Tag: Ariel Sabar

  • Kurdish Jewish History Arrives In Baltimore

    Kurdish Jewish History Arrives In Baltimore

    Kurdish-Jewish history preserved by author and son of an immigrant.

    Rochelle Eisenberg
    Staff Writer

    ariel-sabar

    When Ariel Sabar was growing up in Los Angeles, he was embarrassed by the exotic ways of his immigrant Kurdish-Jewish father, Dr. Yona Sabar. Dr. Sabar, a professor of Aramaic at the University of California-Los Angeles, was born and raised in the remote northern Iraqi village of Zakho.

    Years later, Mr. Sabar decided to travel to Zakho with his father. The result is “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search For His Jewish Past In Kurdish Iraq” (Algonquin Books), winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.

    Next Thursday, May 7, at 7 p.m., Mr. Sabar will speak at the Center for Jewish Education, at 5750 Park Heights Ave., about his book as part of CJE’s “On The Same Page” initiative. The program was piloted two years to bring together Jewish adults to discuss books with Jewish themes.

    The BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES spoke recently with Mr. Sabar. He worked as a journalist for 15 years, including three years as an investigative reporter at the Baltimore Sun.

    Why did you write the book?

    I was the consummate 1980s L.A. boy. I bought into the L.A. mythology. I boogie-boarded, bought my clothing at a surf shop. As I saw it through a boy’s eyes, my dad didn’t fit in. He didn’t know how to dress, he cut his own hair. I kept him at arm’s length

    The turning point in my life was the birth of my own son, Seth, in 2002. When you have your own kid, it changes your perspective of your relationship with your parents. I felt I was unfair to my own father.

    I also was drawn to the story about a forgotten-but-ancient group of Jews who were part of the oldest community of the Diaspora.

    What was your biggest surprise in Zakho?

    I heard that in Kurdistan (sic), the Jews and Muslims got along. I always was skeptical.

    People knew immediately we were Jews. The first thing the hosts said was, “Welcome to your home.” They invited us to drink tea and eat elaborate meals. There were still fond memories of Jewish life.

    Saddam Hussein tried to rename the Jewish quarter “the Liberated Quarter.” He didn’t want a trace. [After Saddam’s overthrow], my dad’s hometown went back to calling it “the Jewish Quarter.”

    What do you see as disheartening today between Jews and Muslims?

    People look at Iraq and read the headlines. There is this assumption that this was always the way, that they hated each other all the time. The story of the Kurdish Jews and the Jews in Iraq was that when the Israelites were exiled, they formed a pretty good pluralistic society. There were problems, but nothing of the scale of what was seen in Europe.

    What can American Jews learn from the history of the Kurdish Jews?

    What we can take away is the value of reaffirming our ties to our families’ histories. One of the themes of the book is that in the face of so much change, what can we hold on to? Make an effort to talk to grandparents, write down or video their stories and discus what it is about the past you want to preserve.

    Any stories from people you met on your book tours?

    Once or twice, a father of Mideastern background, in one case an Iraqi and in one case even a Kurdish Jew, said to me, “Now I have something to pass on to my child.”

    One son said, “I had no idea I had this history. I didn’t realize we had a rich past.”

    What also came out of the book tour were documents and memoirs that were given to me. I’ve became a repository of Kurdish Jews. I hope to maintain the e-mails and documents that people sent to me.

    What’s your next project?

    It was inspired by the story of how my parents met. My father was in his first year in New York and thinking of going back to Israel. America was not what it seemed. He sees a woman entering Washington Square park, taking photos of people who didn’t succeed in America. It reminded him of the Kurds in Israel. He talked to her and they got married four months later.

    I want to find other stories of people with strikingly different backgrounds, who happen to meet by chance in New York iconic public places.

    Anything else?

    A big Iraqi magazine wrote a four-page spread on the book. I have made friends on Facebook with Kurds in Turkey. An Arab radio station did a piece. The book is being translated into Hebrew, to be published later this year or early next year, and the Dutch have bought the rights to the book. You see the way the book is being received by all three faiths. It’s an affirmation.

    Source:  www.jewishtimes.com, May 1, 2009

  • The Man From Zakho

    The Man From Zakho

    Ariel Sabor’s ‘My Father’s Paradise’ paints a portrait of one man and the vanished Kurdish ‘Jerusalem’ from which he came.

    by Sandee Brawarsky
    Jewish Week Book Critic

    There are no more Jews in Zakho. Once the center of Jewish activity in Kurdish Iraq, the isolated town, a dusty vision of biblical landscape, was known as the “Jerusalem of Kurdistan.” Residents spoke the ancient Aramaic language, which they kept alive, along with their faith and distinctive culture, for almost 3,000 years. In the 1950s, after the Iraqi government turned against the Jews, the entire community moved to Israel, as part of Operations Ezra and Nehemiah. More than 120,000 Jews were airlifted from Iraq, including 18,000 Kurdish Jews; other Kurdish Jews arrived from Syria and Iran.

