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4.17 AVERAGE
4.17 AVERAGE
This book told a fascinating story both of a father's journey from one country to another and from one life to another, and of a son's journey to understand his father. The story is written in a style that is readable and engaging on the level of narrative while also being informative and eye-opening. I learned about a Jewish community that no longer exists, and that I had never before heard of.
This work is a high three low four. The first 200 pages or so are great, then the work starts to drag ,then for the last few pages it picks up again. This work is the story of one Jewish families trek from Iraq to the U.S.. The part from Great Grandpa to dad entering the U.S. and going to Yale are wonderful. Once the story gets to Yale the slow down starts. It is the story of a young man struggling with adapting to life in the U.S.. I found this part dull and skimmed their section. When Ariel and his father return to Iraq during Operation Provide Comfort/Per-Diem in the early 90's the story picks up interest and speed. (I spent 18 months of my three years at RAF Bentwaters in Turkey maintaining the A-10's that flew o ver Northern Iraq and kept Saddam Husein's head down.) This is a family history, well written, and mostly a quick exciting read. If the Mid-East is an area of interest it is a must.
A very interesting and informative read, about a people supposedly lost in time. The writing was pretty good, if slightly overwrought at times. Understandable, given the personal nature of its content - the author's father's family history - which is fascinating. Well worth reading for the history alone, and most especially for the moving family story.
The Lost Tribe Loses the Plot
A moving story, as so often the case, of Jews dispossessed and exiled. In this instance from the remote region of Kurdish Iraq. There is no question that this story of personal travail is worth telling and worth reading. Among other things, it is a story which provides essential background for the recent rise of Islamic State and its persecution of Kurdish Christians in a re-play of what the Iraqi government did to the Kurdish Jews almost seven decades ago.
But Sabar’s main theme isn’t personal, despite his use of his own family on which to paint a picture of what he himself refers to as one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. His primary point is a cultural one. The book is a sort of a conciliatory homage to his father who, removed from the ancestral home of the Kurdistan Jews as a child, is one of a disappearing remnant of this ancient fragment of the Jewish Dispersion directed by the Assyrian empire in the 8th century BCE. His father is, understandably, obsessed by his heritage: “My father had staked his life on the notion that the past mattered more than anything.” For him, the lost culture of Kurdistani Judaism has an intensely emotional and sentimental import: “The past felt safe, like a hiding place.” He devotes his life to the documentation of the Neo-Aramaic dialect that was all but lost in the mass emigration. Again, from a personal perspective, this is a not unreasonable response to traumatic dislocation. But the subject of the book isn’t his father, it is the culture in which this arcane dialect persisted and to which his father has devoted his adult life to remembering.
What kind of culture was this? Certainly beyond primitive, beyond simple patriarchy. It was a savage, uneducated, feudal culture of subsistence, not one of arts or technology or social graces or even modest civilisation. It was a culture in which not only was a boy-child valued infinitely over a girl (despite a long-term decline in population), but one in which an infant was given away to a nomadic wet-nurse whom no one knew, and who was not pursued when she didn’t return the child as per agreement merely because her father was not so inclined to postpone pressing business engagements. Subsequently he cavalierly risked his sons in his smuggling operations. This was apparently a culture based not on personal, family, tribal, or religious loyalty, but solely on the prospects for trade, both legal and illegal. Its brutality, necessitated in part by the severe physical environment in which it existed, was made an order of magnitude more brutal by the reduction of human relationships to their functional usefulness in maintaining the dominance of males. Think of the poverty of Dickensian London overlaid with the social barbarity of the barrios of Sao Paulo, and the Maoist destruction of family feeling in the Cultural Revolution. This is the world of Kurdish Jews in the 1930’s and 40’s as portrayed by Sabar - verging itself on tragedy in its very existence.
Why then should one be tempted to mourn the passage of such a culture? Sabar’s sentimental quest for his roots as a mode of reconciliation with his father is understandable. But remarkable as is the survival of a remote Jewish enclave for 2700 years, its voluntary assimilation into the modern world, principally the modern world of Israeli Judaism, is hardly a profound tragedy. The life of a Kurdish Jew was no idyll. Viewed as an historical relic, the loss of this remnant of the Assyrian-ordered diaspora and its oral traditions is perhaps of somewhat less significance than the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha of Bamiyan. Much of the oral tradition could at least be recorded for posterity unlike the ancient statue which is irrecoverable. Viewed as the rescue of a group of impoverished, disadvantaged, illiterate, and hopelessly dying human beings, this same loss can only be viewed as a successful and fortunate work of mercy.
