Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted elegantly weaves together two storylines, the first of which is set in an overcrowded immigrant camp in the early years of Israeli statehood. Yaqub, an orphan from North Yemen, stumbles across a girl his age and is immediately smitten with a poignant and forbidden attraction.

The second storyline, set in New York during the volatile summer of 1995, is narrated by Zohara, who has been struggling with her dissertation. When her mother’s sudden death draws her home to a Yemini neighborhood in central Israel, Zohara uncovers tapes of her mother’s singing as well as a startling secret. Gradually, Zohara gains a deeper appreciation of the complexity and quiet heroism of her mother’s life, and the beauty, joys, and sorrows of a culture she has often resisted.
 
With immersive, spellbinding prose, Tsabari masterfully foregrounds the social upheavals of two transformative historical eras, illuminating intergenerational schisms and healing in unexpected ways. This soaring novel does justice to it all: the feverish highs and lows of love affairs, personal and collective forms of grief, tempestuous family dramas, issues of gender and belonging, and Israel’s divisive politics.