My Father's Paradise by Ariel Sabar

My Father's Paradise by Ariel Sabar

I am the keeper of my family s stories. I am the guardian of its honor. I am the defender of its traditions. As the first-born son of a Kurdish father, these, they tell me, are my duties. And yet even before my birth I resisted.
So begins Ariel Sabar's true tale of a father and a son, and the two worlds that kept them apart and finally brought them together: ancient Iraq and modern America.
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an enclave 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.
Caught unawares by growing ethnic tensions in the Middle East after World War I, the Jews of Zakho were airlifted to the new state of Israel in the 1950s 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 s son Ariel knew little of his father s history. Growing up in Los Angeles, where Yona had become an esteemed professor at UCLA and had dedicated his career to preserving his people s traditions, Ariel wanted nothing to do with his father s strange immigrant heritage. Until he had a son of his own.
My Father s Paradise is Ariel Sabar's quest to reconcile present and past. As Ariel and his father travel together into today's postwar Iraq to find what s left of Yona's birthplace, Sabar brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, telling his family s story and discovering their place in the sweeping saga of the Sephardic Jews' millennia-long survival in Islamic lands. He introduces us to his spiritual great-grandfather, the village cloth dyer by day

Sabar, Ariel: - Ariel Sabar is an award-winning former staff writer for the Baltimore Sun and the Providence (RI) Journal. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Monthly, Moment, Mother Jones magazine, and other publications. He lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781565124905
ISBN 10	1565124901
Title	My Father's Paradise
Author	Ariel Sabar
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Year published	2008-09-16
Number of pages	332
Prizes	Winner of National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography) 2008
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.