Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Book Review: A search for belonging and understanding of identity


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.

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