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My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Family's Past

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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.

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.

The events of the Middle East that assault us each day from CNN and other sources seem to be motivated by an understanding of the world that is completely removed from what is taken for granted by the West. It is a world where one's religion is not only their faith but their tribal identification; where everything is conducted in the context of cultural assumptions more rooted in the world of medieval nomadic traders than the egalitarian ideas of modern nation-states. "Why do they act this way?" we often wonder as we witness their stubborn refusal to act like us.

Although not written for that purpose, Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise gives keen insight into this world that is at once both lost but still with us in today's headlines. Sabar's family line traces back to a time when the Jews of the Middle East were not centered in Israel but spread throughout the region. Most of these communities are now gone - leaving because of their dream of a Jewish state or their fear of remaining behind what is now enemy lines. Like the now firm divide between the Greece and Turkey, the current situation tells us nothing about the past - and everything.

Sabar was motivated to trace his roots and this led to an small area in what is now Kurdish Iraq. There his family was part of a small Jewish community that was so isolated they still spoke Aramaic - a language that once was the lingua franca of the Middle East but was thought to have died centuries earlier. In retracing his family's steps, Sabar's eyes were opened to a world we barely know existed, one where the strange mix of ethnic and religious identities worked with and often around the authorities to preserve some semblance of their traditions.

Despite an admitted aversion earlier in life to the traditions of his family, Sabar seems to have become a marvelous apologist for that lineage. He is an excellent storyteller and his rendering of the tale of his family is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. It is in fact as complex as the world he describes - a world that has died but whose ghosts still haunt us.

It might be argued that the situation in the area of Zakho he describes was not typical of life as a whole but that is precisely the point - no one picture is "typical" of an area that has seen so much culture, conflict, and fervor. This is an area of the world that has been a battleground for many of the world's major religions, has been under the heel of Persian, Greek, Roman, Arabic, Turkish, Mongol, and British empires, and consequently been involved in many of the most important conflicts in world history. It is both the root of our common culture but has nothing at all common in it.

The most powerful thing in this book is that he relates key events not by a dispassionate laundry list of crises and dates but in the lives of ordinary people for whom the sudden outbreaks of violence were unfathomable. How could this outside world that had ignored them for centuries suddenly see them as a symbol of a conspiracy in a faraway land? How could their friends whom they had known for many years now turn on them and want them punished for deeds done by others?

One begins to understand also the conflicts within Israel itself between the Jews whose identity has been in this region for centuries and those who emigrated from the West that led to the state of Israel. These two groups may have shared a religion but the way Sabar's relatives saw the world had far more in common with their Kurdish Muslim neighbors than with their fellow religionists. In Israel they may have shared a religion, but in Zakho they shared a way of life.

Anyone wishing to understand the complexities of the region should read My Father's Paradise. In particular, the recent efforts at "exporting democracy" with expectations it would take on the same character as in the West seem even more hopeless than before. While Ariel Sabar's tale is not meant as a political statement, the realities of life in the region - based as it is on the lives and hopes of real people - gives us a window into the tragedy of that region and the triumph of one family over its obstacles.

For many hundreds of years the small village of Zakho in Iraq was a quiet, unassuming place to raise a family. It rarely made its way into the annuls of history and nothing of any significance ever gave it a reason to change its primitive ways. Jews lived in harmony alongside Christians and Muslims. Until a war broke out in the 1950s that was so big Zakho couldn't hide in its corner of Iraq any longer. When the Kurdish Jews were offered a chance to escape to Israel, they left behind their previous lives to pursue paradise. Except Israel was anything but the promised land these Jews sought. To be a newly immigrated Kurdish Jew in Israel was to be the lowest of the low. It was at this time in history that Yona Beh Sabagha was coming of age. This displacement shaped the boy into a man. Determined to make something of himself in the face of difficult odds Yona invented himself in Israel(quite literally with the changing of his last name to Sabar), then reinvented himself in America as a renowned linguistics professor at UCLA.

Fast forward to the dawn of a new century. Ariel Sabar has spent his every moment rebelling against and distancing himself from his father, a man inconsistent with his fashionable L.A. surroundings; until the birth of his own son causes him to step into his father's shoes. It becomes the impetus for the journey to discover his roots and to understand the man his father is apart from being the father of Ariel Sabar.

