Writer and journalist Ariel Sabar '93 read from his new book "My Father's Paradise" in the Brown Bookstore Thursday afternoon. The former Providence Journal reporter discussed the history of the Jewish presence in Iraq and his quest to reconnect with his father, a Jew born in Kurdistan.
Sabar described his father's upbringing in the provincial Kurdish town of Zakho, an environment notable for cooperative relations between its Jewish and Muslim populations. His father, Yona, grew up speaking Aramaic, an ancient, very rare language, managing to preserve it even after his family immigrated to Israel in the 1940s and began to speak Hebrew. Yona moved to the U.S., eventually becoming a scholar of his native tongue, producing the first Aramaic-English dictionary and working as a professor at UCLA.
"His homesickness gets turned into a career," Sabar explained. "The one souvenir he takes with him is this language."
Sabar recalled his adolescent rebellion against his father, who never really adapted to the Los Angeles culture that Sabar valued. "At one point, I even stopped calling him 'abba,' or 'father,'" Sabar said.
After his own son was born, however, Sabar decided to repair his relationship with his father and traveled with him back to Zakho, the experience that he relates in his memoir. They found the town had been transformed and modernized by oil money, Sabar said, but they were still able to find older inhabitants who remembered the town in which Yona had grown up.
"The stories of Jews from Muslim lands have not been well-documented," Sabar said, explaining his aims for the memoir. "What we see in the headlines today isn't representative of Iraqi history," he said.