There was however one major characteristic of this culture worth saving: its religious tolerance. The isolation of the Kurdish region insulated local Jews, Muslims, Christians and others from the religious ideologies promoted elsewhere - from pan Arab Islam to Zionist Judaism to Evangelical Christianity. Whatever the level of patriarchal brutality existing in any of the Kurdish religious groups, they all had a remarkable degree of mutual respect for tradition and custom according to Sabar. Muslims, for example, routinely carried out sabbath-day tasks forbidden to Jews while Jews refrained from smoking during Ramadan. He describes a sort of equivalent to the Iberian Golden Age of tolerance and civil assistance, without of course the intellectual component. This amicability was destroyed not by Dominican religious agitprop of course but simply by improvement in communications with the ideologically enmeshed world. Having been touched by religious and nationalist propaganda and by the increased political interest in that part of the globe, there was no way inter-religious relations could remain stable after the Second World War.
Nevertheless, despite this apparently accidental, and perhaps incidental, religious tolerance, it is difficult to conceive of the conditions in which Kurdish Jews existed to be, as the title suggests, in any way paradise-like. Paradise as a sentimental conceit certainly but not as any ground-truth. No, as a memoir of personal displacement and courageous re-establishment, the book works. As a memorial to a lost culture whose contribution to the world will be missed, it is an inevitable failure.
A moving story, as so often the case, of Jews dispossessed and exiled. In this instance from the remote region of Kurdish Iraq. There is no question that this story of personal travail is worth telling and worth reading. Among other things, it is a story which provides essential background for the recent rise of Islamic State and its persecution of Kurdish Christians in a re-play of what the Iraqi government did to the Kurdish Jews almost seven decades ago.
But Sabar’s main theme isn’t personal, despite his use of his own family on which to paint a picture of what he himself refers to as one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. His primary point is a cultural one. The book is a sort of a conciliatory homage to his father who, removed from the ancestral home of the Kurdistan Jews as a child, is one of a disappearing remnant of this ancient fragment of the Jewish Dispersion directed by the Assyrian empire in the 8th century BCE. His father is, understandably, obsessed by his heritage: “My father had staked his life on the notion that the past mattered more than anything.” For him, the lost culture of Kurdistani Judaism has an intensely emotional and sentimental import: “The past felt safe, like a hiding place.” He devotes his life to the documentation of the Neo-Aramaic dialect that was all but lost in the mass emigration. Again, from a personal perspective, this is a not unreasonable response to traumatic dislocation. But the subject of the book isn’t his father, it is the culture in which this arcane dialect persisted and to which his father has devoted his adult life to remembering.
What kind of culture was this? Certainly beyond primitive, beyond simple patriarchy. It was a savage, uneducated, feudal culture of subsistence, not one of arts or technology or social graces or even modest civilisation. It was a culture in which not only was a boy-child valued infinitely over a girl (despite a long-term decline in population), but one in which an infant was given away to a nomadic wet-nurse whom no one knew, and who was not pursued when she didn’t return the child as per agreement merely because her father was not so inclined to postpone pressing business engagements. Subsequently he cavalierly risked his sons in his smuggling operations. This was apparently a culture based not on personal, family, tribal, or religious loyalty, but solely on the prospects for trade, both legal and illegal. Its brutality, necessitated in part by the severe physical environment in which it existed, was made an order of magnitude more brutal by the reduction of human relationships to their functional usefulness in maintaining the dominance of males. Think of the poverty of Dickensian London overlaid with the social barbarity of the barrios of Sao Paulo, and the Maoist destruction of family feeling in the Cultural Revolution. This is the world of Kurdish Jews in the 1930’s and 40’s as portrayed by Sabar - verging itself on tragedy in its very existence.
