Wednesday, November 12 | 11am
OJMCHE’s book club will meet every other month midday at the museum. The book selection for November is Songs for the Brokenhearted: A Novel by Ayelet Tsabari.
This month’s meeting includes an optional streamed online program with the author Ayelet Tsabari at 10am, presented by the National Library of Israel in honor of Mizrachi Heritage Month. Join Tsabari and Dr. Amalia Kedem, Curator of the Music Collection at the National Library of Israel, for a richly layered conversation about how music, memory and storytelling preserve and transform Mizrahi identity. Drawing on readings from Tsabari’s acclaimed novel Songs for the Brokenhearted and rare recordings from NLI’s vast archives, they will explore how Mizrahi voices are reshaping the Jewish cultural narrative. Learn more about the free online program here.
To stay in the loop about book club activities, email mbshevchuk@ojmche.org and we will keep you updated.
About Book Selection for November
A young Yemeni Israeli woman learns of her mother’s secret romance in a dramatic journey through lost family stories, revealing the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter in the debut novel of an award-winning literary voice.
- Thousands of Yemeni Jews have immigrated to the newly founded Israel in search of a better life. In an overcrowded immigrant camp in Rosh Ha’ayin, Yaqub, a shy young man, happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But they weren’t supposed to; Saida is married and has a child, and a married woman has no place befriending another man.
- Thirty-something Zohara, Saida’s daughter, has been living in New York City—a city that feels much less complicated than Israel, where she grew up wishing her skin were lighter, her illiterate mother’s Yemeni music quieter, and that the father who always favored her was alive. She hasn’t looked back since leaving home, rarely in touch with her mother or sister, Lizzie, and missing out on her nephew Yoni’s childhood. But when Lizzie calls to tell her their mother has died, she gets on a plane to Israel with no return ticket.
Soon Zohara finds herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family—including dangers that lurk for impressionable young men and secrets that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, her heritage, and her own future.