The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  One day, I catch her pretend-writing on our kitchen table, wearing fake plastic glasses. She glances at me unsmiling. “I am writing my book, Ima,” she says. Another day, she’s lit up by the sound of Yemeni music, jumping onto her feet and dancing like this beat has been latent in her all along, and we hold hands and twirl. In moments like that, I am reminded in awe that we are a part of something bigger than the two of us, bigger than the present moment. In my daughter’s body, I see a connection to something both ancient and unwritten. A link on a lineage chain, a branch on a family tree.

  I look at her and I think, This is what it means to belong.

  The other day, before I took off to give a talk out of town—one of those trips I embark on often that both satisfy my travel bug and make me intensely miss my family—she snuggled up to me in bed and whispered, “I wish you stayed forever.” I squeezed her tight. “I’m not leaving for long,” I told her. “I always come back.” I wanted to tell her that nothing had ever made me want to stay put the way she did, that nothing had ever made me happier, truly nothing. I wanted to tell her, If I leave, we leave together.

  For my beloved family

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Writing a book should take longer than a day,” my father said to me when I presented him with my very first book, a school notebook filled with my handwriting. He was right. In fact, from the moment I started writing stories from my own life—the first writing I had done in English—it took twelve years until they shaped themselves into a memoir. Twelve years is a long time. During that period, I published another book, my first, moved across Canada, enrolled in two writing programs, had a child. Writing a book over the span of that many years also makes for an exceptionally long list of acknowledgments: I have been fortunate to have had many people help me along the way. All deserve my gratitude.

  I am deeply indebted to my brilliant editors, Jennifer Lambert at HarperCollins Canada and Andrea Walker at Random House in the United States, for their enthusiasm and insight. Thank you for pushing me to make this book the best it could be. I am grateful to the team at HarperCollins Canada: Iris Tupholme for championing my work from the start, Noelle Zitzer for overseeing the production stages, and Catherine Dorton for her meticulous copyediting. At Random House, I’m grateful to Susan Kamil for taking a chance on me and Emma Caruso for her help with the production process. To my wonderful agents, David Forrer and Kimberly Witherspoon, thank you for your guidance, smarts, and faith in me. Eternal gratitude to the Sami Rohr family for their enormous generosity. The Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature changed my life and allowed me to concentrate on writing this book. Thank you to everyone at the Jewish Book Council, especially Carolyn Hessel, for their ongoing support.

  I have been blessed with several inspiring mentors over the years. Wayde Compton was the best first champion an emerging writer could have hoped for. He believed in me before I dared to believe in myself, and I am forever indebted to him. Thanks also to Betsy Warland, Catherine Bush, Camilla Gibb, Janice Kulyk Keefer, and Nancy Lee for sharing their wisdom and making me a better writer; to my cohort at the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and my classmates at the University of Guelph MFA in Creative Writing, who read parts of this book when it was first written; to the supportive communities of writers I’ve been lucky to be a part of in Toronto, Vancouver, and Israel; and to my writing students for continuing to inspire and challenge me.

  I am immensely thankful to the many excellent readers and friends who’ve read the book or parts of it at different stages and provided invaluable feedback: Kathy Friedman, Becky Blake, Janet Hong, Anna Chatterton, Nancy Jo Cullen, Nazanine Hozar, Alison Pick, Amanda Leduc, Rachel Knudsen, Alev Ersan, Jan Redford, Leslie Hill, Sue Anne Linde, Jen Caldwell, Fiona Scott, and Clarissa Green. Special thanks to the incomparable Eufemia Fantetti, who’s read numerous drafts of this book and commented on them tirelessly, brainstormed story arcs and themes with me, and discussed everything from the title to covers to epigraphs. I am humbled by your friendship.

