By Rubin Friedman
The Art of Leaving
By Ayelet Tsabari
HarperCollins
Canada
326 pages
|
The Art of Leaving, a memoir by
Ayelet Tsabari, an Israeli Mizrahi of Yemenite descent – who has also lived and
worked in Canada – chronicles her personal Odyssey to find “home” and to
be reconciled with her family’s culture and history both as Yemenite Jews and
as Israelis.
|
Unlike Odysseus
who leaves based on a call to duty, Tsabari undertakes her travels in response
to her ongoing sense of alienation, a feeling first of being alone and
misunderstood, as well as a feeling of not belonging anywhere, and rebellion.
But like the wanderer in the Greek story, she must undergo many trials
and losses before she can reach some semblance of peace with herself, with the
world around her, and with the nature of the multiple components of her
identity: Mizrahi, Yemenite, Israeli, Canadian, woman, mother, and wife.
The arc of the
story is a strong one, but some might find some of the steps she takes along
the way troublesome and to some extent repetitive.
The memoir is
divided into sections relating to periods of Tsabari’s life and what she
identifies as the predominant theme of each: “Home”, “Leaving” and “Return.”
Each section is further divided into episodes.
As in real life, such
divisions are not clean and definite. There is some overlap and reappearance of
events at a point later than the time frame in which they occurred. So an
uncomfortable and frightening experience with a friend’s father are not told in
the time when she and the friend were in the army, but many years later when
they meet by chance in Vancouver.
This tendency is especially noticeable in the section, “Leaving.” The
publication history of the various parts of the memoir show the reason for this
tendency, namely that they were not published chronologically but appeared
separately in the years they were apparently written. It was only later that
these were organized into The Art of Leaving.
I am familiar with
this difficulty and the challenges of recalling and retelling incidents in
one’s life, which came first, which ones later, as well as the changing
perception of what these actually meant as one gains both experience and
perhaps, wisdom.
Some of the strongest writing and the most relevant I found in the “Home”
and “Return” sections of book. In the former, Tsabari describes in simple and
effective language the effects of the death of her father on her attitudes and
her life as a 10-year-old, as a teen, and as a young woman. She becomes cynical
about everything in her life: her own Yemenite Mizrahi background, the dominant
Israeli culture, which she sees as Ashkenazi; and her relations with lovers,
friends and family.
I was less
satisfied with the middle section which seems to be an effort to recount her
years of hedonistic and alienated search for meaning, drugs, sex, new cultural
experiences. This section sometimes seems too self-pitying, too self-absorbed.
Perhaps accurate, but less interesting.
The final section
of the book, “Return,” is a sensitive portrait of an individual who has matured
and has finally reconciled with her father’s death, her mother and her whole
background. She finally learns the art of “Coming Home.”
Tsabari conveys with great delicacy the sense of being divided both from
one’s ancestors who grew up in another country, and from one’s children who are
growing up in a whole new environment, each generation dominated by another
language: Arabic, Hebrew, English. Her writing here had the power to move a
reader like me to tears.
Both Tsabari and her parents were born in Israel. Her alienation came in
part from her perception of how Mizrahi in general and Yemenite women in
particular were portrayed in the dominant Israeli culture and its stereotypes.
Tsabari is able
nevertheless to portray, some of the experience and suffering of the Yemenites
who had to walk across a desert to reach the port of Oman in the early 20th
century in order to reach Haifa by ships via Egypt. For this brief glimpse of a
different culture and its challenges, especially for women, we should be
grateful and motivated to hear more of this from her and other Jewish voices.
Rubin Friedman is
the author of Our
Family Holocaust Chronicle – Part I: Running for Their Lives and Part
II: Fitting into Toronto.
No comments:
Post a Comment