Ariel Sabar

In his debut book My Father’s Paradise, award-winning journalist and author Ariel Sabar takes us on a journey into one of the oldest and most remote corners of  the Jewish Diaspora: Kurdish Iraq. His father, Yona Sabar, was born to an illiterate mother in a mud hut in the hills of northern Iraq, where Jews were so cut off from the rest of the world that they still spoke Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus. Yona was the last boy bar-mitzvahed in his town before the mass exodus of Jews from Iraq in the early 1950s. Like many Jews from Muslim lands, Yona’s family battled poverty and prejudice in the new state of Israel. But Yona’s deeply personal attachment to his dying mother tongue would  eventually win him a full scholarship to Yale University and a faculty job at UCLA. Professor Sabar is today regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on Aramaic. Trying to grow up cool in 1980s Los Angeles, Ariel rejected his odd-looking, funny-talking father. But after having a son of his own, Ariel set out to discover his father’s story – and his own.

Populated by Kurdish chieftains, trailblazing linguists, Arab nomads, and devout believers, My Father’s Paradise, winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, is a stirring tale of hope and redemption in an Iraq very different from the one in the headlines today.