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A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq
Algonquin Books
September 2008
On Sale: August 21, 2008
325 pages
ISBN: 1565124901
EAN: 9781565124905
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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