Product Description

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.

Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise is the Winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #67669 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 325 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781565124905
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. For his first 31 years Sabar considered his father, Yona, an embarrassing anachronism. Ours was a clash of civilizations, writ small. He was ancient Kurdistan. I was 1980s L.A. Yona was a UCLA professor whose passion was his native language, Aramaic. Ariel was an aspiring rock-and-roll drummer. The birth of Sabar's own son in 2002 was a turning point, prompting Sabar to try to understand his father on his own terms. Readers can only be grateful to him for unearthing the history of a family, a people and a very different image of Iraq. Sabar vividly depicts daily life in the remote village of Zahko, where Muslims, Jews and Christians banded together to ensure prosperity and survival, and in Israel (after the Jews' 1951 expulsion from Iraq), where Kurdish Jews were stereotyped as backward and simple. Sabar's career as an investigative reporter at the Baltimore Sun and elsewhere serves him well, particularly in his attempt to track down his father's oldest sister, who was kidnapped as an infant. Sabar offers something rare and precious—a tale of hope and continuity that can be passed on for generations. Photos. (Sept. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Donna Rifkind If Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise were only about his father's life, it would be a remarkable enough story about the psychic costs of immigration. But Sabar's family history turns out to be more than the chronicle of one man's efforts to retain something of his homeland in new surroundings. It's also a moving story about the near-death of an ancient language and the tiny flicker of life that remains in it. The author's father, Yona Sabar, was born in 1938 to an illiterate mother in a mud shack in the remote mountain village of Zakho in northern Iraq, among a community of Kurdistani Jews whose ancestry in the area could be traced back nearly 2,700 years. Co-existing affably with Muslims and Christians, these Jews were so isolated that they heard nothing about the savage farhud, or pogrom, against the Jews of Baghdad in 1941, and throughout the 1940s they had almost no idea about the fate of Jews in Europe. The Sabar family spoke Aramaic, which was the lingua franca of much of the Middle East beginning in the 8th century B.C. and is believed to be the language of Jesus. Its domination ceased in the region in the 7th century A.D., when conquering Muslim armies imposed Arabic. By the 1930s, except in enclaves like Zakho, Aramaic as an everyday tongue was more or less extinct. (It survives today in some scattered communities as well as in major Jewish texts and prayers.) Just as Aramaic has been disappearing, so has Jewish life in Zakho. In 1930, there were 1,471 Jews in the town of 27,000 people. Today, according to the author, there are none. Over the course of his life, Yona Sabar traveled far from his origins. Exiled from the Eden of his childhood, he raised his children in a dizzyingly different place: Los Angeles. "Aramaic," writes his son, "was his only surviving childhood possession." The Sabar family left Zakho around 1950, along with nearly every other Jewish family in Iraq. Impelled by increasing anti-Semitic violence and a forceful denaturalization law, their flight was part of a dramatic exodus that became one of the largest airlifts in history: In less than a year, some 120,000 Iraqi Jews abandoned their homeland for the newly created state of Israel. Yet for Yona and his family, the reality of their arrival in the Promised Land was vastly different from their dreams. Even after they moved out of the vermin-ridden immigrant shanty town that was their first Israeli home, the family remained poor and defeated, victims of discrimination against Jews from Islamic lands. Of those Jews, called Mizrahim, the Kurds were the lowest on the social scale, stigmatized by many European-born Israelis as primitives. Through sheer prodigiousness, Yona managed to distinguish himself, gaining admission to Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where his talent for linguistics was quickly discovered, and then to the graduate program in Near Eastern Languages at Yale. The chapters describing Yona's budding success as a linguist are thrilling, as both he and his professors recognized that as a speaker of Aramaic he was a living repository of an endangered tongue. He began by tracing common roots among Aramaic and Hebrew words, then recorded and analyzed the speech of an elderly storyteller from Zakho. In time, Yona's singular efforts led him to UCLA, where he has taught for three decades and where he composed a definitive Jewish-Aramaic dictionary, "racing against time," his son writes, "to document the language for the generations of scholars who would come too late to hear it firsthand." Living in Los Angeles, he has also consulted for the film industry, helping actors learn Aramaic for the 1977 George Burns comedy "Oh God!" and for an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Ariel Sabar, a Washington-based journalist who has worked for the Baltimore Sun, has framed his book as an act of reconnection with the father who had always embarrassed him with his old-fashioned, Middle Eastern ways. But this generational reconciliation is the book's weakest feature. As an anguished mission to preserve the shards of his shattered culture, Yona Sabar's story speaks eloquently on its own.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
For almost 3,000 years, a tiny Jewish enclave existed in what is now the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The Jews and their Christian and Muslim neighbors spoke the ancient tongue of Aramaic, which had once been the lingua franca of the Middle East and was spoken by Jesus. Sabar’s father, Yona, was born in that enclave but immigrated to the U.S. when the creation of the state of Israel created hostile conditions for Iraqi Jews in the 1950s. Yona, however, maintained strong emotional ties to his native language and culture even as he ascended to a prominent academic position at UCLA. Meanwhile, Sabar showed virtually no interest in his father’s background; however, after the birth of his own son, he felt a desire to reconnect with his father and their shared cultural heritage. Their joint visit to their ancestral town of Zakho rekindles memories of the ancient community while strengthening the ties between father and son. An involving memoir that works as both a family saga and an examination of a lost but treasured community. --Jay Freeman

