’s visibility as a Yemeni Jew meant to you growing up? And her impact on you?
  She was everything as a young child. You know? Seeing a woman like her succeeding in such a way, then being in the Eurovision contest — she won 2nd place in the Eurovision — she was one of very few role models for me, and for young girls like me.

  And there was something really special about her, and I’m saying that without cynicism: She was special.

  She really did give me hope, you know? Because there weren’t many [Yemeni Jewish] artists, and definitely no writers, but [Ofra Haza was] someone who made it. And made it so big, and was humble and beautiful and dark-skinned and Yemeni. She was definitely the darling of the community. It was a huge loss, her death, at such a young age.

  I loved the Ofra bit, just because it really introduced me to her – but my absolute favorite part of your memoir was when you write about your relationship with your mom through the food that she makes. What has her reaction been like to your book?
  So, my mom does not read English, and the book, so far, has not been translated into Hebrew, and I’m not sure if I will do that or not. I’m a bit hesitant. But I have a written a summary of the parts in which she’s mentioned in Hebrew, and I sent it to her so she knows what is being told and what I have written about her. Obviously it’s not the same as reading the entire book. She was okay, she was supportive. I cannot say I’m not still nervous.

  I remember talking to Sean, my partner, about it, even before, when it was just “Yemeni Soup and Other Recipes” published in a tiny little magazine, and I was worried then. And he said, “Why are you worried? It’s such a loving piece.” It may be loving, but it’s still really honest and talks about a lot of painful stuff that I don’t know if she wants to be reminded of. So, I am nervous.

  What about the rest of your family?
  With my siblings, they kind of just said, “Do whatever you want.” My brothers are fairly easy-going. I’m like, do you wanna read it? See what I wrote? And they’re like, yeah, whatever, we trust you.

  My sister, who also just read the parts that were about her, was really moved by it. That’s easy because I’m writing really fondly of her, so of course she’d love it.

  But none of them have actually read the entire book yet. I am nervous, I’m nervous about the whole thing. It’s huge exposure. A part of me wonders, why on earth would anyone chose to do this? [Laughs.] But then on the other hand, I know that there was a deep need, on my part, to do it. It was such an urge, it wasn’t really calculated, it was what had to be written. I just followed that. I just listened to that.

  You mentioned you don’t know if you want to translate this into Hebrew —
  Yeah.

  Can you explain a little more on why you wouldn’t want to translate it, and if you ever hope to write in Hebrew in the future, what that would look like?
  When I first started publishing in English, people in Israel didn’t really know about me. And then the book came out in Israel, and I belong a little bit now in the literary community in Israel. I mean I’m a little bit of an outsider because I am writing in a different language. But, I have been asked a couple times to write stuff in Hebrew, and I’m glad to do it.

  That said, I feel like at this point, I’m going to stick to English. For many, many reasons. My career is in English, and I think it would be a mistake, career-wise, to write in a language that has a much smaller readership, despite the fact that obviously I have love in my heart for the Hebrew language that’s never gonna stop. But for now… it’s not like I’m making that decision as a business decision, you know. It’s not like there’s a dissonance between my heart and my brain right now. I’m still very much into writing in English, and I love the challenge of it, the newness.

  And with regard to publishing The Art of Leaving in Hebrew?
  Israel is a very small place, as you know, there’s something that can feel very familial about it, which is both positive and not so positive at different times and different instances. And I’m a little bit nervous.

  The exposure, despite the fact that it’s a smaller readership as I just said, somehow feels more. Just more. More on point, more scary, and there’s Mom… I know it’s silly, and I know I’m not a child, and still I’m a little bit nervous. So I’m not sure. I haven’t decided yet, I am talking to people who are trying to convince me.

  I don’t know if you know the story of Etgar Keret’s memoir?

  No, I don’t.
  He did not publish [his memoir] in Israel either. Etgar Keret is a very famous Israeli writer, very successful in the world. He writes in Hebrew, lives in Israel, so he wrote his memoir in Hebrew, had it translated into English and into many other languages, and did not publish it in the original language in which it was written, for similar reasons. So, yeah, I’m not even the first to do this, funnily enough. But we’ll see.

  Do you think there’s been increased awareness of Mizrahi Jewish culture in English-language speaking communities?
  I sure hope so. I do my part. It’s a small part. But every time I get to speak in front of people, I correct misconceptions, which happens often. People saying things like, “Mizrahi Jews didn’t come to Israel until the founding of the country, so that’s maybe why…” And I’m like, “Actually, my great-grandmother came in 1907, and the first Yemeni immigration was at the same time as the Bilu immigration of the European Jews, exactly the same years, it just hasn’t been told.” So yeah, you have to do what you have to do.

  When I was working at a Lebanese restaurant [in Canada], I was doing a small part in the fight for world peace: by being there, working with other Middle Eastern people, and introducing people to my culture and making them like me [laughs].

  I do what I can. And I hope that it’s helping in making some impact.

  Being in that Lebanese restaurant, and speaking about your books, does it ever feel like a burden?
  No, no, I actually quite like it. I’m one of those — I know a lot of authors are introverted. I like people. I like being out in the world because I like meeting people, I like hearing people’s stories, I like talking to strangers. And I find that especially because as a writer I spend so much time holed in my little room — in my imaginary world — I need that balance. And giving talks and teaching both satisfy my need for social interactions and my love of community. They’re my attempt to give back in some small way.

  Does the build-up to the release of this book feel different than The Best Place on Earth?
  Yes and no. There’s nothing quite like your first book. It’s such an unexpected thing, even though you dream about it your whole life, you plan for it, and still, when it actually happens, it’s such a shock that it’s actually happening.

