Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted begins with Zohara Haddad returning to Israel in 1995 for her mother Saida’s funeral. Zohara has been living in New York, where she is a graduate student at NYU, but her distance from her mother has long been more than geographical. As a child she found her mother’s expressions of her Yemeni culture embarrassing – to young Zohara, Saida’s singing “sounded foreign, Arabic, and utterly uncool” – and she also longed to escape her mother’s unrelenting grief for the loss of her first child, Zohara’s brother Rafael. “Why couldn’t she let go, like my father had?” Zohara complains. Her mother’s death is to Zohara “the last stage of separation between us.”

Then, sorting through her mother’s things, Zohara finds a box full of unlabelled cassette tapes. When she plays one, her skin breaks out in goosebumps: it is her dead mother, “singing in Yemeni to me.” 

“What did the songs mean,” Zohara wonders, “and why were they so sad?” To answer these questions she has to learn not just the full story of her mother’s life, but also more about the culture and experiences of the Yemeni Jews who came to the newly established nation of Israel in 1950 and found, not the “promised land [they] dreamt about,” but poverty, struggle, and discrimination. The Israel of 1995 is likewise far from idyllic: residents live in fear of bombs, ultra-nationalists are protesting the Oslo Accords, and many, including Zohara, are well aware that theirs is “a country erected on the ruins of others, the oppression of others.” The whole country seems “tinged with rage, hot red, a pot on the brink of overflowing.”

As she navigates this fraught personal and political landscape, Zohara comes to appreciate what singing meant to her mother. Yemeni women were expected to be silent and submissive, one of the women in Saida’s singing group explains; “the songs were their way of speaking their heart, having a voice.” Zohara even begins to sing with the group herself. “Traditionally,” her friend Nir tells her, “the songs were passed from mother to daughter.” The lightness Zohara feels when she joins in is like a precious legacy, reconnecting Zohara to both her mother and a longer tradition: “It was as if my body knew the songs, as if they’d been folded in there, imprinted.”

Tsabari (author of the memoir The Art of Leaving) thoughtfully combines the different elements of her story, taking us back and forth between 1950 and 1995 as she gradually reveals the sources of Saida’s sorrows, but also her hidden joys. The novel is hampered somewhat by Tsabari’s tendency to over-explain. The symbolic resonance of Saida’s songs is clear and powerful enough without readers being explicitly told; the novel is full of painful incidents that make the commentary on “othering,” including the dry (if accurate) term “microaggressions,” unnecessary. The occasionally pedantic tone is perhaps justified by Zohara’s academic training, but it has a dampening effect; a more lyrical and suggestive approach would have allowed readers to feel more while still learning about the lives Tsabari aspires to illuminate.