Why then should one be tempted to mourn the passage of such a culture? Sabar’s sentimental quest for his roots as a mode of reconciliation with his father is understandable. But remarkable as is the survival of a remote Jewish enclave for 2700 years, its voluntary assimilation into the modern world, principally the modern world of Israeli Judaism, is hardly a profound tragedy. The life of a Kurdish Jew was no idyll. Viewed as an historical relic, the loss of this remnant of the Assyrian-ordered diaspora and its oral traditions is perhaps of somewhat less significance than the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha of Bamiyan. Much of the oral tradition could at least be recorded for posterity unlike the ancient statue which is irrecoverable. Viewed as the rescue of a group of impoverished, disadvantaged, illiterate, and hopelessly dying human beings, this same loss can only be viewed as a successful and fortunate work of mercy.
There was however one major characteristic of this culture worth saving: its religious tolerance. The isolation of the Kurdish region insulated local Jews, Muslims, Christians and others from the religious ideologies promoted elsewhere - from pan Arab Islam to Zionist Judaism to Evangelical Christianity. Whatever the level of patriarchal brutality existing in any of the Kurdish religious groups, they all had a remarkable degree of mutual respect for tradition and custom according to Sabar. Muslims, for example, routinely carried out sabbath-day tasks forbidden to Jews while Jews refrained from smoking during Ramadan. He describes a sort of equivalent to the Iberian Golden Age of tolerance and civil assistance, without of course the intellectual component. This amicability was destroyed not by Dominican religious agitprop of course but simply by improvement in communications with the ideologically enmeshed world. Having been touched by religious and nationalist propaganda and by the increased political interest in that part of the globe, there was no way inter-religious relations could remain stable after the Second World War.
Nevertheless, despite this apparently accidental, and perhaps incidental, religious tolerance, it is difficult to conceive of the conditions in which Kurdish Jews existed to be, as the title suggests, in any way paradise-like. Paradise as a sentimental conceit certainly but not as any ground-truth. No, as a memoir of personal displacement and courageous re-establishment, the book works. As a memorial to a lost culture whose contribution to the world will be missed, it is an inevitable failure.
"What is the value of our past? When we carry our languages and stories from one generation to the next, from one country to another, what exactly do we gain?
... If studied in the right angle of light, the past could carry you to new worlds... If you knew which levers to pull, you could stop time just long enough to save the things you loved most...
For most of us, experience grinds down dreams. Time clarifies our aptitudes. We scale back our expectations. Setting the bar lower is a basic human defense. It lets us celebrate small triumphs. It protects us from the realization that some hopes are forever out of reach. It is a trade-off all immigrants make, sacrificing what we were for what our children might be...
Everyone here [in the U.S.] wanted you to complete questionnaires, rate and rank your likes and dislikes, mince your life into a thousand categories that some school administrator later turned into statistics...
The more a society advances in a technical and material way, the more its people grow complicated and distant from one another. Everyone here, and especially the intellectuals, is an individual... In one letter he told his sister that "America is a country of 200 million lonely people." In another he described America as a land of false hopes...
Was it possible to feel a stronger bond to one part of one's ancestry, an abstract part that encompassed language and culture, than to another? What were his obligations, exactly? What kind of person was he to neglect his family? Weren't they the living incarnation of his roots? He had thought that he could take his past with him, box it up, and replant it in fresh soil. Now he wondered whether that was just self-serving bunk...
Immigrants like my grandfather, who lived in a world of absolutes, set themselves up for disappointment. My father, it seems, saw that survival in a new land required a daily negotiation of past and present. There were times when it was better to favor pragmatism over orthodoxy, ambiguity over hard truth...
You have certain hopes... You do this as a nostalgic trip, and nostalgia is you feel like you will see a place again. And when you see nothing is left, it's in a way a comment on life itself. You see that life doesn't stand still. Nothing waits for you to visit it again. The river keeps flowing. It may be smaller. But still it flows. And with it your life flows by. This is what life basically is...
Dreams were a place where fragments could be made whole...
Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent. When the whispers of Aramaic and Dama and Plains Miwok are at last drowned out by the shouts, what do we do? We should pause to mourn. But then we must tell our stories in a new tongue, so at least the stories may survive...
