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I was born in Israel in 1969 to Jewish Iraqi parents who had made the country their home only a few years before my birth.
I grew up a Sabra, surrounded by sounds that shaped me more than words ever could.
At weddings and celebrations, my parents would place me near the musicians,
and I remember feeling as if the instruments were speaking directly to me.
Music didn’t just fill the room — it filled me.
When I was eighteen, my world broke apart. My mother died suddenly at forty-three,
and the silence she left behind was unbearable.
Maybe the early passing of my mother carved a hollow in my childhood
— a quiet, echoing chamber where no one taught me to feel  empathy,
to look beyond the borders of myself, to sense the beating of other hearts beside mine,
or to understand the simple grace of expressing gratitude.
My father turned toward religion, searching for comfort in prayer and ritual until he eventually became a rabbi.
I turned to music.
And also in my marriage,
music has always been my
savior,
except for my children
who were the brighter
salvation of my life.
But my father never understood my devotion
for it. He wanted me to follow him into a religious life, and the distance between us grew until it became a quiet, painful emptiness. Yet when my father died suddenly in 2025, at eighty-seven, grief hit me with a force I didn’t expect.
Music
has always been the thread that holds me together. It still is. |
