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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
Blew me away . . .:
Though I enjoyed this book, I kept wanting to give it only 4 stars for the earlier sections in which Sabar writes accounts of his grandparents' and his father's lives in Iraq and Israel. He treats them as if they were characters in a novel, recording their thoughts and conversations - in English, not their native Aramaic - like an omniscient author. There was a breezy Sunday supplement style to all this that rang wrong for me. But by the mid-point, as the author himself appears as a character in this... more info
My Father's Paradise:
We read and discussed this book in our book club. It is about a widely acclaimed and respected UCLA professor whose roots were from Kurdish Iraq, and how he was viewed by his American born son. When the son matured and had a son of his own, he became interested in his father's background and wanted to explore his "father's paradise".
The book presents information on Jewish life in pre-1950's Iraq, a subject that is not widely known. Although the members in the book club came from varied backgrounds,... more info
My Father's Paradise:
An outstanding book which intertwined a family's story with the relatively recent history of increasing tensions in the Middle East. It told the story of the Kurdish jews living in Iraq for 2,700 years in peaceful harmony with muslims and christians, living much like their ancestors who were taken there in the 700's B.C. And the struggles of one family who left this ancient culture, finally ending up in Los Angeles--talk about time travel. It warmed my heart and gave me hope to know that jews and muslims... more info
My Father's Paradise:
Hard to put down. Spell binding story, shows how little we know of world. True story of a family & it's stranger than life path.