  This book was written mostly in the homes I inhabited in Vancouver, Toronto, and Israel, but also at Toronto Writers’ Center, at Sage Hill Writing Residency in Saskatchewan, and at Crescent School in Toronto during my term as writer in residence. Most of the copy-edits were completed during my residency at the Toronto Reference Library. Heartfelt thanks to all who have made it possible for me to write comfortably, especially Aga Maksimowska and Trish Cislak for arranging the Crescent School gig; Sage Hill Writing for their financial support and Ted Barris for his encouragement; Nissim Mizrahi, my mother’s loving partner, for creating an awesome room with a view for me at their new home; and my brother, who allotted me an office at his place of work. Immense gratitude also to Sonia Finseth and Karin Randoja for babysitting, and to Becky, Eufemia, and Gabrielle Zilkha for helping out. Special thanks to Taunya Gaum, the delightful Doda T., who volunteered to watch my kid once a week so I could write and allowed me to escape to her downstairs apartment at other times to use her desk while my baby was with her sitter upstairs. It may be the kindest thing you can do for a writer who’s also a mother, and I’m lucky to have you as a friend.

  For their generous support of this project and my career, I’m indebted to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

  For more than a decade, I have been conducting extensive research into Jewish Yemeni history. During those years of research, I was aided by numerous people—first and foremost, my extended family, especially my beloved aunts and uncles. Gratitude also to Tuvya Sulami, Gila Beshari, Shlomi Hatuka, Menashe Anzi, Amnon Ma’abi, Yossi Zabari, Zion Ozeri (whose amazing photographs of Haidan a-Sham are still the only ones I’ve ever seen), and many others from the Yemeni community who opened their homes and hearts to me. I am thankful to the many librarians, scholars, and researchers who assisted me at the city archives in Petah Tikva and Rehovot, the Yad Ben Zvi Institute and the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the Museum of Yemeni Jewry in Rosh HaAyin, and the Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot in Tel Aviv. Thanks to Kamal Al-Solaylee for his help with Yemeni words and spellings. For their generous support of my research, I am grateful to Yosef Wosk, the Access Copyright Foundation, and the Chalmers Family Fund and the Ontario Arts Council for awarding me a Chalmers Art Fellowship.

  I am deeply grateful to everyone who appears in the book, by either their real name or pseudonym, and to my many wonderful friends—too many to name, many of whom didn’t make it into the memoir—for their unwavering love and support. I am limiting my individual thanks to those who helped me in specific ways while I was writing the book. Orit Mosseri (Kreskas), Yael Levinger, Carlin Sandor, Sacha Levin, Danielle Nakouz, Marie Belzil, Nadia Hedar, Sarah Hedar, Riyadh Hashim, Stefania Gilardi, Jane Warren, Doron Sagie, Einat Katz Kaplan, Tsvika Kaplan, Limor Iron, Gurjinder Basran, Homeyra Javadi Panah, Cecilia Mutti, Jill Moffett, Elanor Waslander, Hayim Raclaw, Mona Krayem and her family. I love you all.

  Special thanks to the Brereton-Creer clan for their love and encouragement. To Michal Shavit, my most enduring heart-sister. To Tal Savoray, my earliest reader and writing partner and a steady source of solace in my life. To Yifat Jovani for her boundless support and companionship since our chance meeting in India. To Elsin Davidi, my partner in crime and grief, for her friendship and inspiration. To Maya Tevet Dayan, for her poetry and camaraderie. To Yonit Naaman, granddaughter to Saida, my grandmother’s twin, for her brilliance and friendship, and for her amazing essay “Everyone Knows Yemenites Are Great in Bed” (available online!), which was the inspiration for my essay “A Simple Girl.” And to Aya Ortal and her mother, Shuli Haza—who look like family because they are—I dedicate that essay.

  Parts of this memoir have appeared in different forms in the following magazines: Event, Room, PRISM International, Paper Brigade, The New Quarterly, and Grain. I’m grateful for the editors who’ve helped s
hape these essays. I’ve also included in this book bits and pieces from essays I’ve published in the National Post, Lit Hub, and Jewish Book Week.