There is a counterpoint to the familiar immigrant story of opportunities won: It is the story, less often told, of cultures lost. Its trope is not "a better life for our children" but broken bonds to ancestors, lang, identity, and history. For many immigrants, the past is painful and best forgotten; it is the reason they left. But for my father, it was where the best part of himself resided. It was a place where life could still be glimpsed through a child's eyes...
In going to Israel and then America, he had set in motion a chain of events whose ineluctable end was a son with weaker ties to his past... [but] he saw value in swimming hard against the tide. It was in the collision of past and present that he found he could see himself most clearly...
In tunneling back through time, I wanted only a better sense of my debts to history. I grew up believing I could be anybody. But my son's birth... was a stark reminder of continuity, that we are who we come from as much as who we make of ourselves. Jews had carried a flame into the hills of Kurdistan, and they carried it out, still burning, 2,700 years later. My father touched another candle to it and brought it across continents... If my children ever feel adrift, unsure of who they are, I want that candle to still be burning."
... If studied in the right angle of light, the past could carry you to new worlds... If you knew which levers to pull, you could stop time just long enough to save the things you loved most...
For most of us, experience grinds down dreams. Time clarifies our aptitudes. We scale back our expectations. Setting the bar lower is a basic human defense. It lets us celebrate small triumphs. It protects us from the realization that some hopes are forever out of reach. It is a trade-off all immigrants make, sacrificing what we were for what our children might be...
Everyone here [in the U.S.] wanted you to complete questionnaires, rate and rank your likes and dislikes, mince your life into a thousand categories that some school administrator later turned into statistics...
The more a society advances in a technical and material way, the more its people grow complicated and distant from one another. Everyone here, and especially the intellectuals, is an individual... In one letter he told his sister that "America is a country of 200 million lonely people." In another he described America as a land of false hopes...
Was it possible to feel a stronger bond to one part of one's ancestry, an abstract part that encompassed language and culture, than to another? What were his obligations, exactly? What kind of person was he to neglect his family? Weren't they the living incarnation of his roots? He had thought that he could take his past with him, box it up, and replant it in fresh soil. Now he wondered whether that was just self-serving bunk...
Immigrants like my grandfather, who lived in a world of absolutes, set themselves up for disappointment. My father, it seems, saw that survival in a new land required a daily negotiation of past and present. There were times when it was better to favor pragmatism over orthodoxy, ambiguity over hard truth...
You have certain hopes... You do this as a nostalgic trip, and nostalgia is you feel like you will see a place again. And when you see nothing is left, it's in a way a comment on life itself. You see that life doesn't stand still. Nothing waits for you to visit it again. The river keeps flowing. It may be smaller. But still it flows. And with it your life flows by. This is what life basically is...
Dreams were a place where fragments could be made whole...
Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent. When the whispers of Aramaic and Dama and Plains Miwok are at last drowned out by the shouts, what do we do? We should pause to mourn. But then we must tell our stories in a new tongue, so at least the stories may survive...
There is a counterpoint to the familiar immigrant story of opportunities won: It is the story, less often told, of cultures lost. Its trope is not "a better life for our children" but broken bonds to ancestors, lang, identity, and history. For many immigrants, the past is painful and best forgotten; it is the reason they left. But for my father, it was where the best part of himself resided. It was a place where life could still be glimpsed through a child's eyes...
In going to Israel and then America, he had set in motion a chain of events whose ineluctable end was a son with weaker ties to his past... [but] he saw value in swimming hard against the tide. It was in the collision of past and present that he found he could see himself most clearly...
In tunneling back through time, I wanted only a better sense of my debts to history. I grew up believing I could be anybody. But my son's birth... was a stark reminder of continuity, that we are who we come from as much as who we make of ourselves. Jews had carried a flame into the hills of Kurdistan, and they carried it out, still burning, 2,700 years later. My father touched another candle to it and brought it across continents... If my children ever feel adrift, unsure of who they are, I want that candle to still be burning."
I read the first 100 pages of this book and then I misplaced it. I was very disappointed as I was really into it. And then after some time I found it again. It had slipped underneath my bed from the tiny space between the bed and the wall. When I started reading it again from the point I left, I couldn’t follow the story, so I thought I would skim the first 100 pages again. But I ended reading them instead of skimming. And I’m so glad I did. I understood the book so much better because of that. For someone like me who didn’t know anything about Kurdish Jews or Zakho, I’m actually glad I misplaced it. This doesn’t mean you’ll have to re-read the beginning too. I know that’s just me. That’s just to say how engrossing the book was even the second time around.
