An aspiring young writer, Yaqub first saw Saida amid the dust, stench and squalor at the rusty drinking fountain in Rosh Ha’Ayin, an immigrant Camp, in Israel. Dark- skinned, modestly covered eighteen-year-old Saida averted Yaqub’s glances darting back to her home, a tent, she shared with her husband Hussein, sister Shuli and friend Bruria. When next Yaqub saw her, Saida sat near the Yarkon River singing plaintive melodies, lyrics overflowing with sorrow for her missing child. Married, Saida was forbidden to him. Yaqub felt Saida was his destined, his “basheret.”
Historical fiction, Songs for the Broken-Hearted by prize-winning author Ayelet Tsabari is a smoldering love story that begins in the 1950s. At that time, Mizrahi Jews, like Yaqub and Saida were airlifted on code-name Operation Magic Carpet and flown to the fledgling new state of Israel to settle the land, “flowing with milk and honey.” Thousands of Yemeni immigrants were dumped into “ma’abarot,” transit camps, that overnight became overcrowded, disease-infested, tent cities. The new “olim” were grateful to leave the tyrannical Imams in the Arab countries hoping to start anew in “the promised land.” The promise proved empty.
Saida hated the new country, despised its foreign Ashkenazi customs, its “god- awful” food, cold climate and “the secularism rampant in such a holy place.” Her husband was generally absent laboring to build up the north country. In addition, Saida, felt alone helpless in her anguish. She was grieving for her healthy baby son snatched from the nursery where she was forced to leave him in the care of strangers. Illiterate and voiceless, as were Yemeni women raised within a strict patriarchal, Yemeni society, Saida would express the rage bubbling inside her with songs she composed and quietly sang by the river. On rare occasions Yaqub, would write and read stories for her and in those brief moments when they met, both forgot the “chaos, uncertainty and misery that surrounded them."
When their religious community discovered Yaqub and Saida’s innocent interludes, Yaqub was summarily expelled from the camp. He enlisted in the army, completed his studies, married the angelic Ruth and honorably supported his expanding family, but he never stopped writing stories about his secret veneration for Saida.
Fast forward, to 1995. After a five-year absence from Israel, thirty-three year old Zorky, Saida’s youngest daughter, returns from New York to Sha’aryia, the family’s permanent residence near Tel Aviv. She comes home to attend Saida’s funeral and shiva. Clearing out her mother’s house Zorky uncovers boxes of song-tapes. Some Zorky remembers are traditional Yemeni tunes from her childhood, others by contemporary Israeli/Mizrachi pop star Ofra Haza. But when she listened to original recordings sung in her mother’s own voice Zorky was stunned. Saida sang about a burning desire, a crushing longing for her lover. Did her timid mother compose these torrid, impassioned lyrics? Bewildered, compelled to find the truth Zorky unravels an incredible mystery—the secret lives both parents hid from their daughter.