  Infinite gratitude and love to my immediate family: To my beloved brothers, for trusting me to write this book and for having my back, always and forever. I apologize for anything you may have remembered differently. To my sister—my best friend—who transcribed my first stories into a notebook when I was five and she was twelve, and bought me my very first diary at the age of six and said, “Write.” To my nephews and nieces, whom I love more than they know. Most of all, I am immensely grateful to my mother, who understood my need to write this memoir; while she couldn’t read this book in the language I wrote it in, she approved a translated summary of the parts in which she’s mentioned. Thank you for nurturing, feeding, and loving me. I love you. You’re an amazing mother. Don’t be mad about the drugs.

  To my father, who instilled in me his love of writing and books and people: this book, like everything I write, is in your memory.

  To my grandmother, who loved me with few words: I’m grateful for the time we spent together and the stories you (reluctantly) shared. Ma’asalama.

  And finally, profound gratitude to my daughter, the best human who has ever happened to me, for giving me perspective, inspiration, and so much love and joy. I’m in awe of you every single day. And to Sean Brereton, my love, for pushing me to write and making it possible, for helping me with funny English expressions, and for being, hands down, the best partner a writer could ask for. Now everyone knows how awesome you are.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Writing a memoir is a work of memory, not a work of history. And though I often like to brag about my freakishly good memory (my partner, Sean, calls me his external hard drive), I am also well aware that memory is a shifty, unreliable character who shouldn’t be trusted. While I researched facts and interviewed other people whenever I could, this book relies mostly on my recollections, journals, and letters, and therefore is a subjective telling of my own story. I have changed some names and a few details to protect people’s privacy. I have also taken some creative liberties: I re-created dialogue based on my recollections and, in some cases, compressed time for the sake of a tighter narrative.

  In “A Simple Girl,” I mentioned Mizrahi activists who have been calling the media out on their under-representation of Mizrahi characters. You can follow the Web series HaMishmar HaMizrahi by Shlomi Hatuka for examples (in Hebrew only) on Kan Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (https://www.kan.org.il/​program/​?catid=16).

  Also in “A Simple Girl” I remarked on young Mizrahi poets who have sidestepped the gatekeepers by launching their own poetry readings. I was referring specifically to Ars Poetica, which was founded by poet Adi Keissar in 2013. The name of the series is a wordplay reclaiming the word “Ars”—Arabic for “pimp,” and a derogatory name for Mizrahi men in Israel. Google “Ars Poetica Israel” to find more information.

  In “Not for the Faint-Hearted,” I mentioned the Yemenite Children Affair as a trauma that shaped Jewish Yemeni history. However, expanding on this devastating topic was beyond the scope of this book. If you’d like to know more, the only book written in English on the topic is Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict: The Yemenite Babies Affair by S. Madmoni-Gerber (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). In Israel, the Amram Association has been doing amazing work collecting survivors’ testimonies and fighting for justice and recognition. You can find and support them online. You can also watch the powerful Web series Neviim Docu-Shorts on YouTube for interviews with survivors and activists. (English subtitles are available.)

  In “If I Forget You,” I tell the story of dealing with the hordes of books in my childhood home. A couple of years after I gave away my brother’s books, I found a pile of the Young Technician series at a used bookstore by the port in Haifa and bought them for him. I think he’s forgiven me.

  TRANSLITERATION AND LANGUAGE

  Transliterating Hebrew or Arabic words is a tricky business. Most people simply follow their ear and attempt to write the word as phonetically as possible. As a result, some common words may have competing spellings. The letter Tsadik, for example, which is the first letter of my last name (or Tsade, as it appears in Wikipedia), may also be spelled Tzaddik, Tzadi, or Sadhe. When I was little and couldn’t pronounce the letter Tsadik, I was told to put T and S together, which is how the spelling of my last name came to be. Yet others with my last name may choose to spell it with Tz, S, or Z.