In a small and dusty village called Zakho at the border of Iraq, nestled between the mountains and almost secluded from the rest of Iraq, a boy called Yona Sabagha, Ariel Sabar’s father, was born. Yona was the son of Rahmain and grandson of Ephraim, who was a respected dyer and was known to talk to angels. Yona spent his first 11 years in Zakho, a place where where Muslims and Jews lived in Harmony. But somewhere around the time of the Second World War, things began to change. The Arab Islamic movement took hold in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq, which resulted in conflicts between the Jews and Muslims. Majority of the Jews from the Arab World fled to Israel. Along with the millions of Jews, Yona’s family too had to go.
In Israel, Yona struggled with life and getting a job and studying. What really amazed me was the courage and conviction of Yona and his friends to become something, to pull themselves and families above the poverty line. When Yona was granted scholarship in the States, he decided to take it. There he met his future wife. So in a way his son Ariel did not experience or know what it was like to be a Kurdish Jew. He was an American through and through. Yona could never really accept the American culture, nor could he go back to his past.S o he was in a way strange to his son.
After many years Ariel decides to go back to Zakho with his father in the hopes of getting to know him better and also to close the rift that had divided them for so many years.
I absolutely LOVED this book. It reads like fiction where he describes his father and his life and like non-fiction where he writes about the Kurdish Jews and the history of Aramaic. But no where does it get boring or over-bearing. The descriptions of Zakho, what it was like then and now, were mesmerizing. It was like discovering a whole new world.
The journey of a son to understand his father, his past and his own roots was beautiful, heartbreaking, captivating and hopeful. This book felt like a tribute to his father and the Jews from Zakho who are relatively unknown to the world. Author Ariel Sabar has documented history in the most beautiful way possible.
Very highly recommended. Let me know if you need more convincing.
Reviewed at
http://violetcrush.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/my-fathers-paradise-by-ariel-sabar/
In a small and dusty village called Zakho at the border of Iraq, nestled between the mountains and almost secluded from the rest of Iraq, a boy called Yona Sabagha, Ariel Sabar’s father, was born. Yona was the son of Rahmain and grandson of Ephraim, who was a respected dyer and was known to talk to angels. Yona spent his first 11 years in Zakho, a place where where Muslims and Jews lived in Harmony. But somewhere around the time of the Second World War, things began to change. The Arab Islamic movement took hold in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq, which resulted in conflicts between the Jews and Muslims. Majority of the Jews from the Arab World fled to Israel. Along with the millions of Jews, Yona’s family too had to go.
In Israel, Yona struggled with life and getting a job and studying. What really amazed me was the courage and conviction of Yona and his friends to become something, to pull themselves and families above the poverty line. When Yona was granted scholarship in the States, he decided to take it. There he met his future wife. So in a way his son Ariel did not experience or know what it was like to be a Kurdish Jew. He was an American through and through. Yona could never really accept the American culture, nor could he go back to his past.S o he was in a way strange to his son.
After many years Ariel decides to go back to Zakho with his father in the hopes of getting to know him better and also to close the rift that had divided them for so many years.
I absolutely LOVED this book. It reads like fiction where he describes his father and his life and like non-fiction where he writes about the Kurdish Jews and the history of Aramaic. But no where does it get boring or over-bearing. The descriptions of Zakho, what it was like then and now, were mesmerizing. It was like discovering a whole new world.
The journey of a son to understand his father, his past and his own roots was beautiful, heartbreaking, captivating and hopeful. This book felt like a tribute to his father and the Jews from Zakho who are relatively unknown to the world. Author Ariel Sabar has documented history in the most beautiful way possible.
Very highly recommended. Let me know if you need more convincing.
Reviewed at
http://violetcrush.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/my-fathers-paradise-by-ariel-sabar/
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
An interesting look at a rocky father-son relationship and the history that made everyone who they are. I've never thought much about what happened to the Shephardic Jews when they reached Israel, but this is a lovely history of a place that time forgot - until it was remembered.
adventurous
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced