New Books In Literature

Zohara flies from New York to Israel for her mother’s funeral. She’d already been through a tough year; a divorce from her American husband and trouble getting started on her doctoral dissertation at NYU. As she clears out the house where she grew up, Zohara finds tapes of her mother singing Yemenite songs in Arabic, and evidence of a secret romance. During her first thirty days of mourning, Zohara has conversations with her mother’s longtime friends, joins her mother’s Yemenite women’s choir, and rekindles old friendships. Songs for the Brokenhearted (Random House, 2024) is a beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself. Ayelet Tsabari is an Israeli Canadian writer born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. Her book of stories, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literatu