On Language, Gender, and the Stigma of Mizrahi Sentimentality: An Interview with Ayelet Tsabari

Photo by Jonathan Bloom

Ayelet Tsabari's memoir, The Art of Leaving, comprises sixteen essays written over the span of twelve years, each one delving into a different chapter in her life- yet even from the first page of the book, echoes of the story to come are impressively and synthetically reflected in an opening recollection of her tenth birthday.

There is her father, there is his handwriting and hers, there are the neighbors and cousins of her childhood, there is a memory written in English of a yellowing Hebrew-language magazine. The scene's air of youthful innocence is offset by a wistful past tense, a cognizance of a bygone meaning of home that Tsabari would run from for years before finally running back toward it.

The book’s format as a “memoir in essays” risks fragmentation, yet Tsabari’s writing is remarkably integrated, and that strength extends beyond The Art of Leaving. Her nonfiction finds its compliment in The Best Place on Earth, a short story collection released six years prior, in 2013. The world of Tsabari's fiction feels just as living and breathing as that of her memoir because of this same quality of integration; its blunt honesty, its attention to familial relationships and food, its lyrical corporeality all mirror the ways in which she reflects upon her own life.

It's rare for us, as members of an English-speaking audience, to read prosaic accounts and imaginations of Mizrahi life written by an Israeli author that were originally composed in English, rather than translated from Hebrew. Tsabari's work offers us a glimpse into her life as a Yemeni woman born in Israel not only by way of content- but by way of language. Hebrew makes itself subliminally known in her writing, be it through the warmth and sharpness of her characters' dialogue in "Brit Milah," or the layered, rippling spirituality of the conclusion of "Tikkun:" 

 "I feel I am becoming a part of this earth, this tree, this night. It feels a little bit like prayer."

Our editors, Sophie Levy and Evan Mateen, met with Ayelet over Zoom to discuss her experiences writing in English as a second language, the place of Mizrahi women in Israeli literature and society, and the ties between thematic and stylistic choices in her work. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ZAMAN Collective: Hi Ayelet, thank you for bracing the time difference and meeting with us. To start, we wanted to talk about language. Both your short story collection and your memoir were written in English, despite Hebrew being your first language. Can you tell us about your decision to write in English and what that has lent you as a writer?

Ayelet Tsabari: It wasn’t a decision, really. I always imagined I would write in Hebrew, but after I moved to Vancouver, I couldn’t go back to Israel often, phone calls were more expensive, and there were basically no Israelis in town, so I didn’t really have a regular connection to Israel and to Hebrew. I was so distanced from the language that I wasn’t actually using it; I was living entirely in English and I had no one to speak Hebrew with for months on end. 

My Hebrew was starting to suffer, but my English was still not very good. I felt stuck between languages, lost between languages, and neither of them felt adequate to express myself. I didn’t write at all for years because of that. When I finally did start to write in English, it started to appear in these little vignettes I wrote, or in diary entries that ended up being these messy, incoherent mixtures of languages. 

But there was something about English that excited me; it made it feel new when I first started to write again, it brought back this feeling of excitement for writing… and also humility, you know? It gave me this permission to fail, this permission to be really bad at something. I was trying to write in a language that was not my own, and there was a lot of freedom in that, somehow. A lot of artists talk about constraint as something that can be really liberating, and in a strange way, that’s how writing in a second language has felt for me. It was an exercise in constraint; I had to tell stories with fewer words and fewer skills at my disposal.

ZC: So is that exercise what led you to progress from writing short fiction to writing a memoir?

AT: Actually, I started writing nonfiction in English before I wrote fiction. I had written fiction in Hebrew my whole life, and aside from journalistic writing, personal nonfiction wasn’t really something I did.

Although, now that I think of it, one day I found a diary I wrote when I was fifteen or sixteen, and I was inspired by book series like Dapei Tamar (“Tamar’s Diary”) that made me try to craft it into an actual story. I didn’t realize what I was doing, but for a time, I did ask myself, “What if I wrote my diary in chapters?” It didn’t last very long.

Eventually, though, I started writing formal nonfiction because I was so intimidated by the idea of writing fiction in English that it made more sense for me to write about my own life. I started publishing short memoir pieces little by little, then after a couple years of doing that, I felt brave enough to venture into fiction, which is what I always imagined I’d be doing.

ZC: Having read your short stories and your memoir, even though one is fiction and one is nonfiction, there definitely is a common stylistic thread between the two—

AT: And thematic!

ZC: Yes. You do have a specific voice as an English language writer across genres. Do you think that’s due in part to this process of writing between fiction and nonfiction, of switching formats and working on projects of different genres at the same time?

AT: Something I learned from publishing a collection of short stories is that a lot of the work of writing a unified book has to be done in revision—in this process of taking disparate pieces and making them blend into a cohesive whole. My personal essays were written in different times of my life; some of them were not as polished, in some of them my voice changed, my perspective changed… they had to be threaded together, and that process is ultimately what gave the book a more coherent style, voice, and series of themes. After I took a step back and looked at the whole thing, I thought, “Wow, there’s this intergenerational theme here, there’s this common thread about women, how do I incorporate them and tie them together from the first chapter through the end?”

ZC: On the topic of women— something we appreciated about the female characters in your stories is that you let them embrace aggression, but with this sensitivity to it. It didn’t feel like you wanted to disprove stereotypes about the combativeness of Israeli or Mizrahi women by making them docile. Can you talk a bit about how you want to form your characters in relation to archetypes like the freha*, which you also talk about in your memoir? 

AT: When I had those ideas for my short stories, I just thought to write the kind of female characters I’d want to read. It didn’t occur to me that I was writing aggressive or assertive female characters until a male teacher of mine pointed out how badass they were, how bold and sexually forward they were… and I thought, Oh, okay! Yay!

In my earlier stories, those traits kind of appeared in the characters more naturally, but later on, when I was writing the memoir, I knew I wanted to dissect the freha term with intention, because that is something that completely overshadowed the life of a young Mizrahi girl growing up in Israel. It was a major negative motivation to not be one—God forbid you’d be mistaken as one. 

* Urban Dictionary defines the freha as “a woman with bad taste in clothes” who “often chews gum and talks on the phone loudly” and “has no awareness or respect for her surroundings.” Bearing a similar connotation to “bimbo,” it has commonly been used as a derogatory stereotype levied against Mizrahi women in particular.

ZC: You also centered three of your stories— Tikkun, The Poets in the Kitchen Window, and Below Sea Level— around the perspectives of male characters. What were you aiming to address regarding standards of masculinity in Israel? 

AT: From the distance in place and time that living in Canada brought me, I became interested specifically in how the military shapes gender norms for young Israelis. I think that quality of aggression in women that we talked about earlier comes from being required to serve in the military, especially in a place that was very patriarchal. 

I couldn’t hide from addressing how this affects not only women, but men. It’s awful; they’re thrown into this intense and aggressive situation that some of them really don’t fit into. I know I didn’t, but I had it easy; I didn’t have to go into combat.

I wanted to imagine what it would be like to feel trapped in these requirements of being an Israeli man, what it would feel like to have them forced on you when they’re not who you are.  So that’s why my male characters are poets, or they don’t want to fight but they force themselves to, or they cry when they run over kittens in their cars, because all the pressure they feel finally explodes in these small moments. That’s how I wanted to challenge this issue of how the Army shapes Israeli men and women, I wanted to confront it.

ZC: What was especially effective about that confrontation was the fact that in some cases, you wrote in first person as a man. Would you say that felt natural or was it more of a challenge?

AT: It didn’t always flow. I definitely needed some help, especially with Tikkun, the first story in the book. I asked my partner to comment on the narrator’s voice, and sometimes he did make some corrections.

I really care about female mentorship, so most of my teachers (with the exception of my very first mentor, who was this gentle, attentive man, and a true gift to my life) were women. Some of them were surprised by my writing, or dismissed things by saying that I was going through some experimental phase, but I pushed back and said the voices of my male characters felt accurate to the temperaments of men I knew. I knew that I got it right if it wasn’t necessarily comfortable for them to read.

When it came to Tikkun in particular, I questioned and challenged myself a lot. Why tell this story from the point of view of Lior, the male protagonist, and not from the point of view of Natalie, his love interest? She’s an amazing character with an incredibly interesting story [as a ba’ala teshuva], so, why? 

I realized that, yes, Natalie is a fine character, but I related to Lior more. He made so much more sense to me. Natalie is a little distant for me; I don’t know if I could have been able to access her as well.

ZC: You write about cities with such vividness and specificity. There is such a different sensibility, tone, flavor to each place you write about. How do you cultivate that? What is your favorite place to write about?

AT: I love writing about place. It’s such a wonderful way to teach us about characters, because first of all, what they see is always influenced by their point of view or their mood at a given moment, so their account of a place is always through a lens; it’s not neutral. When I write about Tel Aviv, I’m not describing Tel Aviv—I’m describing it from one person’s point of view at a very specific time. A description of a place without that intertwined connection to a character would just be… boring, to be frank.

I think that sensibility, that sensitivity to place could be a migrant thing, an immigrant thing; maybe you just can’t help noticing places more carefully like that when you move around so much. You’re very attuned to the world around you; you hunt for these sensory details and take stock. 

As for the second part of your question— For a very long time my favorite place to write about was Israel, because I lived far away, and that was one way I could visit it. I loved the idea of creating a literary place out of my memories of my neighborhood, of my grandma’s Yemeni neighborhood, not in a way that exoticized it but in a very real and honest way. I had never read about these places in books, so the idea that they could exist in literature was intoxicating for me. Even now, I keep going back to that; I’m somehow still interested in writing about Israel as a place.

ZC: You recently moved back to Israel after living in Canada for a long time. Do you think the move has affected your recent writing?

AT: Well, I’m a little bit fearful of my English suffering from being surrounded by Hebrew again. I’m a little scared. It’s a precarious thing, you know? English is not my mother tongue. I mastered it enough to write books, so I’m nervous about it, I want to protect it. But on good days I tell myself, “No, Hebrew won’t kill your English, it’ll just color it. It’s always colored the way you write in English; maybe it’ll just do that a little more now.”

ZC: There’s something to be said about bilingual authors writing about the world in the most interesting ways, with the most depth.

AT: I agree, I really love transnational writers.

ZC: In a number of ways— whether it be the intergenerational and transnational themes in your writing, this idea of imagining Hebrew-speaking characters through dialogue written in English, this feeling of being lost between languages and finding a home in the page— the concepts alive in your work have a really Mizrahi history to them, literarily speaking. Between novels and poems, between Arabic and Hebrew, many Mizrahi authors seem to incorporate themes like this in their work. 

How do you place your work within, or think about it in relation to the idea of “Mizrahi literature?” It’s been resurfacing recently in Israel, and there’s some kind of connection there, even though you write in English.

AT: I have no doubt that our identity informs our style as writers, but because of language differences, I think it’s harder to see how my work matches up stylistically with the work of Mizrahi authors writing in Hebrew. I do feel that thematically, I definitely have some sort of community of writers in Israel, and I’m appreciative of that, but I’m not always too sure about where I stand. I remember the first time that I met [the poet] Adi Keissar, I told her that I felt I’m placed a little bit… outside of that world. But she argued against me and said, “I don’t think so! What we’re doing goes beyond the borders of Israel; it goes beyond the borders of language,” and I loved that answer. I thought, “maybe I do belong.”

Now that I’m back in Israel, I understand that it’s an artistic choice to write about Mizrahi experiences in English, as an Israeli in particular. But I definitely feel like I’m adding to an existing body of work that’s mostly based here; I’m like a drop in an ocean.

What’s happening in Israel with Mizrahi literature is exciting; when this “revival” began, I remember feeling a little bit sad that I wasn’t a part of it on the ground, because it felt like this long-awaited arrival of all these voices that I didn’t see growing up. Of course, there were some Mizrahi writers out there, but I didn’t know about them. And if I did, then okay, they weren’t Yemeni, they were Iraqi—

ZC: Iraqi men.

