HER NOMADIC JOURNEY
Travelling the world gives writer the freedom to understand her roots
Ayelet Tsabari’s story of travelling the world while learning how to embrace her Jewish-Yemeni heritage is engrossing,
Every winter since Ayelet Tsabari’s daughter was born, she and her partner Sean pack up to spend a couple months in Tel Aviv, where Tsabari grew up. In the past, they’ve considered their time in Israel more like an extended visit, but this year it’s a potential trial to see whether they might make a permanent move, splitting their time between two countries.
Although she’s happy to leave the pounding winter snowstorms behind for Tel Aviv’s numerous beaches, Tsabari misses her west-end Toronto neighbourhood and its familiar haunts. There’s the local café that knows how she takes her coffee, the shop where she buys vegetables, the neighbours who stop to chat. But Tsabari has spent the greater part of her life in transit, not just physically but emotionally as she straddled cultures and languages in pursuit of a sense of freedom. She learned how to make a home anywhere, whether it be nights sleeping in a hammock in a Thai village or navigating the grey and glass landscape of urban Vancouver.
“It doesn’t matter where I am at this point, movement is going to be a part of it,” Tsabari says over Skype from Tel Aviv.
Tsabari explores her nomadic journey in her new memoir, The Art of Leaving, a beautifully written and engrossing story of a young woman who travels the world while slowly learning how to embrace her Jewish-Yemeni heritage and to overcome the murmuring sense of grief she held throughout her life after the death of her father, the first person to show real support for her writing. It’s a coming-of-age memoir, filled with plenty of youthful sex, drugs and indiscretions, overlaid with a woman’s quest to find peace with her own identity.
If there’s such a thing as a born writer, Tsabari might be it. “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t telling stories,” she says. “There was never really a question growing up that this is what I was going to do.” Her first memories were creating comics, even before she could write, dictating the words to her older sister. At age 10, her stories were being published by a Hebrew children’s publication. By the time she was 15, she had a regular gig writing for a teen magazine.
“It was such an assured trajectory, and then it all fell apart,” Tsabari says.
After Tsabari completed her stint in the Israeli army, where she honed her rebellious spirit — her departure an event she describes as a “limp handshake with no eye contact” — Tsabari began travelling. If you were to track her locations on a world map, it would be crowded with push pins: New York, Los Angeles, Bangkok, Goa, among them. But with freedom came harrowing moments, like the time Tsabari accidentally drank kerosene, thinking it was water.
Tsabari looks back and observes a penchant for risk-taking and adventure she is no longer attached to, especially now that she’s a mother. She discussed those feelings with a good friend who is Lebanese and discovered many parallels in their backgrounds: that growing up in places where there’s political conflict or war often results in a higher baseline for what is considered risky or dangerous.
“The idea of harm and risk is something that is really entrenched in the Israeli ethos,” she says. “There’s also growing up with grief, and the idea that there is nothing to lose. I think there’s a higher awareness of temporariness, and the nature of life and the need to grab it.”
During those years, Tsabari gave up writing, her insecurities and doubts overriding her ability to put pen to paper. It wasn’t until much later, after she found a sense of peace living with Sean in Vancouver, that she took those first steps, relearning her craft in English.
“I now I take all my risks in writing,” she says.
Pushed by the memory of her father and his own later-in-life determination to write poetry, Tsabari found her way back to her childhood pursuit. Her debut 2015 story collection, The Best Place on Earth, was lauded by international media for its unique characters and rare literary depictions of Yemeni-Jewish life, and that of other Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews, taking home that year’s prestigious Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
Although her debut was critically well received, Tsabari admits she’s scared of the response to The Art of Leaving. Memoirs can make any author feel naked and exposed. “But it was an urge, something that had to be written,” she says.
“I went with it because I think that’s the only way to live as a writer, or as an artist. I just followed the calling.”