  And not so much the build-up, but the experience of writing is very different. When you write your first book, you get to write it in a bit of a bubble. You don’t know if it will be published, as much as you hope and wish for it, you don’t really know that. It’s kind of a safer place to write. And then when you write the second book, you’re aware of readership, you’re aware of views, of an audience out there, of expectations, and it’s more work to shut that down.

  Or shut it up, you find the right preposition! I’m ESL, help me out.

  Both work! Who are the Jewish writers writing today you think everyone should be reading?
  The interesting thing, of course, is a lot of the Jewish writers I read are Israeli writers who write in Hebrew, and some of them have not been translated, so there’s that.

  I particularly enjoy young Israeli poets, many of them Mizrahi, like Yonit Na’aman, Adi Keissar, Maya Tevet Dayan, and Shlomi Hatuka.

  Apart from that, I’ve just finished Nathan Englander’s next book [kaddish.com], and I love his book of short stories. I like Dorit Rabinyan’s book that was published in English as All the Rivers. Idra Novey, I love her, she’s wonderful. And Sigal Samuel is another [writer] I really admire.

  And my last question for you — in your memoir, you write about how you always travel with books because it makes you feel at home wherever you are, and I loved that so much. What are you traveling with now? What’s on your nightstand?
  Oh my goodness, there are so many books, it’s kind of out of control. So the thing is, I’m now judging a Canadian contest and I have to read about 40 books of short stories, and I’m only on my second. So there’s that. Apart from that, again, a pile of Hebrew books, I can’t really — there’s too many to mention.

  This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

  The Art of Leaving is out on February 19th, 2019. Image of Ayelet Tsabari in header by Jonathan Bloom.

• Toronto Star - https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/a-road-that-leads-back-home/article_883d21fd-3290-587a-b5de-63aefeaba7b5.html

  A road that leads back home
  Tsabari explores her nomadic journey in her new memoir, The Art of Leaving, a beautifully written and engrossing story of a young woman who travels the world while slowly learning how to embrace her Jewish-Yemeni heritage

  Feb. 15, 2019
  3 min read
  Save
  artofleaving
  The Art of Leaving.

  HarperCollins
  By Sue Carter Special to the Star
  Every winter since Ayelet Tsabari’s daughter was born, she and her partner Sean pack up to spend a couple months in Tel Aviv, where Tsabari grew up. In the past, they’ve considered their time in Israel more like an extended visit, but this year it’s a potential trial to see whether they might make a permanent move, splitting their time between two countries.

  Although she’s happy to leave the pounding winter snowstorms behind for Tel Aviv’s numerous beaches, Tsabari misses her west-end Toronto neighbourhood and its familiar haunts. There’s the local café that knows how she takes her coffee, the shop where she buys vegetables, the neighbours who stop to chat. But Tsabari has spent the greater part of her life in transit, not just physically but emotionally as she straddled cultures and languages in pursuit of a sense of freedom. She learned how to make a home anywhere, whether it be nights sleeping in a hammock in a Thai village or navigating the grey and glass landscape of urban Vancouver.

  “It doesn’t matter where I am at this point, movement is going to be a part of it,” Tsabari says over Skype from Tel Aviv.

  ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW

  Tsabari explores her nomadic journey in her new memoir, The Art of Leaving, a beautifully written and engrossing story of a young woman who travels the world while slowly learning how to embrace her Jewish-Yemeni heritage and to overcome the murmuring sense of grief she held throughout her life after the death of her father, the first person to show real support for her writing. It’s a coming-of-age memoir, filled with plenty of youthful sex, drugs and indiscretions, overlaid with a woman’s quest to find peace with her own identity.

  If there’s such a thing as a born writer, Tsabari might be it. “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t telling stories,” she says. “There was never really a question growing up that this is what I was going to do.” Her first memories were creating comics, even before she could write, dictating the words to her older sister. At age 10, her stories were being published by a Hebrew children’s publication. By the time she was 15, she had a regular gig writing for a teen magazine.

  “It was such an assured trajectory, and then it all fell apart,” Tsabari says.

  After Tsabari completed her stint in the Israeli army, where she honed her rebellious spirit — her departure an event she describes as a “limp handshake with no eye contact” — Tsabari began travelling. If you were to track her locations on a world map, it would be crowded with push pins: New York, Los Angeles, Bangkok, Goa, among them. But with freedom came harrowing moments, like the time Tsabari accidentally drank kerosene, thinking it was water.

  Tsabari looks back and observes a penchant for risk-taking and adventure she is no longer attached to, especially now that she’s a mother. She discussed those feelings with a good friend who is Lebanese and discovered many parallels in their backgrounds: that growing up in places where there’s political conflict or war often results in a higher baseline for what is considered risky or dangerous.

  ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW

  “The idea of harm and risk is something that is really entrenched in the Israeli ethos,” she says. “There’s also growing up with grief, and the idea that there is nothing to lose. I think there’s a higher awareness of temporariness, and the nature of life and the need to grab it.”

  During those years, Tsabari gave up writing, her insecurities and doubts overriding her ability to put pen to paper. It wasn’t until much later, after she found a sense of peace living with Sean in Vancouver, that she took those first steps, relearning her craft in English.

  “I now I take all my risks in writing,” she says.

  Pushed by the memory of her father and his own later-in-life determination to write poetry, Tsabari found her way back to her childhood pursuit. Her debut 2015 story collection, The Best Place on Earth, was lauded by international media for its unique characters and rare literary depictions of Yemeni Jewish life, and that of other Mizrahi (Middle-Eastern) Jews, taking home that year’s prestigious Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

  Although her debut was critically well received, Tsabari admits she’s scared of the response to The Art of Leaving. Memoirs can make any author feel naked and exposed. “But it was an urge, something that had to be written,” she says.

  “I went with it because I think that’s the only way to live as a writer, or as an artist. I just followed the calling.”