Customer Reviews

Excellent history of the Kurdish Jewish experience told through the story of the author's family
We've all heard of Kurdistan, of course--especially the Iraqi portion. And those like me who are either of Jewish descent, interested in languages, or both, have heard of Kurdish Jews and the fact that they were some of the last remaining speakers of Aramaic. But never before had I gotten such a deep insight into their culture and struggles to assimilate in the new state of Israel. They truly had more in common with their fellow Kurds than their Ashkenazi co-religionists in Israel, and this seems to have been a major reason the author's father elected to stay in the U.S. after receiving his Ph.D. at Yale. It's slightly mistitled in that, while Ariel Sabar's search and desire to reconcile with his family's past was the genesis of the book, it really reads more as a biography of his father Yona, now a UCLA professor, and of the entire Kurdish Jewish community. The son's own story, while touching, almost seemed an afterthought.

I understand from the introduction that some dialogue was made up and some composite characters were created, so while this isn't quite creative nonfiction, it's not journalism either. That makes for an excellent read, but it also makes me wonder if there's an accessible but more historiographic book on this subject out there.

At any rate, my thanks to Ariel Sabar for writing this and painting a vivid picture of a world I think few people know ever existed... one that was turned upside down in the space of his father's childhood and is now almost nonexistent. My thanks, too, to Yona Sabar for his important scholarship. I had no idea how important this man was to the study of Neo-Aramaic and am glad he didn't suffer the fate of too many of his fellow Mizrahi immigrants to Israel. Highly recommended.

Beautiful and beautifully written
At heart this is about a Jewish man, born and raised in America, trying as a grown-up to find a connection to the immigrant father by whom he was baffled and embarrassed as a child. Ariel Sabar knows how to tell a story, however, and it's his writing and organization even more than the story itself that makes this book such a treasure. But the story is wonderful, too.

The book starts in the village of Zakho, in Kurdish Iraq, with the tale of its people, including the author's great-grandfather, Ephraim, the dyer, whom the locals believe talks to angels. Sabar makes the village and its inhabitants come alive and while I at times wished there were more photos included in the book, Sabar's writing is usually picture enough. Sabar's parents are married (arranged, of course), Sabar's father, Yona, and his siblings are born, and too many of them die. One goes tragically missing. Throughout the personal saga, Sabar presents a global context -- World Wars I & II, the relationship of his family's native language in Zakho (Aramaic) to the rest of Iraq, to the multi-culturalism and religious harmony of Kurdistan and how the area was divided in the wake of the first World War, to the changing attitudes toward Jews in Iraq and the Middle East and the foundation of Israel.