This eloquent family history combines factual details with just the right amount of storytelling flare. I admire the way the author honors his father, a man of quiet dignity. And I am a little jealous of the rich family history he has to ground himself in. I sometimes got lost in the details about war and politics but these were not heavy nor did they at all detract from the story of this remarkable family. It is very readable. I highly recommend it.

Ariel Sabar's account of his family's history in Kurdish Iraq and his own relationship with his father has the detail and dream-like atmosphere of a Naguib Mahfouz novel.

The Sabagha family were Aramaic-speaking Jewish dyers and merchants in Kurdish Iraq. Sabar's narrative recounts events as far back as his great-grandfather's time, but focuses on his father, Yona Beh Sabagha. While he is a boy, Yona's family emigrates to Israel, at the strong suggestion of the Iraqi government. In Israel, Yona attends school at night, and eventually makes it into university, where the fact that he has native knowledge of the Aramaic language (or "Neo-Aramaic", being Aramaic in its last, dying phase) leads him to become a linguist, pursuing studies at Yale and eventually becoming a professor at UCLA and a leading scholar of Neo-Aramaic. Yona's son Ariel (the author) identifies more with mainstream American culture than with his father, but as he matures comes to see his father in a different light, and value his father's efforts to preserve the history, tradition and culture embodied in the Aramaic language. Son and father return to Zakho together as son researches the writing of his book, and seeks to resolve a family mystery.

This book is beautifully-written and a delight to read. It is structured like a novel, with resolution of a loss at the book's beginning coming only at the end. Like a good country music song, it abounds in particulars (details from life in Zakho before World War II and in Israel mid-century) while exploring an important universal theme -- the tension and interplay between the two necessary goods of valuing the past and seeking a better future.

If you are an American Jew, the offspring of immigrants, a linguist, a student of the Mideast crisis, or an ex-teen who's finally dropped the attitude, you should read this book. And if I'm not mistaken, that would be all of us.

I've scarcely considered the plight of the Sephardic Jews of Western Asia much less the disposition of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Nor pondered the enormity of forced exile and the task of assimilating these uprooted peoples in America or Israel. Never knew the painstaking scholarship involved in archiving an ancient language. I was taken aback by the prejudices held by European immigrants towards those from the Middle East and Africa during the settlement of Israel. And heartened to learn that in Kurdish Iraq midway through the 20th century per a village elder there, "We and the Jews were loving each other...We were blood brothers."

I am no stranger, however, to the know-it-all attitudes with which children view their parents, and the father and child reunion that dominates the last chapters of this book is the best part of all.

Take a journey with Mr. Sabar back to a lost homeland, back to family. It's a place we all need to visit.

I could not imagine a people with more strikes against them-to be Kurdish is bad enough-tough role to play in the world! And to be Jewish is bad enough-and outside Israel-it just doesn's seem like you would have much of a chance, considering all the talk of pushing Israel into the Red Sea or wiping it off the face of the earth...even the sentiment of U.S. Palestinians who seem to revile Jews make me think being Jewish is a tough call. So, put it all together: Kurdish, Jewish and Iraqi. Well, it sounds as if one has a bucket load of trouble just in being, with that mix.

But, what a surprisingly poetic, fluid read about dislocation, time, love and a world now changed irrevocably! Prompted by the birth of his own son, the author gives up his "modern, hip" evaluations and learns to understand his father and his life on its own terms.

I had no idea about Jewish-Kurdish Iraq before reading this, and felt as if I were looking into a world now vanished. The form of the book...what would you call it? It is a kind of biography, but it enlarges enough to bring into focus world events, and shows those agents of change in a microcosm that touches us, and helps us understand in a personal way the events of history. You might call this an historical biography.

I would think that any thoughtful reader would find beauty and meaning in this book, and that for Jews it would be especially insightful. If you are American-your people came from somewhere else, and many were in exile before landing on these shores. If you are Native American, your land was ripped from you, and you became an exile in your own land. I think, therefore, the issues of exile, the immigrant experience, the story of change, loss, adaptation, and even the cringing recognition of "not quite fitting in" are universally significant issues. My highest recommendation.

