THE ART OF LEAVING

An Arab Jew searches for the meaning of home.

From the time her father died when she was 10, Tsabari (The
Best Place on Earth: Stories, 2016) felt out of place in Israel, where she
and her family had long lived in a community of Yemeni Jews. “Grief shakes the
foundations of your home,” she writes in her candid, affecting memoir,
“unsettles and banishes you.” In addition to the loss of her father—whom the author
evokes in loving detail—she felt excluded from Israeli culture, where Arab Jews
were treated like second-class citizens, even those, like her and her parents,
who were born in Israel. “In a country riddled with cultural prejudice,” she
writes, “the stereotypes associated with Yemenis over the years have ranged
from romanticizing to fetishizing to patronizing.” In 1935, when her grandparents
arrived, Yemeni immigrants were considered “savage and primitive”; even today,
“Yemenis are often the butt of racial jokes and the subject of mockery.” As in
her impressive collection of short stories, which won the Sami Rohr Prize for
Jewish Literature, Tsabari examines the cultural and personal forces that
result in alienation and “self-inflicted exile.” For nearly a decade after
completing mandatory service in the Israeli army, she traveled to Canada, New
York, Mexico, India, and Thailand, with few possessions. “Home, essentially,
was the act of leaving,” she writes, “not a physical place, but the pattern of
walking away from it.” She married, briefly; had affairs; spent years drinking
cheap whiskey and smoking dope; and periodically returned to her family home
before leaving once more. “Leaving is the only thing I know how to do,” she
reflects. “That seemed to be the one stable thing in my life, the ritual of
picking up, throwing out or giving away the little I have, packing up and
taking off.” It must be lonely, a friend remarks, “needing to be free all the
time.” Now in her 40s, grounded by her husband and daughter, she redefines
home: an emotional commitment to a place “where love resides.”

Linked essays cohere into a tender, moving memoir.