  Sue Carter is the editor of Quill and Quire

• Paste - https://www.pastemagazine.com/article/ayelet-tsabari-the-art-of-leaving

  The Art of Leaving: Ayelet Tsabari Discusses Embracing Her Yemeni and Mizrahi Heritage
  By Bridey Heing | February 27, 2019 | 4:06pm
  Photo by Jonathan Bloom
  Books Features ayelet tsabari 0
  The Art of Leaving: Ayelet Tsabari Discusses Embracing Her Yemeni and Mizrahi Heritage
  Ayelet Tsabari’s life makes for a fascinating and, at times, upsetting read. The Art of Leaving, her memoir in essays, charts a childhood shaped by loss, an adolescence that put her at odds with the Israel Defense Forces, and a young adulthood defined by constant relocation. Along the way, Tsabari shares stories of assaults, drug usage, relationships, and her struggle to find a place she might call home.

  That struggle, as she explains in the first essay, began with the loss of her father and her eventual realization of its impact on her life.

  “I had this big epiphany,” Tsabari tells Paste. “It happened as I was writing, and I was thinking about someone I missed. I thought to myself that I was mad at him for leaving, and I wrote that it seemed similar to the anger a child might feel towards their father of dying. I had a moment of like, ‘Oh shit. It shaped who I am as a person.’”

  art of leaving book cover-min.pngThat moment was also defined by a rejection of her Yemeni and Mizrahi identity. Tsabari grew up in Israel in a Yemeni family, although she explains that her exposure to what that meant beyond a culinary heritage and language was limited. The Mizrahi Jewish community in Israel has long struggled against racism and lack of representation; she explains that one of the few prominent Mizrahi female musicians, Ofra Haza, was brought to fame with an image as being a “freha,” an Arabic term connoting promiscuity and lack of intelligence.

  “There was something about Yemeniness and Mizrahiness that almost turned me off as a child and a young teen,” she says. “I wanted to be ‘It,’ and ‘It’ was not that.”

  An appreciation of her heritage came later, after living in India and Canada, getting married and divorced, and having experiences that illuminated the ways her distance from home was isolating.

  “I was feeling rootless,” Tsabari says. “On one hand, how exciting—the anonymity, the freedom. But on the other hand, something in me really yearned for my roots.”

  She began researching, asking her family questions, and reconnecting with traditions. It allowed her to get in touch with a community that she deeply loves today.

  “It’s so important to me to celebrate my community and their traditions and to carve a little place in world literature for my people,” Tsabari says. “That’s definitely something that drives me.”

  One of the most striking things about Tsabari’s memoir is how she utilizes her own story to illuminate the overlooked ways in which minority communities struggle in Israel. “I try to break the single Jewish story that is familiar in North America by introducing something else.”

  In the final third of the book, Tsabari explains that becoming a mother lent urgency to connecting with her roots, as raising her daughter in Canada made it more difficult to impart the Yemeni part of her identity. She also struggled to impart facets of what had been easy to understand in Israel: language, history, Jewishness.

  “I just want it to be easy like it is in Israel,” she says. “I didn’t really find the right way to sort of introduce her to that aspect or her identity”

  The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard

  Tsabari writes about bringing her daughter to Israel for the first time, just as she learns that her childhood home is going to be demolished. It’s a striking way of expressing what became a deeper hurt; the house was yet “another ache in [her] heart.”

  So Tsabari and her family returned to Israel. After many years of finding ways to leave, it was returning home that allowed her to connect with her roots and to pass down that heritage and cultural identity to her young daughter. She conveys the magnitude of this with a simple, moving anecdote: She was recently singing a traditional Yemeni song, and her daughter, despite not knowing or understanding the words, started to sing along.

  “It is a tradition that passes along from mother to daughter, a tradition that is very close to extinction because it just died when [Yemeni immigrants] came [to Israel],” Tsabari explains. “They just didn’t sing anymore and didn’t pass it onto their daughters who were Hebrew speakers. This is how traditions get lost.”

  By digging into her cultural identity, she’s able to pass down these traditions to her child. Tsabari describes this as necessary, because though her own mother has been a remarkable resource, Tsabari has had to ask that information be shared.

  “[My daughter] will have access to a lot of stuff that I had to work hard to unlock,” Tsabari says. “My mom needed to be asked. [Her mother and grandmother] didn’t have that kind of time [to tell stories]. I think when you’re busy surviving and raising a bunch of children and trying to feed them, it becomes a luxury.”

  Tsabari’s story interlinks with the women who came before her, many of whom also had complex relationship to “home.” The final section of the memoir, titled “Return,” casts a fascinating light on these histories and Tsabari’s place within this lineage. It’s made more powerful with her insights about becoming a mother to a daughter; that intergenerational relationship is one she’s explored at length, but she’s still learning.

  “I’m like, ‘Ask more, ask more’,” she says of her daughter. “Don’t waste this time.”

  The Art of Leaving is available now from Random House.

• Jewish Book Council - https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/words-between-worlds-a-conversation-with-ayelet-tsabari

  Words Between Worlds: A Con­ver­sa­tion with Ayelet Tsabari
  Simona Zaret­sky September 9, 2024

  Author pho­to by Elsin Davidi

  Ayelet Tsabari is inti­mate­ly famil­iar with liv­ing between worlds. She grew up in Israel and lived abroad for many years. Her work often depicts the lim­i­nal expe­ri­ence of Yem­i­ni Jews in Israel. In her debut nov­el, Songs for the Bro­ken­heart­ed, she depict the nuances of liv­ing as an expa­tri­ate and the search for belong­ing in and out­side of one’s birthplace.

  Seen from the per­spec­tives of three pro­tag­o­nists, Songs for the Bro­ken­heart­ed, is set against a back­drop of hope and polit­i­cal unrest in Israel dur­ing two dif­fer­ent time peri­ods. The nov­el begins in the 1950s, when Yaqub glimpses Sai­da for the first time in the migrant camp of Rosh Ha’ayin. We then flash for­ward to 1995. Zohara, Saida’s daugh­ter, has returned from liv­ing abroad to mourn her mother’s death; Yoni, Zohara’s teenage nephew, feels his grandmother’s loss keen­ly and grap­ples with how to fill the space cre­at­ed by her absence.