The book consists of three stories, really. First is the story of the author's grandparents in Zukho in Kurdish Iraq. They are descendants of the original Babylonian captivity, part of a Jewish community that has been in Mesopotamia for 2700 years. Their story is lyrical and beautiful.

Second is the story of the author's father, Yona. Forced to emigrate to Israel at age 12, he ultimately went to Yale and became a professor of Near Eastern Languages at UCLA. This is a compelling story of an immigrant who never fits in, and who builds his career on reconstructing the Aramaic language and culture of the town where he was born.

Third is the author's own story, in which he comes to understand his father better and then searches for the family roots in Iraq. The father-son material was appropriate in length to frame the first two stories, and I would have left the personal story there. Unfortunately, Sabar becomes obsessed with a search for his long-lost aunt in Iraq. No one in his family, none of his friends, and no one he meets in Iraq really understands this particular obsession. Neither did this reader.

The first two stories are so wonderful that I forgive Sabar the third. This book is highly recommended.

I apologize for the lengthy review. It is hard to condense my thoughts about this book -- it is a rarity for me, and I want to do my best to convey its richness. I didn't really know what to expect of My Father's Paradise by Ariel Sabar. I'm a NY Episcopalian with an interest in Judaism as well as in languages, but I don't have a knack for the details of history or war stories. I wasn't sure if this would be an angry book or a sad one or what. I wasn't altogether sure what a Kurd is (although of course I'd heard of them). Something about it just called to me though, some aspect of wanting to know more about the background of Yona, Ariel's father, the scholar.

Ariel Sabar has given us a real gem. Obviously he is a writer of merit, because the chapters are very human, full of sadness and happiness, freedom and shame, and yet without venom. The stories are told through the limited point of view of the Kurdish Jews of around 1935 and beyond, from their traditional isolated mountain villages (specifically Zakho in this book) through their emigration to Israel (Jerusalem for this narrative) and finally Yona Sabar's movement to the U.S. The Kurds had a hard time in Israel. Sephardic Jews in general had a harder time than Ashkenazi Jews, for various reasons. (I am not Jewish and while I understand that the Ashkenazi are European, I am not sure of the difference between Sephardic and Mizrahi, and why the Kurds would be Sephardic rather than Mizrahi. Perhaps someone can clear that up for me.) When Yona came to Yale University in New Haven, CT, and visited New York City as well, he did find many other Jews -- but they were not like his people, and the culture shock continued.

Sabar leads us through the personalities, town legends, and journeys with a thoughtful journalist's wisdom... revealing enough of the story to make it real for us, yet not so much as to take us out of the story -- again, without rancour. Tragedies and injustice speak for themselves, so it does not require the narrator's emphasis to point them out.

There is a beauty and gentleness pervading most of the text, in the people and the story, that I could not at first identify. While it is of course the tone of the author, it is something more than that -- something that eluded me for most of the book. It finally struck me that there was a similarity to the speech of a friend of mine who is a Russian priest, that is, an Orthodox priest living in the Moscow area. There is in Ariel and in Sergei's words a similar note of beauty and gentleness. I am not sure what it means, but I wonder if it has to do with the East/West question that is another of the things at the heart of this book. For, of course, the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews is part of the background of the story, a background that is sketched and painted, even illuminated, but remains mostly in the background. This mood is broken, for me, when the author segues into the present, when we first meet him as Yona's rebellious son, who is very rude to his father to the point of profanity, because of an especially wide generational gap, you might say. But the poetry is soon renewed, in a way, and the book soon redeems itself.

I have had to read this book in widely spaced sessions of altogether too brief duration each, which attenuated the story. I would recommend reading it in a more concentrated manner so as not to dilute the experience.

The first half of the book is taken up with the background of Sabar's people, the Kurdish Jews of Zakho, Iraq, and not until about the halfway mark do we get to where the author's father, Yona Sabar, really begins his study of Aramaic. This lengthy introduction to the Kurd's way of life and their unfortunate position in Israeli society is necessary, though, precisely because it is unfamiliar territory for so many of us. The story of the [re]discovery of Aramaic as a living language would be a great story on its own, but without its context in humanity it would not mean half so much. The Jews of Zakho had been speaking it all along, for sixteen hundred years -- but the rest of the world had gone on without them, and the language, like the coelacanth, had been on record as extinct -- until the period covered by this book.

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.