In the '50's Sabar's family relocates, not entirely willingly, to Israel, where they find not the holy land of their dreams, but a huge and unwelcoming city in which they are the lowest of the low. Most of the middle of the book follows Yona's tale as he works to make something of himself in this hostile environment, eventually earning a scholarship to Yale and becoming a respected professor of Neo-Aramaic at UCLA.

The final sections of the book recount the author's story and his attempts to reconnect with his roots in Iraq and reconcile himself with his father.

Wisely, Sabar distances himself from the earlier portions of the book and doesn't spend much time on his American upbringing and personal story, choosing only to interject himself into the tale as it relates to his family's past. The tale is about the people, but Sabar deftly weaves throught the book language, politics, religion, and poverty without letting any of them dominate.

Being from Los Angeles I find myself hoping one day that I will run into and recognize Ariel and Yona, so that I can smile at my fellow Angelino and the rumpled professor who has never felt like he truly belongs here. I know very little about my family before they emmigrated to New York, but somehow Sabar's book makes me feel as if I do. His family's story is that of everyone whose ancestors came here hoping for a better life for the people they loved, yet still missing that which was lost.

Thank you, Ariel Sabar for this beautiful and heartfelt book.

Reconciling Past and Present
Sabar, Ariel. "My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq", Algonquin, 2008.

Reconciling Past and Present

Amos Lassen

We really do not have a great deal of literature about Jewish life in Iraq so "My Father's Paradise" is extremely welcome. Ariel Sabar, a noted journalist gives us a look at past and present in the Arab country and it is all fascinating.
Kurdish Iraq can be described as "a remote and dusty corner of the world, long forgotten for nearly 3000 years." Here they still spoke Aramaic and most of the people had a degree of literacy. They believed in mysticism and they told stories and supported themselves by humble and honest work. The people of Kurdish Iraq lived peacefully with their neighbors who were Muslims and Christians.
The Jewish community of northern Iraq originated with the tribes of Israel and in this community Ariel Sabar's father, Yona, was born. Yona came to the States and in the 1980's was a professor at UCLA where he worked with the Aramaic language. At the same time, his son was experimenting with becoming a drummer in a rock band. When Ariel's son was born in 2002, he began to understand the meaning of fatherhood and became involved in the history of his family. As Sabar unearths information, he shares it with us and we learn of the daily life in the village of Zahko and then he moves onto the daily life of the Kurdish Jews when they came to Israel after having been expelled from Iraq in 1951. 120,000 Kurdish Jews, a large element of the Diaspora which was virtually unknown, went to Israel in the 50's where they were considered "backward and simple". It seemed that their heritage and life would never be known but when Yona came to America; he was determined to preserve the Kurdish traditions and dedicated his career to it. It took for Ariel to have a son of his own to understand his father's passion.
Yona and Ariel went to Iraq to find what was left of Zahko and they learn the story of the Sabar family as well as an epic saga of hope and tolerance. The characters that father and son meet are a gallery of unforgettable people--linguists, Arab and Kurdish chieftains, nomads and Bedouins, religious believers. We get an eyewitness account of the history of a place that has vanished but remains in a place that monopolizes the attention of today's world.
Ancient Iraq and 21st century America are indeed worlds apart; "My Father's Paradise" brings them together through beautiful prose and intense storytelling. Several times my eyes filled with tears as I read, both from the depth of the tales and the beauty of the prose. It is so good to have this book! It fills a void which existed for too long and gives the Kurdish Jews their proper place. I remember spending an evening with a Kurdish family when I lived in Israel and although the details are fuzzy, the book reminded me of it and just that is enough for me.