  Simona Zaret­sky: Songs for the Bro­ken­heart­ed is full of nuanced, mul­ti­fac­eted char­ac­ters. How did you go about cre­at­ing this cast? What drew you to the three nar­ra­tors, and how did you approach thread­ing their sto­ries together?

  Ayelet Tsabari: Sai­da and Zohara emerged in my mind long before I knew the plot or themes of this nov­el. I just knew them and loved them. Yaqub came lat­er, in rela­tion to Sai­da, and Yoni was the last to show up and was a bit of a sur­prise to me. Fic­tion writ­ing isn’t inter­est­ing to me unless I make an effort to embody a point of view that is dif­fer­ent from mine. I’ve watched count­less videos of demon­stra­tions against Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords and I sup­pose Yoni was born from my wish to under­stand how some peo­ple become radicalized.

  I envi­sioned the book exact­ly as you said: voic­es from dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions and times in his­to­ry inter­wo­ven to cre­ate a com­plex, mul­ti­fac­eted sto­ry of Yemeni Jew­ry. Espe­cial­ly because so lit­tle has been writ­ten about my com­mu­ni­ty, I want­ed the rep­re­sen­ta­tion to be rich and lay­ered and intri­cate. It was also impor­tant to me because this is a nov­el about voice and voice­less­ness. Through the dif­fer­ent points of view of those around Sai­da, I was able to tell her sto­ry and give her a voice — and by proxy, give voice to our moth­ers and grand­moth­ers whose voic­es were silenced and sto­ries weren’t told.

  SZ: The kid­nap­ping of Rafael, Saida’s son, from the migrant camp of Rosh Ha’ayin looms over the whole nov­el. Society’s denial of these kid­nap­pings and the government’s sub­se­quent years of side­step­ping and belit­tling of the sub­ject seem to press on a wound unable to heal. With­out proof of Rafael’s death, or life, there is just a ques­tion mark. This put me in mind of Zohara’s rumi­na­tions on her bur­geon­ing Mizrahi aware­ness, when there is no rep­re­sen­ta­tion in his­to­ry texts or in pop­u­lar cul­ture: ​“You are left word­less, unable to nar­rate your own expe­ri­ences.” How do you see this shift­ing in the novel?

  AT: That ques­tion mark, that gap in the nar­ra­tive, is some­thing that char­ac­ter­izes much of our his­to­ry as Yemeni Jews. In addi­tion to the lack of rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Israeli lit­er­a­ture, there were few offi­cial records in Yemen. It was even more true for the women, since they were illit­er­ate, and their sto­ries were unwrit­ten. In my own research into my fam­i­ly his­to­ry (which I’ve writ­ten about in my mem­oir, The Art of Leav­ing) I’ve encoun­tered many dead ends, gaps, and con­flict­ing sto­ries. My great grandmother’s grave, once I found it, was not even carved with her name. It was blank. If that’s not a metaphor for era­sure I don’t know what is. At some point, I had to accept the lim­i­ta­tions of research when it came to Yemeni his­to­ry. That led me to ques­tion the author­i­ty of writ­ten his­to­ry. Because who writes these his­to­ry books? Who decides what to include in them? I had to shake the belief that writ­ten his­to­ry mat­tered more than oth­er types of nar­ra­tion. That some people’s his­to­ry mat­tered more because it was documented.

  My own way of coun­ter­ing the lack of record­ed Yemeni Jew­ish his­to­ry was to lis­ten to Yemeni women and men, study their songs, and tell their sto­ries. Zohara’s jour­ney in the nov­el is sim­i­lar. It is a jour­ney of recla­ma­tion. And for some­one like her, who comes from acad­e­mia where every­thing needs to be cit­ed and ref­er­enced, that’s a huge shift in per­spec­tive. She choos­es to immerse her­self in the rich oral tra­di­tions of her cul­ture and accepts oth­er forms of doc­u­men­ta­tion and storytelling.

  SZ: Zohara, Yaqub, and Yoni are all, in a sense, search­ing for a place and a coun­try to belong in. Zohara attends an elite board­ing school where she is oth­ered for being Yemeni, and lat­er moves to New York City to work on her doc­tor­ate. Wher­ev­er she lives, Zohara search­es for con­nec­tion and strug­gles to be ful­ly seen. Could you speak about this quest for home across the char­ac­ters’ journeys?

  AT: My own sense of belong­ing has been frac­tured since child­hood, par­tial­ly because of my Yemeni her­itage, par­tial­ly because of los­ing my father when I was very young. Because of this, I find myself end­less­ly inves­ti­gat­ing the myr­i­ad rea­sons oth­er peo­ple also strug­gle to find a sense of belong­ing. Yoni feels adja­cent to the new fam­i­ly his moth­er has cre­at­ed and does not even feel entire­ly at home in his grow­ing, teenage body. Zohara grew dis­tant from her her­itage, her neigh­bor­hood, and her fam­i­ly. Yaqub tries to rec­on­cile the fan­ta­sy of the Holy Land he yearned for as a Yemeni Jew with the real­i­ty of Israel.

  As an Israeli and a Jew, I’m inter­est­ed in the idea of home not only on a per­son­al lev­el, but also on a his­tor­i­cal lev­el. The ques­tion of belong­ing in the nov­el is relat­ed to Mizrahi iden­ti­ty and to the wish — and often fail­ure — to fit into an Israeli soci­ety that ide­al­izes Euro­pean, Ashke­nazi cul­ture. Nowa­days, dis­cus­sions about home in rela­tion to this region have become flat­tened, one-dimen­sion­al, and com­bat­ive, but the beau­ty of fic­tion is that it allows for nuance. If I had to char­ac­ter­ize Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture, I’d say that the search for belong­ing is a com­mon the­mat­ic thread.

