My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq
by Ariel Sabar
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ariel SabarEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-08-21
ISBN: 1565124901
Number of pages: 325
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Book Reviews of My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq
Book Review: Fascinating Exploration of Culture and Family
Summary: 4 Stars
My Father's Paradise is the author's exploration of his family's roots. Ariel's father, Yona, left his town of Zhako in Kurdish Iraq as a child, in a mass exodus of thousands of Kurdish Jews to Israel. From there, as a young adult, Yona emigrated to America. Ariel explores his own relationship with his father, as he traces the roots of his father's past and explores the culture and language of Zakho. Ariel shares his own struggle with wanting to be a modern American teenager and having disdain for his father, to finally, as he grows up, wanting a closer relationship with his father and a connection to the past. The reader sees glimpses of life in Zhako, Israel, and America. This is a very worthwhile read that speaks to larger themes of how culture survives across continents and borders.
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Summary of My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq
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.
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