My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq | Ariel Sabar | FATHERS AND SONS

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My Father's Paradi...

	My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq Ariel Sabar Algonquin Books, 2008 - 325 pages average customer review:based on 39 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In a remote and dusty corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an ancient community of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic?the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers, humble peddlers and rugged loggers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.

In the 1950s, after the founding of the state of Israel, Yona and his family emigrated there with the mass exodus of 120,000 Jews from Iraq?one of the world's largest and least-known diasporas. Almost overnight, the Kurdish Jews' exotic culture and language were doomed to extinction. Yona, who became an esteemed professor at UCLA, dedicated his career to preserving his people's traditions. But to his first-generation American son Ariel, Yona was a reminder of a strange immigrant heritage on which he had turned his back?until he had a son of his own.

My Father's Paradise is Ariel Sabar's quest to reconcile present and past. As father and son travel together to today's postwar Iraq to find what's left of Yona's birthplace, Ariel brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, telling his family's story and discovering his own role in this sweeping saga. What he finds in the Sephardic Jews' millennia-long survival in Islamic lands is an improbable story of tolerance and hope.

Populated by Kurdish chieftains, trailblazing linguists, Arab nomads, devout believers?marvelous characters all? this intimate yet powerful book uncovers the vanished history of a place that is now at the very center of the world's attention.

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Beautiful story from Zakho to California

I found it hard to put this book down as I read the story of Yona Sabar as he began life in the village of Zakho, a small community of Kurdish Jews in northern Iraq living much as their ancestors did for hundreds of years. Before his 13th birthday, Yona's world was turned upside down when the family was relocated to the newly formed Israel but he held on to the teachings of his grandfather and continued to go to school.

The author, Ariel Sabar grew up as a red blooded Californian and starts the telling of his father's story by explaining the rift that had existed between himself and his father. As an adult, with children of his own, he became curious about the Kurdish Jews and the language his father treasured. His extensive research is put to good use to tell Yona's story (a story of the end of the Kurdish Jews and their Neo-Aramaic language) and he included photos that enhanced the history he was telling.

Growing up, I never learned the whole story about Israel. Ariel tells this history through the eyes of his family in a way that has touched me and left me in awe of the diverse peoples that make up Israel.

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FATHERS AND SONS

My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar is one of the best books that I have ever read. The story is incredibly appealing and can be enjoyed by anyone who grew up with parents and grandparents that just "didn't get it". Of course, as we get older, we realize that our parents faced challenges and issues that, at the time, we could not understand.

Mr. Sabar tells us something of Kurdistan and the Jewish population that once lived in Kurdistan. Both the history of the Kurdish people and the Jews of Kurdistan are very topical as the war in Iraq goes on. The Kurds after some very rough times in the 1990's, seem to be the center of prosperity and stability in modern Iraq. Perhaps this book might have some hints as to why that might be.

The prose - and I know of no other word to capture its beauty - in the book is so breathtakingly powerful that at time I was moved to tears. Of course, at my age, a good coffee commercial can move me to tears. However, this book is well written and one can certainly tell that the aptitude for and love of language is a common bond between Mr. Sabar and his father.

Based on the reviews and on some of Mr. Sabar's speaking engagements, this book is really being marketed as a Jewish story and, to a lesser extent, an immigrant family's story. Yet, it is a universal story of fathers and son, of generational change, and the eternal consistency of family, culture, and interaction with the outside world.

There were two errors in the book that annoyed me because they were so minor and needless. First, Disraeli was not England's first Jewish Prime Minister. At the time, England took its state religion pretty seriously and only Anglican's could hold public office. Disraeli converted long before he was Prime Minister. Second, the author asks one to imagine what English would be like if it was only spoken by some isolated hill people in the middle of nowhere. Of course, with Shakespearian English that is exactly what happened. After 1680, as England became a world power the language mutated wildly. Only small isolated parts of what later became western Arkansas spoke Shakespearian English. These areas were so isolated that they did not speak "standardized" English until the 1880's.

It isn't clear what type of book this is. It isn't a biography, it isn't a history, and there is enough fact that it isn't a novel. The genre of this book defies easy definition.

Overall, this is a good book. Strongly recommended. It is hard to imagine anyone not enjoying this beautifully written story. It is fun to think that someday this book might get picked up for a movie, thus uniting Mr. Sabar's childhood fascination with pop culture and his father's love of language.

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Very Engaging And A Very Smooth Read

Ariel Sabar grew up in Westwood, near Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. His father's roots, and therefore, by extension his own, were thousands of miles and years away. Ariel's father Yona dressed differently, drove an old car, and was somewhat of a cheapskate. Young Ariel resented his father's "differentness". With no understanding of where Yona came from, the two grew very far apart over the years.

This book is Ariel's tribute to his father's life and gift of understanding of their dying cultural heritage to his own son. The story starts in Kurdish Iraq, winds through Israel and ends here in the United States. It spans almost the entire twentieth century, and there is an old family mystery as well. The story is very engaging and Ariel Sabar is a writer who can tell the tale in a way that does not make the reader feel like we are intruding on someone elses privacy.

The glimpses into the Iraqi and Israeli cultures are priceless. Yona's thoughts about the American culture are also eye openers. Iraq and Israel are in the news right now. This book gives some insights into the Middle East's "little people", everyday people with everyday lives, not great leaders, but the people who make a community a community.

This book was well worth the read and I highly recommend it.

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a son's fascinating search for his father's past

"My Father's Paradise" is a sort of love song in its singular devotion to the past of an immigrant father who always seemed dull, ridiculously parsimonious and buried in old books. His son, the book's author, grew up American, trying to wriggle away from this past; in this book, he explores and embraces it.

The father Yona Sabar was born a Kurdish Jew, living in a remote corner of Iraq and speaking Aramaic, a language many people thought to be dead. When the small tribe fled to Israel for safety, Yona, who was intent on escaping his heritage, was taken up by a brilliant university professor and urged to write down what he remembered of Aramaic and to have an ancient and illiterate relative record some of the tribal stories. From there, Yona wins a scholarship in linguistics to Yale and comes to America. Bewildered by English (he asks for a sandwich on "dry" bread) and the casual social world, so foreign from his own intimate one, he struggles along with his beloved Aramaic to become a much honored and tenured professor.

Any unique group of people (Yona's family had lived in the same way and place a thousand years before the birth of Jesus) will have a unique story to tell. I had never heard of Kurdish Jews: their lives were vivid and good, their painful expulsion difficult to read, and their struggle to make enough money and keep their values in the new Israel was surpising to me...I thought that state had been a haven for all Jews who found it. It was for some of the Kurds and not for others. The older ones particularly could not adjust.

Yet the most fascinating story of the book to me was the young Yona finding his own way with the part of the past he thought was useless, his language. The book is a love song to words, how subtle, how beautiful, how irreplaceable, how whole worlds live within them that can teach us and how they must not ever be lost.

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Window Into A Vanishing World

As recently as 60 years ago, Aramaic-speaking Jews were living in remote Kurdish villages, just as they had for thousands of years. Who knew? Their culture might have been lost forever when they were forced to leave Arab lands were it not for one of their number, Yona Sabar, who went on to become a world-renowned professor. While his fellow Kurdish Jews and their children assimilated into other societies, Sabar worked to preserve his native tongue in the halls of academia even as he watched the end of its 3000-year run as a living language. Now his son, Ariel, has brought his story to a mainstream audience.

My Father's Paradise is a tale of change and loss, but also of discovery. It offers a fascinating look at the Jews of Zahko, an isolated village in Iraqi Kurdistan where time appeared to stand still for centuries. Yona Sabar lived there until the age of 12, when his family left for Israel. The story follows his journey to the immigrant slums of Jerusalem, then on to Yale University, and eventually to a professorship in Los Angeles -- an adventure unimaginable to his parents' generation. Eventually, he returns to a very different Zakho from the one he remembers. When his entirely American son, the author, becomes a father himself, he develops an interest in his family history. This leads him to Kurdistan as well, and to write this book.

Most of My Father's Paradise is pretty riveting in its tales of old Zakho, immigrant life in Israel, and the Sabars' recent travels to their ancestral land. On the other hand, the less exotic chapters detailing the Sabars' life in America and Yona's academic career didn't hold my attention quite as much. Yona's linguistic work and Ariel's awakening, while somewhat inspiring, simply weren't that interesting. But they make up less than a third of the text. Overall, this is a very unique work that will appeal to history buffs as well as folks interested in immigrant stories.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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