  SZ: The nov­el is set pri­mar­i­ly in Israel in the 1990s, with touch­points in the 1950s. Do you see the nov­el as being in con­ver­sa­tion with our cur­rent polit­i­cal moment?

  AT: I set the bulk of the nov­el in the ​’90s, dur­ing the fraught nego­ti­a­tions for the Oslo Accords and the assas­si­na­tion of Rabin, because it was a sig­nif­i­cant peri­od for me as a young adult, and for all Israelis and Pales­tini­ans who lived through it/​experienced it. It was a time when hope was pal­pa­ble and peace felt pos­si­ble. Rabin’s assas­si­na­tion was such a shock and a rup­ture. It was the first time that I remem­ber feel­ing like his­to­ry was unfold­ing in front of my eyes. We are liv­ing at a sim­i­lar moment right now. Every­thing changed after Octo­ber 7th. Obvi­ous­ly, the book was writ­ten pri­or to that, but I hope that it will pro­vide some con­text and back­ground to the cur­rent conflict.

  SZ: The protagonist’s moth­er, Sai­da, is a poet; the nar­ra­tor Yaqub a sto­ry­teller. In the nov­el, you describe how in tra­di­tion­al Yemeni cul­ture men learn to read and under­stand Hebrew, where­as women do not. Their music and poet­ry is held in low­er esteem. Could you dis­cuss this hier­ar­chy of lan­guage, and how it shifts as the com­mu­ni­ty migrates to Israel?

  AT: Cer­tain­ly, the dif­fer­ence in the Yemeni men and women’s pro­fi­cien­cy in Hebrew played a huge role in how they adjust­ed to Israel. The women had to learn the lan­guage from scratch, which deep­ened the inequal­i­ty and fur­ther alien­at­ed the women from the rest of soci­ety. But as Bruria says in the nov­el, the move also afford­ed the women some free­dom, by plac­ing them around dif­fer­ent ways of liv­ing. In Israel, women could work, study. I often tell the sto­ry of how my grand­ma, who was my grandfather’s sec­ond wife, used the move to Israel to pose an ulti­ma­tum to my grand­fa­ther to ​“get rid” of the first wife because she rec­og­nized that plur­al mar­riages weren’t accept­able here.

  The gap in speak­ing Hebrew nar­rowed nat­u­ral­ly over time. And as any­one who speaks more than one lan­guage can tes­ti­fy, we can be some­one else, some­one new, in a new lan­guage. It took longer for the gap in lit­er­a­cy to close. My own grand­moth­er learned to read and write in her six­ties, long after my grand­fa­ther passed.

  My own way of coun­ter­ing the lack of record­ed Yemeni Jew­ish his­to­ry was to lis­ten to Yemeni women and men, study their songs, and tell their stories.

  SZ: Zohara wants to trans­late tapes of her moth­er singing, and there is also a metaphor­i­cal trans­la­tion that the nar­ra­tor endeav­ors to car­ry out as she moves from Ashke­nazi spaces to Yemeni ones, from city to city or coun­try to coun­try, and across gen­er­a­tions. Could you speak a bit about trans­la­tion in all of its iterations?

  AT: There were sev­er­al acts of trans­la­tion inher­ent in the writ­ing of this nov­el. First was the act of trans­la­tion that hap­pened as I wrote; I am an author whose moth­er tongue is Hebrew, and who wrote a book in Eng­lish about peo­ple who speak most­ly Hebrew and Ara­bic. There is also a dou­ble trans­la­tion in the case of the women’s songs that are includ­ed in the book — I relied on the trans­la­tion from the orig­i­nal Ara­bic to Hebrew to cre­ate the Eng­lish trans­la­tion. I then made small changes and added my own lines to rep­re­sent the dynam­ic char­ac­ter of the women’s songs, which his­tor­i­cal­ly, were changed slight­ly every time they were sung.

  Which brings me to the trans­la­tion from oral tra­di­tions into a lit­er­ary work. By com­mit­ting the sung poet­ry to the page, there’s a freez­ing that hap­pens. The poet­ry stops being dynam­ic, and so, once again, an impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tic of the oral tra­di­tions is scar­i­fied. When I hon­or our oral tra­di­tions by turn­ing them into text, how do I main­tain the integri­ty of the oral work? I tried to main­tain that flu­id­i­ty by hav­ing Sai­da rewrite parts of the songs. In doing so, I hoped to con­tribute to that tra­di­tion myself and play a role in pass­ing it down.

  SZ: Zohara’s nar­ra­tive begins in grief. Return­ing to her place of birth in Israel to mourn the death of her moth­er. Zohara’s sto­ry, though, is steeped in lay­ers of loss – the end of a mar­riage, the upend­ing of per­cep­tions about her moth­er, a reck­on­ing with her own past behav­iors, and many more deaths large and small. Could you speak about how loss oper­ates in the novel?

  AT: Loss is the incit­ing inci­dent of the nov­el, it moves the sto­ry and the char­ac­ters, who all react to it in dif­fer­ent ways. The con­trast between their ways of cop­ing is also a source of ten­sion, like Yoni and Zohara (one is being dri­ven to rad­i­cal­ism, the oth­er holds on to the dream of peace), Zohara and her sis­ter, and so on.

  I find that I often start my nar­ra­tives in grief or loss. Per­haps because my own incit­ing inci­dent was the death of my father when I was a child and it dra­mat­i­cal­ly changed the course of my life. Sim­i­lar­ly to Dahlia Ravikovitch (whose poet­ry Zohara was study­ing and is quot­ed in the nov­el), who often spoke and wrote about her own father’s death when she was six and the impact it made on her life. I often say that my fic­tion isn’t auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal (at least not in a straight­for­ward way) but my themes are, and so, like belong­ing, grief and loss are themes I have been drawn to explor­ing and pro­cess­ing in my work, and I sup­pose I end up inflict­ing my char­ac­ters with it.

