Songs for the Brokenhearted

Jerusalem, a city surrounded by thick forests and rolling hills, where the air was fresh and cool, where everything was ancient, biblical, suffused with meaning. (chapter 18)

Whatever resolve and certainty he had felt in the past few weeks had melted away. Strangely, there was some lightness in the unknowing, like a clenched fist had been unfurled. (chapter 34)

On bad days, I looked at the paleness of the sky, and all I could see was how deeply fucked up everything was, how much the pain radiated from the earth, fury bubbling up like hot lava underneath the surface.

Other days, mostly at the beach, I would breathe in the saturated air and be filled with gratitude. Despite everything, this was the only home I knew. Flawed, imperfect, but home. And though my sense of belonging was fractured, still I belonged here more than anywhere else. Maybe that's why I held on to this dream of peace so desperately. I needed to believe we were heading somewhere better. If peace came, maybe we would finally be able to let out the breath we'd been holding for forty-seven years, and exhale. (chapter 19)

Years later, when they are old, sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea, someone would ask them how it all started, and he'd say, as soon as he saw her on the other side of the drinking fountain at the immigrant camp, he knew. (first lines of book)

Maybe that's why the two of them felt so connected. Both waiting, both missing an integral part of themselves, the constant ache in their bodies throbbing like a phantom limb. (chapter 16)

It was my sister, Lizzie, who told me. Her voice-transmitted through telephone lines that ran underneath seas and borders from Sha'ariya, our Yemeni neighborhood at the edge of a suburb east of Tel Aviv, to this guesthouse counter in the Thai island of Ko Pha-ngan-echoed faintly.

"Zohara," she said. Not Zorki, I noted. "You have to come home." You have to come home, a tinny version of her repeated.

I woke up with an urge to write, to document everything [they] had shared with me about the women's songs. For the first time in forever, I felt inspired by something. The idea of oral poetry that was created and disseminated by a community of women fascinated me, the fluidity of it, the riffing and rewriting and borrowing, which stood against the idea of authorship as it was known and celebrated in the West. There was so much more I wished to know. (Chapter 14)