Ayelet Tsabari's Songs for the Brokenhearted among winners of U.S. National Jewish Book Awards
Israeli Canadian writer Ayelet Tsabari is among the winners at the National Jewish Book Awards.
Now in their 74th year, the U.S.-based awards annually celebrate works of Jewish literature. They are presented by the Jewish Book Council.
Tsabari's novel Songs for the Brokenhearted is the sole Canadian book recognized this year. It won the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction.
In Songs for the Brokenhearted, Zohara hasn't looked back since moving to the U.S. for her PhD. Her life feels much simpler than her childhood growing up in Israel, where she felt othered as a Yemeni Jew by the predominant Ashkenazi (eastern European) culture.
When her sister calls to let her know of their mother's death, she gets on a plane with no return ticket. But as she goes through her mother's belongings and discovers tapes of her mother singing hauntingly beautiful songs in Arabic, she begins to unravel family secrets, including a forbidden romance that challenges her perception of the conservative Yemeni community of her parents.
Tsabari is the author of The Art of Leaving, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Memoir and was a finalist for the Writer's Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Best Place on Earth, which won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award.
She spent years living in Canada and is now based in Tel Aviv. Tsabari's short story Green was shortlisted for the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize.
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