My father’s paradise: A son's search for his Jewish past in Kurdish Iraq
Ariel Sabar
A mysterious corner of Iraq. An ancient language a tribe of mystics and magic men, peasants and storytellers vanished history. And a son's epic journey back to his father's lost homeland.
Advance Praise for My father's paradise
"Something rare and precious - a tale of hope and continuity that can be passed on for generations." - Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Taut and extravagant. A sweeping saga with the cadence of a Biblical tale." - Daniel Asa Rose, author of hiding places: A Father and his sons retrace their family's escape from the Holocaust
"Touching and brilliantly written... It is an incredible story of a man divided among three cultures. The striking discontinuities in Yona Sabar's journey reveal the transformations of an immigrant's life as much as its trials and heartbreak:' - Sammy Smooha, Ph.D., winner of the 2008 Israel Prize for sociology and author of Arabs and Jews in Israel
"An enchanting combination of history, family, and discovery-Ariel Sabar's chronicle of his journey is flat-out wonderful." - Rabbi David Wolpe, author of Why Faith Matters
"With the novelistic skill of a Levantine storyteller ... Sabar explores the conflicting demands of love and tradition, the burdens and blessings of an ancient culture encountering the 21st century. A well-researched text falling somewhere between journalism and memoir, sustained by Mesopotamian imagination:' - Kirkus Reviews
"I searched to discover which was the first of all languages. Many have said that the Aramaic is most ancient, and that it is in the nature of man to speak it without having been taught by anyone. Further, that if a newborn child were placed in the desert with no one but a mute wet nurse, he would speak Aramaic."
-Abraham Ibn-Ezra, twelfth-century commentator and linguist
Contents
A note on method / ix
Introduction / 1
Zakho
1. What's in a name / 9
2. An Island in a river / 12
3. A book with shining pages / 16
4. Rotten corn / 19
5. A surprise / 25
6. The dyer's son / 28
7. Little thumb girl / 31
8. A woman's purpose / 42
9. A prayer to the prophet / 45
10. No Wasted Steps / 48
11. Lost in the land of Assyria / 51
12. Speaking with angels / 57
13. Arabs before jews / 61
14. Plus and minus / 65
15. The mountains are our only friends / 67
16. Freezing in baghdad / 72
17. Hanging / 76
18. Let the hajji speak / 80
19. Can't help this time / 83
20. To hell with books / 87
21. Let my people go / 93
22. A suitable level of civilization / 96
23. God will provide / 102
24. Iraqi stamps / 103
Israel
25. Kissing the ground / 109
26. Where are the Jewish synagogues? / 111
27. Herzl's beard / 117
28. Ana Kurdi / 120
29. Some of the best in Zakho 124
30. John savage / 126
31. Sleepwalking out windows / 134
32. The brotherhood of man / 145
33. Gold / 149
Aramaic
34. Lishana Deni / 155
35. Cleft sentences / 159
36. It's all god's world / 164
37. Hets and 'Ayins / 172
38. Abandoning the fountainhead / 175
39. Exiled and redeemed / 183
40. Systematic description of a Living Dialect / 189
41. Getting Lost / 192
Yale
42. Aramaic for dirges / 197
43. To a deep well / 203
44. Missions / 213
45. A memorial Candle / 218
46. Are they kings? / 220
47. Some enchanted place / 223
Father and son
48. Speechless / 229
49. Hollywood on the Habur / 241
50. Coming of the Messiah / 247
51. Covenants / 254
The return
52. River keeps flowing / 261
53. Time travel / 267
54. Habur / 272
55. Kiss the eyes of your sons / 274
56. Turkish delights or Jordan almonds / 278
57. Heaven sent / 283
58. Chasing phantoms / 287
59. A disaster, god forbid / 291
6o. Kind of a problem / 296
61. Breakdown / 298
62. "The girl, the Jew, is alive." / 301
63. Convenient truths / 308
Conclusion
64. Paradise lost / 315
65. Ice-blended mocha / 318
66. Saba's music / 321
Acknowledgments / 327
Selected bibliography / 329
My father’s paradise
A son's search for his Jewish past in Kurdish Iraq
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 II, 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 whose true passion is praying through the night in Zakho's tiny mud-brick synagogue; his quietly heroic grandmother, who never recovers from the kidnapping of her first-born child; his grandfather, defeated by the prejudice and poverty Kurds faced in the Promised Land of Israel; and young Yona, Ariel's father, a footloose boy who swims in the Habur river, leaps across rooftops, and becomes the last bar mitzvah in Zakho before being ousted from paradise.
Populated by Kurdish chieftains, trailblazing linguists, Arab nomads, and devout believers, this intimate yet powerful book is an improbable story of tolerance and hope set in what today is the very center of the world's attention. In retelling his father's story, Ariel Sabar has found his own.
Jacket design: Evan Gaffney
Jacket art: photograph - Man on the Road to Zakho, Iraq, 1934 (donated from the collection of the late Abraham Jacob Braver to the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center); border - Kelim carpet. Mersida, Iraqi Kurdistan (lent by Itzhak Itzhak and his wife, the weaver. Ruhama, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
A note on method
To research this book, I interviewed nearly one hundred relatives, family friends and acquaintances, scholars, and others. I conducted re- search at libraries, special collections, and government archives in the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom. I traveled to Iraq, Israel, and cities across the United States to see crucial settings with my own eyes. I collected family letters, diaries, photographs, and official docu- ments. I read transcripts of my grandmother's recorded oral histories. And I spent untold hours harrying my father with questions. I took pains to find every living relative and acquaintance in a position to shed light on my family's story.
But while this book is by and large a work of nonfiction, it is not formal history or biography. Nor is it journalism. In parts of this story where key sources had died or where memories had faded, I built on the framework of known facts and let myself imagine how the particulars of a scene or dialogue would be likely to have unfolded.
A book on one's family is by its nature a subjective exercise. But I have tried in every instance to keep faith with the larger emotional truth of my family's saga.
I changed the names of people who were involved in a family contro- versy in Israel, because they are dead and did not have a chance to de- fend themselves. I created a few minor composite characters in an effort to streamline the narrative. Also, in the scenes in modern-day Kurdish Iraq, I changed the names of the people who helped me, out of concern for their security.
INTRODUCTION
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.
Our first clash - really more of a proxy battle - was over my name. My father wanted to call me Aram, after the swath of ancient Syria where the first Aramaic-speaking tribes dwelt in the second millennium B.C. A son named Aram would be a thread through three thousand years of history, uncoiling through Israel and Kurdistan back to a patch of land between the Habur and Euphrates rivers where my father's native language first graced the lips of man. A son named Aram would pass this awesome birthright to his own son, and that son to his, on and on down the line, like princes in a fairy tale.
This may have been my father's reasoning. But it was not my mother's. She seemed to understand me even before I was born, because she didn't much care for Aram. As an American she knew the cruelty of children to kids with weird names. Aram, she told my father, was a nonstarter.
And so even before I drew a breath, I had landed my first blow.
…
My father’s paradise
A son's search for his Jewish past in Kurdish Iraq
Ariel Sabar
Algonquin books of Chapel Hill
a division of Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014
www.algonquin.com
Published by
Algonquin books of Chapel Hill
Post office box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
A division of
Workman publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2008 by Ariel Sabar
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Anne Winslow.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP record of this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-490-5
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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, Mother Jones magazine, and other publications. He lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C. Please visit his Web site: www.arielsabar.com
