Ariel Sabar’s head was swimming with words as he listened to academics dispassionately analyze Neo-Aramaic languages at a linguistics workshop a few years ago.
But then his father, professor Yona Sabar, stood up and discussed Aramaic in the context of his childhood in the Jewish neighborhood of Zahko, Iraq — one of the last bastions of the dying language.
“This was the only talk in which I could hear — I could almost see — the people behind the words,” Ariel writes in “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.”
In approaching Aramaic in such a personal way, Yona made the language relatable for a novice. Ariel manages to accomplish a similar task in his family memoir — he transforms dense, complicated history into a compelling story.
As a child, Ariel was embarrassed of his strangely dressed, foreign-sounding father. As an adult, he became a newspaper reporter, and made his life researching the lives of other people. But it was the birth of his own son that made him realize his need to understand his own father — his own people.
While the story in “My Father’s Paradise” spans centuries, regions and religions, the epiphany at the heart of the book is one of redemption, a son making good with his father. Ariel could easily have written a coming-of-age weepfest about lost children and lost cultural identity, but he resists. Instead, he maintains his snappy reporter’s style.
Over the course of several years, Ariel interviewed nearly a hundred family members and friends, visited government archives and traveled to Iraq, Israel and Los Angeles, all in a quest to understand his father’s journey.
But in order to grasp Yona’s life, it’s important to understand the 2,700-year history of Kurdish Jews, something Ariel writes about masterfully. It’s his exhaustive interweaving of world history and family stories that make “My Father’s Paradise” such a fascinating read.
At the time of Yona’s birth in 1938, Muslims and Jews interacted peacefully in Zahko, as they had for centuries. They bartered, worked alongside one another and even recognized each other’s customs. Muslims would bring tea to Jews on Shabbat, despite the growing distrust of Jews in nearby Baghdad.
Yona grew up in this corner of the world blissfully unaware of the dire situations elsewhere. He spent his time jumping across the rooftops of mud-brick houses packed tightly in Zahko’s Jewish district, playing in the nearby Habur River and reading Torah portions alongside his spiritually uninhibited grandfather Ephraim.
But in the years nearing Yona’s 13th birthday, there was a growing exodus to Israel. It would eventually include his entire family along with every last Jew of Zahko. Yona was Zahko’s last bar mitzvah.
“It is tempting to look out across my father’s hometown and see a landscape of fairy tale: an ancient island in a river, in a broad plain, walled by snow-fringed mountains,” Ariel writes. “The Jews lived on the island, a crescent of rock spanning four hundred by eight hundred yards, in a region so isolated that Western visitors (and there weren’t many) often fancied they had discovered a tribe of lost Israelites.”
After immigrating to Israel and beginning his studies, Yona discovered his real passion was cataloguing the Aramaic he spoke as child (the language was in danger of becoming extinct when the Jews of Zahko began speaking Hebrew in Israel).
The book follows Yona as he studied at Hebrew University and Yale, and then became a professor, teaching Near Eastern languages at UCLA and occasionally recording sound bites for television show and films (such as “The X-Files” and “Oh, God!” — Aramaic was the language of Jesus’ time).
Yona felt a lifelong struggle with his identity after leaving Zahko, which may have been why he worked so hard to preserve his native tongue.
“In many ways [my father] had sublimated homesickness into a career,” Ariel comes to realize.
“My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq” by Ariel Sabar (325 pages, Algonquin Books, $25.95)
Ariel Sabar will discuss “My Father’s Paradise” at 7 p.m. Oct. 2 at Book Passage in Corte Madera; at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 6 at Readers’ Books in Sonoma; at 10 a.m. Oct. 7 at the Albert L. Schultz JCC in Palo Alto and 7:30 p.m. at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. He also will be at the BJE Jewish Community Library in San Francisco at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 13.