  SZ: The com­plex­i­ties of fam­i­ly are ren­dered so beau­ti­ful­ly through­out the nov­el. Each nar­ra­tor is forced to rec­on­cile with the tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly tropes that main­stream soci­ety impos­es on them and to reflect on that. Present-day Zohara is faced with under­stand­ing her tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship with her moth­er in a new light, see­ing her as an indi­vid­ual, not just a par­ent. Could you speak on this shift­ing sense of perception?

  AT: Moth­er – daugh­ter rela­tion­ships are fas­ci­nat­ing to me as a writer, a daugh­ter, and a moth­er to a girl. They can be so fraught and intense and inti­mate and won­der­ful. So often we are so self-cen­tered as chil­dren that we can’t see our moth­ers beyond that role. For Zohara, this shift in per­cep­tion hap­pens in trag­ic cir­cum­stances. It’s the loss of her moth­er that leads her to see her anew. For me, the shift in per­cep­tion regard­ing my own moth­er only hap­pened when I became a moth­er. Moth­er­hood allowed me to see her with clar­i­ty, com­pas­sion, and admi­ra­tion, to rec­og­nize the per­son she once was — my grand­moth­er too — before she mar­ried and had chil­dren. This was some­thing I want­ed to cap­ture in this book and saw as a part of Zohara’s jour­ney of reclamation.

  Simona is the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil’s man­ag­ing edi­tor of dig­i­tal con­tent and mar­ket­ing. She grad­u­at­ed from Sarah Lawrence Col­lege with a con­cen­tra­tion in Eng­lish and His­to­ry and stud­ied abroad in India and Eng­land. Pri­or to the JBC she worked at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Her writ­ing has been fea­tured in Lilith, The Nor­mal School, Dig­ging through the Fat, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. She holds an MFA in fic­tion from The New School.

The Best Place on Earth

Ayelet Tsabari. Random House, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8129-8893-2

This debut story collection daringly takes on complexities of Israeli life and its diaspora. In "Tikkun," Lior and Natalie, once a couple, meet by chance on a Jerusalem street at the height of the second intifada. Natalie has since become devoutly Orthodox, forbidden to touch any man besides her husband; "We don't hug, the space between us thick with past embraces, with a history of touching." Yet when a terrorist attack occurs, their fate is altered. In "Invisible," Tsabari gives voice to the often-marginalized members of Israel's Filipino community in a tender love story. "Brit Milah" pits Reuma, a tradition-minded Yemeni Jewish mother against Ofra, her daughter, who has left the holy land for the cold of Canada and has defied tradition by choosing not to circumcise her son. The title story is the collection's most ambitious and most successful. When Naomi's marriage is in crisis, she decides to pay a visit to her sister in Canada, a place where "Vancouver was as blue as Jerusalem was golden." But rather than being a refuge, as in the past, Naomi must adjust to Carlos, her sister's non-Jewish partner, and their own changed dynamic. This story--and the whole collection, for that matter--elegantly navigates the complex themes of sibling bonding, marital infidelity, and religion. Whereas David Grossman and Amos Oz have been adept at writing about a narrow segment of Israeli society, Tsabari's first collection is rich with many stories from across all of Israel--and beyond. A remarkably assured debut. Agent: David Forrer, Inkwell Management. (Mar.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Best Place on Earth." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 3, 18 Jan. 2016, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A440821768/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=846ad288. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

THE BEST PLACE ON EARTHStoriesBy Ayelet Tsabari256 pp. Random House. $26.

Ayelet Tsabari's first collection of short stories shows what it's like to be both Jewish and Arab in Israel. Chances are you live in an iffy neighborhood and European Jews look down on you. Bombings, military service and Scud missiles intrude. You'll find family melodrama and a tangy whiff of chick lit mixed in with scenes that could come straight from ''M*A*S*H.'' Should I get it on with this cute paratrooper? How can my daughter refuse to circumcise my grandson? Why did my husband sleep with ''some Rona from Haifa'' a couple of years ago?

If all this seems lacking in the gravitas implied by the heritage of its author, who was born in Israel to a family of Yemeni descent and served in the Israeli Army, just try picking up this book without having your preconceived notions prodded into a mess of noisy contradictions. And it's all done so lightly. ''The Best Place on Earth'' wears its identity politics like a macramȨ bikini.

In ''Casualties,'' a 19-year-old Israeli Army medic is ''a Moroccan áfirecracker,'' and her Ashkenazi boyfriend, Oren, stationed far away in Gaza, is depressed. One night in Tel Aviv, after her fifth shot of tequila, she's in the bathroom of a bar with that cute paratrooper. She's also selling gimel forms, get-off-the-base passes that she forges, at 50 bucks a pop. It's seemingly harmless fun until Oren calls to talk about his unit's raid on a Palestinian house: ''They all sit in the corner, Mom, Dad, three kids, looking at me with these eyes. .Çê.Çê. And the sergeant is opening doors and drawers and throwing everything everywhere. Food. Underwear. Books. .Çê.Çê. When we got back to the base he was making fun of me in front of the whole platoon. .Çê.Çê. I couldn't trash their house. I froze.''

It's the collection's only brief detour into the Palestinian point of view. Tsabari has said that some publishers rejected her manuscript because she didn't mention more about the Palestinian-Israeli áconflict. In response, she argues that she was drawn to the schisms between áMizrahi (Jews from the Middle East) and Ashkenazi (Jews from Europe) because their divergent loyalties have been overshadowed or downplayed. For many readers, Israeli literature is associated with the existential intensity of giants like Amos Oz, Aharon Appelfeld and David Grossman. Among these well-known figures, it has been primarily left to A. B. Yehoshua, born in 1936, a fifth-generation Sephardic Jew with a Moroccan mother, to write of the alienation and anguish of the Mizrahi.

