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4.17 AVERAGE
4.17 AVERAGE
Wonderfully written story about a boy coming of age in LA with a brilliant father who is outdated & scholarly. His father is a fascinating man who is the last of a culture to speak Aramaic. His father grew up in Kurdistan in a Jewish community that was completely intertwined with the Kurds. The community has since been completely eradicated. His father studied Aramaic and wrote a book of Aramaic folk tales with the help of a village elder who lives in Israel (highly recommend, although it is difficult to get!). Amazing book about a culture that has all but disappeared.
ahhh a book for linguists and those who are willing to face immigrant children turning away from their pasts and dying cultures. I learned something on every page.
Wow. I really had my expectations exceeded with this one, yet it is hard to describe. Story of Kurdish Jews? (I didn't even know there WERE Kurdish Jews.) Story of the demise of Aramaic? I didn't know anyone still spoke it. Story of a man who immigrated from Kurdish Iraq to Jerusalem to New Haven to LA? Story of a son coming to terms with a father he had never understood? Story of keeping roots in a different land? Maybe all of these things. This haunting part-journalism, part novel, part memoir has elements of all of these. It is a beautiful book, but with a part of it always just out of reach, like the missing aunt the author desperately wanted to find but couldn't. I loved the way the author re-imagined, re-created the past he could not completely pin down through interviews--something I've often toyed with doing myself, although with less exotic material. I cried as he imagined his grandmother, forced to hand over the daughter she could not nurse to a wet-nurse, and then never seeing her again. Beautiful.
I knew very little about Kurdish Jews and Aramaic speakers and was intrigued from the beginning. It spans life in Kurdistan (and historical context of how the Jews got there), their ejection to Israel, life as Middle Eastern Jews and comparison to European Zionist Jews, further migration to the U.S., Aramaic scholarship, and then recollection and revisiting the past with his father and other family members. I really enjoyed this journalistic view of the author's father and family. It was a very moving inquiry into his father's past that deepened their relationship.
Well-deserved winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
Ariel Sabar takes the reader on a genealogical journey of discovery. His great-grandfather was an Aramaic-speaking Kurdistan Jew from Iraq. His grandfather moves the family from Iraq to the new country of Israel. His father leaves Israel to study in the United States, where Ariel then comes into the picture. Along the way, Sabar makes the entire family "live" for his readers.
Reading this was a marvelous experience. I resented any interruptions that pulled me away from the Sabar family.
The chapters that deal with Israel as a new country (with thousands and thousands of new immigrants with varied nationalities and languages and little infrastructure to accommodate them) were most fascinating.
Highly recommended!
Ariel Sabar takes the reader on a genealogical journey of discovery. His great-grandfather was an Aramaic-speaking Kurdistan Jew from Iraq. His grandfather moves the family from Iraq to the new country of Israel. His father leaves Israel to study in the United States, where Ariel then comes into the picture. Along the way, Sabar makes the entire family "live" for his readers.
Reading this was a marvelous experience. I resented any interruptions that pulled me away from the Sabar family.
The chapters that deal with Israel as a new country (with thousands and thousands of new immigrants with varied nationalities and languages and little infrastructure to accommodate them) were most fascinating.
Highly recommended!