You’ve been writing your whole life, having published your first poem at age ten. What drives you to write? AT I can’t explain it. It’s like love. I … - Ayelet Tsabari

Home became the liminal space in between-between identities, between cultures, between languages- and I was content claiming that space as my own, pleased to be different.

(Is her memoir consciously undergirded by feminist assertions of agency, and standing up to patriarchy?) I think this is an essential element of my memoir that is rarely discussed. As a young woman, it absolutely felt subversive and defiant in a way, wishing to break free from patriarchal expectations of me. But also, the fact that it felt so radical was on its own a testament to how oppressed women still are. It really shouldn’t be such a big deal, you know, to want to be free, to follow your heart. (2022)

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.