Tsabari's stories are fresh, and many feature the perspectives of the young, whose immaturity can hauntingly simplify intricate moral conundrums. In ''Borders,'' a 17-year-old who has hitchhiked to Eilat in the summer before her army service confronts her mother's history as a ''hippie settler'' in Sinai. A little girl in ''Warplanes'' sulks because, rather than dying a war hero like her classmate's áfather, her own succumbed to a weak heart. In ''The Poets in the Kitchen Window,'' a boy in Tel Aviv, whose mentally ill mother has been hospitalized, áwatches his sister dabble in pacifist Hinduism during Iraqi missile attacks.

So much of this book's illumination is done with so little wattage. A ninth grader from Belarus in ''Say It Again, Say Something Else'' meets a girl whose grandparents came from Yemen. The girl tries to explain who she is:

'' 'We are Arabs in a way, Arab Jews.'

''Lana laughs. 'No, that's impossible. You're either an Arab or a Jew.'

'' 'Yeah, but you're a Belarussian Jew. Why can't there be Arab Jews?'

'' 'I'm Israeli now,' Lana says. 'And so are you.' ''

If only it were that simple.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO: Ayelet Tsabari (PHOTOGRAPH BY SEAN BRERETON)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Adams, Lorraine. "Sensing a Schism." The New York Times Book Review, 27 Mar. 2016, p. 20(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A447502695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4619d7c2. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

The Best Place on Earth

Ayelet Tsabari. Random House, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8129-8893-2

This debut story collection daringly takes on complexities of Israeli life and its diaspora. In "Tikkun," Lior and Natalie, once a couple, meet by chance on a Jerusalem street at the height of the second intifada. Natalie has since become devoutly Orthodox, forbidden to touch any man besides her husband; "We don't hug, the space between us thick with past embraces, with a history of touching." Yet when a terrorist attack occurs, their fate is altered. In "Invisible," Tsabari gives voice to the often-marginalized members of Israel's Filipino community in a tender love story. "Brit Milah" pits Reuma, a tradition-minded Yemeni Jewish mother against Ofra, her daughter, who has left the holy land for the cold of Canada and has defied tradition by choosing not to circumcise her son. The title story is the collection's most ambitious and most successful. When Naomi's marriage is in crisis, she decides to pay a visit to her sister in Canada, a place where "Vancouver was as blue as Jerusalem was golden." But rather than being a refuge, as in the past, Naomi must adjust to Carlos, her sister's non-Jewish partner, and their own changed dynamic. This story--and the whole collection, for that matter--elegantly navigates the complex themes of sibling bonding, marital infidelity, and religion. Whereas David Grossman and Amos Oz have been adept at writing about a narrow segment of Israeli society, Tsabari's first collection is rich with many stories from across all of Israel--and beyond. A remarkably assured debut. Agent: David Forrer, Inkwell Management. (Mar.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Best Place on Earth." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 3, 18 Jan. 2016, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A440821768/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=846ad288. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

Tsabari, Ayelet THE ART OF LEAVING Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 2, 19 ISBN: 978-0-8129-8898-7

An Arab Jew searches for the meaning of home.

From the time her father died when she was 10, Tsabari (The Best Place on Earth: Stories, 2016) felt out of place in Israel, where she and her family had long lived in a community of Yemeni Jews. "Grief shakes the foundations of your home," she writes in her candid, affecting memoir, "unsettles and banishes you." In addition to the loss of her father--whom the author evokes in loving detail--she felt excluded from Israeli culture, where Arab Jews were treated like second-class citizens, even those, like her and her parents, who were born in Israel. "In a country riddled with cultural prejudice," she writes, "the stereotypes associated with Yemenis over the years have ranged from romanticizing to fetishizing to patronizing." In 1935, when her grandparents arrived, Yemeni immigrants were considered "savage and primitive"; even today, "Yemenis are often the butt of racial jokes and the subject of mockery." As in her impressive collection of short stories, which won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, Tsabari examines the cultural and personal forces that result in alienation and "self-inflicted exile." For nearly a decade after completing mandatory service in the Israeli army, she traveled to Canada, New York, Mexico, India, and Thailand, with few possessions. "Home, essentially, was the act of leaving," she writes, "not a physical place, but the pattern of walking away from it." She married, briefly; had affairs; spent years drinking cheap whiskey and smoking dope; and periodically returned to her family home before leaving once more. "Leaving is the only thing I know how to do," she reflects. "That seemed to be the one stable thing in my life, the ritual of picking up, throwing out or giving away the little I have, packing up and taking off." It must be lonely, a friend remarks, "needing to be free all the time." Now in her 40s, grounded by her husband and daughter, she redefines home: an emotional commitment to a place "where love resides."

Linked essays cohere into a tender, moving memoir.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Tsabari, Ayelet: THE ART OF LEAVING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A565423148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8010936a. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

The Art of Leaving.

By Ayelet Tsabari.

Feb. 2019. 336p. Random, $26 (9780812988987). 813.

