Psychoanalyst Galit Atlas’s book, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma, explores the titular concept in her patients’ and her own stories. A term she coined, emotional inheritance has much crossover with the idea of generational trauma, with one significant caveat: the inherited traumas themselves are secret, unbeknownst to the inheritor. “It is these secrets,” Atlas writes, “that often keep us from living to our full potential. They affect our mental and physical health, create gaps between what we want for ourselves and what we are able to have, and haunt us like ghosts.”
Zohara, the protagonist of Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted, struggles with these very ghosts. An Israeli of Yemeni descent, she moved to New York in her twenties to flee a mother and a nation that didn’t feel like home to her. It is 1995, and she has returned to that home after learning of her mother’s death. Her mother, who immigrated to Israel in 1950 from Yemen and lived in the austere and impoverished camps set up by the fledgling Israeli government for Jewish migrants at that time, was an abrasive and conservative caregiver, under the thumb of Zohara’s father until he died when Zohara was a teenager. Her secrets, the ones that Zohara has inherited, are revealed early and are built upon over the course of the book: she had a secret romance with another man in the camps while she was married to Zohara’s father, and her first child mysteriously vanished while in the camps, likely at the hands of the Israeli government. Zohara discovers that her mother’s experience was not unique: many women in the camps had been told that their children had died suddenly while receiving treatment in the camps’ infirmaries despite just showing minor symptoms when taken in—only to discover, much later, that their children had been adopted by Ashkenazi couples.
Songs for the Brokenhearted develops the same themes that appeared in Tsabari’s short story collection The Best Place on Earth, and in her memoir The Art of Leaving: a young woman who feels perpetually out of place and reluctant to return to her homeland, and dealing with the racism prevalent in Israel, particularly the stereotypes placed upon Israelis of Yemeni descent. Identity formation—the merging of both of these themes—takes centerstage in Songs for the Brokenhearted. Tsabari effectively explores how the racism Zohara experienced shaped her move to New York; how her experience at an affluent and primarily Ashkenazi high school shaped her disdain for herself and her culture; and how these both set her up to detach further from herself while in New York. She marries an Ashkenazi man from Long Island whose parents “weren’t the kind of Jews who needed to visit Israel,” in that they possess an emotional distance from the country and perhaps even mild disdain for those who either live or visit there; starts a Ph.D studying Israeli (i.e., Ashkenazi) literature; and shortens her name to Zo, supposedly for the convenience of those around her.
These passages, where Tsabari extrapolates upon the separation of Zohara’s past Israeli self and her burgeoning American self, are some of the novel’s strongest. Zohara’s instability and relentless search to find herself and her community create an insecure exterior that shines through each of her interactions. This insecurity is engrossing in how strongly it is felt and portrayed; it allows for Zohara’s thoughts to spiral into more ungenerous and compelling waters, particularly when it comes to her beliefs about immigration, a recurring topic through the novel. Processing her move to New York, Zohara reflects on her anger at Saida, her mother, for not being as “good” an immigrant as Zohara believes herself to be in the U.S. Unlike Saida, Zohara embraces the status quo, shunting her Yemeni heritage to the side. As Zo, she “was lighter, new, unburdened”; in her mind, immigration is something that can be done right. The challenge: how aptly do you assimilate? The closer one gets to “very well,” the better the immigrant. Zohara’s beliefs about immigration and assimilation have some immediate merits, in that they allowed her to operate more smoothly in her adopted country. However, as the readers sees in her switch from Zohara to Zo, she becomes alienated from herself. Like the “hara” in “Zohara,” in the switch a part of her is amputated. She may see herself as “unburdened” of the challenges she faced when living in Israel, of her insecurities. But she is also unburdening herself of certain immutable facts of her life—the Yemeni heritage and culture that raised her, the very things that make her a unique and vibrant person.
These passages, however, are followed by a series of experiences of Zohara’s coming to consciousness, with the characters around her—an Arab NYU professor, a queer Palestinian woman, a Yemeni man from her childhood—showcase the wrongs of her beliefs and offer a better path. Although these passages set up Zohara’s ability to later understand her mother, they come across as didactic, the characters sometimes seeming to be speaking more to the reader than to Zohara. They offer a potted history of how Israelis of Arab descent have experienced and experience discrimination in Israel, how marginalization begins and is enforced, and how embracing the exiled parts of oneself (in Zohara’s case, the Yemeni parts) is an act of resistance that ultimately leads to identity integration. The way these characters are portrayed and the ideas they offer begs the question of whether this book was meant for an American audience unaware of Israel’s racial politics and history; or for an Israeli audience who may have some understanding of these dynamics, given that they themselves would have encountered, witnessed, or participated in the institutional and individual prejudices described in the novel. Because the novel was written in English, I assume the former.
Beyond the novel’s themes, its structure is one of its most compelling attributes. Songs for the Brokenhearted follows Zohara on journey of detection and discovery, along the way stumbling across clues of her mother’s originality, her suffering, and her admirable subversiveness in the form her singing and song-making. In describing how emotional inheritance is unearthed and dismantled in Emotional Inheritance, Galit Atlas writes of a similar process: “[M]y patients and I try to follow the signs and listen not only to what they say but also their pauses, to the music of that which is unknown to both of us.” For Zohara, one revealing conversation leads to the next, and chapters often end with the assurance that Zohara will now have to speak to this person to find out the truth. This structure offers forward momentum, and the path from her experiencing her mother as one-dimensional and uncaring to seeing her as dynamic and loving comes across as familiar.
In addition to Zohara’s quest, there are two more adjacent plot-lines. The first depicts Saida’s romance 45 years earlier in the camps, adding granular detail to the story Zohara discovers in the present day; the second follows Yoni, Zohara’s teenage nephew who had been very close to Saida in the years before she passed, and how he deals with Saida’s death. Like Zohara’s journey, Yoni and Saida each offer interesting portraits of grief. Saida, whose romance in the camp was captivating and heartrending, reluctantly lets go of her lover due to her marriage—she wanted to divorce her husband, but her community’s moral code made that impossible. The reader sees her as someone who buckled down, tried to make the best of her life moving forward, and thus sublimated her grief for her lover and her lost son into the songs she wrote. Her life became compartmentalized: expressive in her singing and her love for Yoni, and tamped down in her relationship with her husband and her daughters. Yoni, unlike both Saida and Zohara—whose grief is absorbed into her chronic aimlessness—turns his grief into anger, directed towards Yitzhak Rabin and the Israeli government for their role in the Oslo Accords. This, too, is a bit of a familiar plot: losing himself in a reactionary movement so as to separate himself from his grief and the consequential existential loneliness, alienating himself from those around him in the process. Yet, in the context of this novel the inclusion of Yoni’s plot feels warranted, given the contrast between it and Zohara’s tunnel-visioned and at times neglectful missteps in managing her grief. Yoni is not as expressive as Zohara, but his grief is built more strongly on love and admiration, lending his portrayal a slight glow beneath the anger.
Psychoanalyst Galit Atlas—Israeli herself, whose parents also migrated to Israel in the early 1950s from Syria and Iraq, and who also later emigrated to New York on her own, as Zohara did—asks her reader near the start of Emotional Inheritance: “How do we inherit, hold, and process things that we don’t remember or didn’t experience ourselves? What is the weight of that which is present but not fully known?” Songs for the Brokenhearted exists upon these questions, and bravely takes them on with insight and compassion. It gives an illuminating portrait of Israeli society, and tells a beautiful story at the same time.
Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari. Random House, 352 pages.