AT: Exactly. But there were no Yemeni writers that I knew of, and of course no Yemeni woman writers; women in Yemen were traditionally illiterate, so that didn’t help, either. But later on I found out there were some; I just hadn’t heard of them because they weren’t visible, because the mainstream wasn’t interested in them. 

For example, I found out about this really prolific Yemeni woman writer, Simha Zaramati Asta, who was born in Kerem HaTeimanim in Tel Aviv and published ten books—poems, short stories, novels, nonfiction—but almost no one has heard of her. It makes me think back to my father, who gave up his dream of being a poet; it makes me think, “How could he even have allowed himself to dream?” I forgot who said it, but you can’t be what you can’t see, right?”

ZC: Yes, and you write about that quandary in your short stories. A sense of yearning for Mizrahi writing appears in a written work by you, a Mizrahi woman. It was compelling to see that play out in two layers.

This is a difficult question to ask because it inevitably comes out as a cliché, but what do you hope readers derive from your work? When they finish reading your stories or your memoir, what do you want them to sit with?

AT: When it comes to North American readers, I want to give them another view into Israeli identity and into Jewishness, to complicate it. I feel like this annoying person who has to keep correcting people who are writing about “Jewish” food, to say, “That’s not ‘Jewish’ food, it’s Ashkenazi food.” I constantly have to say, “Actually, no, my family didn’t speak Yiddish. Actually, no, I didn’t grow up eating… Kugel.”

Writing also has given me a chance to rectify my experiences as a child in the eyes of Israeli readers, and to put them out there for that girl who hasn’t seen herself in Eurocentric Hebrew literature. Things are changing, but we’re still only in the process of building this alternative body of work; Erez Bitton was only asked to spearhead a committee to include Mizrahi literature in school curricula four years ago. I wanted to give a voice to our experiences and show that girl that she has a place in literature, beyond some stereotypical portrayal she’s supposed to avoid at all costs. It’s all a work in progress, and I’m just hoping that I’m part of it.

But also—and this is important—I really want people to feel deeply when they read my work. Beyond all the politics, I want them to have an emotional experience. That’s what I look for when I’m reading, and that’s my main criterion for judging a book. I love to cry when I read, so that’s also a major goal in writing for me—to elicit emotion.

ZC: In the context of Mizrahi literature, there’s a specific value to that goal of wanting to make people feel, too. Often, when Mizrahi characters are written into fictional stories, they don’t have this emotional multidimensionality to them. 

AT: That’s true, and further—I think maybe sometimes we’re afraid to explore that in our writing because we’ll be accused of “Eastern” sentimentality, of drama, of groans and tears. People think of the mekonenot that cry over the graves [of Sephardi rabbis], they think of the romantic Egyptian movies they used to show on TV on Friday nights, you know what I mean? It’s like they’re always thinking, “All that emotion, it’s so unsightly.” So yes, it’s also a statement not to be afraid of sentimentality here.

ZC: This also ties in to how you let your women be aggressive without falling into fear of being called a freha; you’re incorporating emotion into your work without falling into the fear of being called overly sentimental. 

After all, Ashkenazi characters in Hebrew-language media are allowed to be emotional, because it’s considered intellectual when they feel; it’s not uncivilized of them, they’re not “acting out.” It begs the question— Why are their emotions intellectualized while ours are shamed? Why should the response to accusations of being “too much” be to shut ourselves down?

AT: That reminds me of one of my first experiences as an MFA student. Someone wrote that on the first page of something I turned in—“too much.” And I remembered how much that hurt me, because it mirrored the feedback that I was getting as a person in the real world. I was too loud, I was too in-your-face, I took up too much space, I was “too much.” 

But then I realized, what do you want me to say? Yes! My culture, my writing does put forward a new way of being a little more overt with your emotions, of letting them be seen on the surface without shame. That goes back to how identity can inform not just our themes, but also our style of writing, our voice. So yes, this is how I am. This is what I brought with me from home.

Ayelet Tsabari is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of a Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and the short story collection The Best Place on Earth, which won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction. She has a background in journalism and photography and teaches at the University of Kings College and Tel Aviv University.