The army was not the place for Tsabari. Nor were the various countries she drifted through after her mandatory Israeli military service was completed--New York, India, Canada. Long after her friends had settled down, Tsabari was still searching for a place she fit in, a search that eventually brought her back to her hometown outside Tel Aviv. As an Israeli citizen who was the grandchild of Yemeni immigrants, Tsabari couldn't shake a sense of otherness as she grew up--even her army classification documents gave her family origin as "Yemen," despite her birth in Israel. Her memoir takes the form of interconnected essays that begin with the death of her father before she was 10, and chronicles her tumultuous service in the army, a string of relationships while on her travels, and a harrowing assault on a Vancouver bus, all leading to her return to Israel and a commitment to learning more about her family's origins. Tsabari brings to her writing a clear voice and a keen ability to capture a moment in its entirety. --Bridget Thoreson

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Thoreson, Bridget. "The Art of Leaving." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 11, 1 Feb. 2019, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A574056350/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f591417f. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

Tsabari, Ayelet. Songs for the Brokenhearted. Random. Sept. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9780812989007. $29. F

With a broken marriage and a stalled doctoral thesis, Zohara has been drifting around Thailand when she is called home to Israel for her mother's funeral. In the aftermath, she sublimates her grief by cleaning out her mother's house. This leads her to uncover many of her parents' stories and secrets. Her parents had arrived in Israel as part of a large Yemeni contingent in 1950, with the belief that Israel was the promised land. Their dreams began to crumble, however, when they were moved into a squalid migration camp. Worse was still to come--Zohara's young brother was sent to hospital with a cold, where he suddenly died. Now, at her mother's house, Zohara is surprised to find many songs her mother wrote and recorded, along with evidence of a love affair with a fellow migrant. Meanwhile, nephew Yoni deals with his own grief by joining a protest group who view the Oslo Accords, offering land for peace, as a betrayal of Israel's founding ideals. VERDICT Tsabari's (The Best Place on Earth) well-plotted novel, alternating between the 1950 Yemeni migration to Israel and the time around Rabin's 1995 assassination, shines a light on a little-known community and their rich history.--Barbara Love

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Love, Barbara. "Tsabari, Ayelet. Songs for the Brokenhearted." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 9, Sept. 2024, p. 81. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808228728/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2b0d145c. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

Songs for the Brokenhearted.

By Ayelet Tsabari.

Sept. 2024. 352p. Random, $29 (9780812989007).

For her mother's shiva, Zohara returns to the Tel Aviv suburb where she grew up before attending an elite boarding school and eventually moving to New York. Divorced and disillusioned with the dissertation she's working on, Zohara is at a crossroads. In the months following her mother's death, she slowly gains new understanding about who Saida was. Saida married young and migrated from Yemen to Israel. In an immigration camp, she was separated from her young son, and he disappeared, one of many Yemeni children lost. When, decades later, Zohara finds tapes of her mother singing in the style of her home country, she confronts the possibility that Saida had a romance with someone other than Zohara's father and that the history Zohara has distanced herself from may be worth rediscovering. Tsabari's (The Art of Leaving, 2019) eye-opening novel brings together a web of relationships--including Zohara's nephew, who begins to find purpose through protests--to explore the complex legacy of the treatment of Arab Jews in Israel through one family's secrets, sorrows, and long-delayed joy.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Thoreson, Bridget. "Songs for the Brokenhearted." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 22, Aug. 2024, p. 28. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808396667/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e65244a3. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

Tsabari, Ayelet SONGS FOR THE BROKENHEARTED Random House (Fiction None) $29.00 9, 10 ISBN: 9780812989007

A family's tangled past comes to light.

In her debut novel, Israeli Canadian memoirist and short story writer Tsabari gently unfolds two narratives: one about young Yaqub and Saida, who fall in love in an Israeli camp for Yemeni immigrants in 1950; the other about Zohara Haddad, a graduate student, newly divorced, who returns to Israel from New York in 1995 after her mother, Saida, dies. The teenage Yemeni lovers are ill-fated: Saida is married with a child, and when her husband discovers the relationship, Yaqub is forced to flee. A few months later, Saida suffers an even more devastating loss. Forced to place her tiny son in the camp's nursery, she cannot find him one day when she goes to breastfeed. Although she's told that the child became ill and died, Saida, for the rest of her life, nurses the hope of finding the baby, whom she's certain was put up for adoption. Zohara discovers the complexities of her parents' lives when she cleans out her mother's house: Tapes of her mother singing unfamiliar love songs, a mysterious photograph, and stories written in someone else's hand all reveal long-hidden secrets. Tsabari sets Zohara's story in the context of the social and political unrest that has long vexed Israel and Palestine. The Oslo Accords have just been signed, inciting ferocious protests. Tensions flare between Ashkenazi Jews and Yemeni Jews, and stereotypes and superstitions abound. "Maybe," Zohara thinks, "Israeli anger was also a manifestation of helplessness, of grief. This was a nation of migrants, exiles and survivors, people who fled from genocide and persecution only to arrive at this place where wars never end ." With Zohara as a central character, Tsabari examines the effect of loss on a woman struggling to define herself as a Jew, a scholar, and an Israeli.

A timely, well-crafted tale, imbued with cultural and personal sorrow.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Tsabari, Ayelet: SONGS FOR THE BROKENHEARTED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865307/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6d782f44. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

"The Best Place on Earth." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 3, 18 Jan. 2016, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A440821768/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=846ad288. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024. Adams, Lorraine. "Sensing a Schism." The New York Times Book Review, 27 Mar. 2016, p. 20(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A447502695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4619d7c2. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024. "The Best Place on Earth." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 3, 18 Jan. 2016, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A440821768/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=846ad288. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024. "Tsabari, Ayelet: THE ART OF LEAVING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A565423148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8010936a. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024. Thoreson, Bridget. "The Art of Leaving." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 11, 1 Feb. 2019, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A574056350/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f591417f. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024. Love, Barbara. "Tsabari, Ayelet. Songs for the Brokenhearted." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 9, Sept. 2024, p. 81. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808228728/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2b0d145c. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024. Thoreson, Bridget. "Songs for the Brokenhearted." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 22, Aug. 2024, p. 28. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808396667/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e65244a3. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024. "Tsabari, Ayelet: SONGS FOR THE BROKENHEARTED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865307/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6d782f44. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

Word Count