  I decided to use H to represent the letter Het (also spelled Chet or Heth) in Hebrew and the letter Ha in Arabic. These guttural letters have no English equivalent. I chose the H over Ch, which is another common way—misleading, in my opinion—of transliterating Het (so you’ll see Hanukkah sometimes spelled as Chanukah). To further complicate things, there’s one exception in this book: the name of the Yemeni dish jichnoon. For this word, I chose to use Ch to denote the H. Yemeni Jews from different regions pronounce the name of the dish slightly differently, so if you look for the recipe online, you may find it under jachnun, which is the most common pronunciation and spelling. But those who call it jichnoon, like my family, tend to feel strongly about the name, as this staple dish also represents home, history, and identity. To the copy editor who suggested changing it, I explained that my family might disown me. On a similar note, if you’re looking for a bisbas recipe, you might find it under schug or zhug. If I called it schug in my mother’s home, I’d be asked to leave.

  The Arabic words in this book are words my grandmother used in her conversations with me, which I’ve transcribed from video and confirmed with my mother. As this is a Judeo-Arabic Yemeni dialect rarely used nowadays and also colored by geography, I couldn’t always find a way to verify them.

  SOURCES

  In “A Simple Girl,” the quote by Dr. Vicki Shiran (p. 36) appeared in an op-ed she published in Tel Aviv Magazine in the eighties.

  In “Not for the Faint-Hearted,” the quote by David Ben-Gurion (p. 184) from his letter to Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin on November 27, 1950, appeared in 1949: The First Israelis by Tom Segev (The Domino Press, 1984), p. 181. The quote from the HaTzvi newspaper (p. 184) appeared in an article titled “On the Yemenites,” set on its front page, on January 27, 1909. The scanned original paper is available online at the Historical Jewish Press website (http://jpress.org.il/​), which was initiated by Tel Aviv University and the National Library of Israel. The final quote, taken from a memo written by Jacob Thon (p. 184) in October 1908, titled “Memorandum for Workers’ Regulation in Palestine,” appears in History of Zionist Settlement by Alex Bien (Masada, 1942), p. 98, as well as in the article “HaTeimanim” (“The Yemenite”) by Haim Hanegbi, Matzpen, April 10, 1971.

  In “Yemeni Soup and Other Recipes,” I mention a fundraising film from the fifties (p. 235) meant to highlight the work of Moetzet HaPoalot (Working Women’s Council). The film is titled Bederech Halev (The Way of the Heart). The specific excerpt that I refer to is available online (https://www.facebook.com/​uri.rosenwaks/​).

  In “Unravel the Tangle,” my father’s poems “False Spring” and “Come to Me” (pp. 275 and 268) are taken from the book Sihey Tsabar Svuhim (Tangled Prickly Pear Shrubs), published by Afikim in 1984 and edited by Tuvya Sulami. The poem “Remember Me While I’m Still on Earth” (pp. 270–71) is from Afikim magazine, issue 18, March 24, 1967.

  The opening epigraph (p. ix) is from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (Vintage Books, 1956). The epigraph for Part I (p. 1) is from Maya Tevet Dayan’s poem “Home,” translated from her Hebrew book of poetry, Floating Home (Kvar Series, Mosad Bialik, 2017). The epigraph for Part II (p. 77) is from an interview with Cynthia Ozick by Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio, which appeared in the book Writers & Company (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1993). The epigraph for Part III (p. 191) is from Esi Edugyan’s book Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home (University of
Alberta Press, 2014).

  All Hebrew quotes, poems, and song excerpts are my own translations.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  Excerpts from this memoir were previously published in different, usually shorter, forms:

  “A Simple Girl” appeared in Paper Brigade (2018).

  “You and What Army” appeared in Event: Poetry and Prose 36, no. 3 (2007), and Slice Me Some Truth: An Anthology of Canadian Creative Nonfiction (Wolsak & Wynn, 2011).

  “Missing in Action” appeared in PRISM International 49, no. 3 (2011).

  “The Marrying Kind” appeared in Room 33, no. 2 (2010); Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine (West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Society and Caitlin Press, 2017); and Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ins, Outs, Ups and Downs of Marriage (Caitlin Press, 2018).

  “Soldiers” appeared in The New Quarterly 131 (2014) and Wherever I Find Myself: Stories by Canadian Immigrant Women (Caitlin Press, 2017).

  An excerpt from “Tough Chick” was first published under the title “Victim” in Event: Poetry and Prose 38, no. 3 (2009).