Coming to Terms

An Israeli Canadian of Yemeni background, Ayelet Tsabari is the award-winning author of The Best Place on Earth, a story collection from 2013, and The Art of Leaving, a memoir from 2019. Her latest, Songs for the Brokenhearted, is a sweeping novel that spans decades — 1950 to 1995 — as it traces the lives of several interconnected characters while moving between Tel Aviv, New York, and a camp on the banks of the Yarkon River in Israel. This is the work of an accomplished writer who is certain of her subject and her craft.

Songs for the Brokenhearted centres on three generations of Mizrahi Jews, including those who arrived in Israel between June 1949 and September 1950 as part of Operation Magic Carpet, which airlifted approximately 49,000 of them out of Yemen. These émigrés, alongside countless others from Djibouti, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, were housed in overcrowded transit camps under prison-like...