    Yona Sabar was born in Zakho, and was the last boy to have his bar mitzvah there. He lived in a mud home, whose roof his family sometimes slept on in the heat, and he enjoyed meeting his grandfather in shul, where the old man sat up every night, conversing with the angels. In Israel, his once-successful merchant family was impoverished; while the Muslims and Christians in Zakho had respected them, the Kurds were looked down on as the very lowest class in the new State of Israel. Sabar, unlike most of his fellow villagers, graduated from high school in Israel (while working full-time to help support his family) and Hebrew University where he studied language with a special interest in Aramaic. He received his doctorate in Near East Languages and Literature from Yale, and now is a distinguished professor at University of California Los Angeles. His ranch-style house in Los Angeles bears no resemblance to his childhood home, where hens and customers crisscrossed the dirt floor at all hours.

    The remarkable arc of Sabar’s life is at the center of his son Ariel Sabar’s outstanding book, “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq”(Algonquin). In telling his father’s story intertwined with the family’s tales, journalist Sabar reconstructs the little-known history of the Kurdish Jews, who lived in harmony with their non-Jewish neighbors. In Zakho, Muslims would bring tea to their Jewish neighbors on Shabbat, when the Jews weren’t able to cook. Jewish men wore the same baggy trousers and embroidered shirts as Muslims, “even if a few strands of tzitzit poked out from beneath their shirts.”

    “My father had staked his life on the notion that the past mattered more than anything,” the younger Sabar writes, adding, “He sublimated homesickness into a career.”

    “My Father’s Paradise” is also a deeply personal story of a distant father and son who were ultimately reconciled. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, Ariel Sabar found his father embarrassing, regarding him as the uncoolest person he knew, with his unstylish clothing and beat-up car, and his passion for ancient languages rather than popular culture.

    But, after moving across the country to attend college, falling in love with and marrying a non-Jewish woman and working hard in his first reporting jobs, Sabar was drawn to write about his father after the scholar was called to consult on the television series “The X-Files,” about the language Jesus might have used. For the first time, Sabar asked his father, as he might have questioned any source, about his life in Zakho. His story in the Providence Journal, “Scholar Dad Goes Showbiz: ‘I Am the Walrus’ in Aramaic” brought him a greater response than all of his previous articles combined. He then thought that he had said everything he had to say about his father.

    Several years later, after he and his wife had their first child, a son, Sabar began seriously thinking about “fathers and sons, and what is it we inherit,” he tells The Jewish Week in an interview. “Would [his son] feel the way I did about my father? That this guy had nothing to teach me, that I didn’t care where he came from, that I was my own person? It took me back to some long-neglected questions.” Now, looking back, he’s not proud of the way he treated his father.

    Aware that his potential sources — Kurdish Jews like his father who remembered life in Iraq — were aging, Sabar felt a sense of duty to preserve their past. And, as a journalist, he sensed he was onto a great story. He quit his newspaper job and moved to Maine, where his wife returned to work as a physician; he began researching and traveling, tracking down relatives and family friends. His father still had the Kurdish sensibility, where people survived by keeping their heads down, so he wasn’t altogether comfortable about being the subject of a book.

    Collecting an impressive amount of detail, Sabar creates a compelling narrative. The Jews of Zakho had little in common with the Jews of Baghdad, who spoke Arabic, built huge synagogues and yeshivas, ran large businesses and held government jobs. In the 1940s, the remote Jews of Zakho had no idea of what was happening to the Jews of Europe; nor did they know of a deadly pogrom in Baghdad in 1941.

    Sabar conveys the life of Zakho, with its storytellers, beggars, traders, smugglers, loggers, Arab tribesmen, cheese makers, and the one dyer of fabrics, his great-grandfather the mystic. Girls didn’t go to school, but instead learned to do heavy chores and to cook specialties whose descriptions may send readers in search of a Kurdish kosher cookbook. His grandmother Miryam’s life was full of loss, including having her firstborn, a daughter, never returned by a tribeswoman who agreed to be her nursemaid when Miryam was ill. She had lost her own mother at a young age, and was married at 13 to a cousin, who proved to be kind.

    In Israel, Miryam was lost, never learning Hebrew, and even though her neighbors would sit around and speak of children, she wouldn’t mention that two of her sons were university professors, her two daughters teachers, another son a vice principal of a school and another a bank officer, for fear that boasting tempts the evil eye. The author knew her as the grandmother who coaxed him in Aramaic, “you didn’t eat anything” and ate only after everyone else finished. He learned the full and vivid story of her life there through transcribed and translated interviews he did with her as a student, while studying her language.

    In 2005, father and son traveled to Zakho together — a dangerous time for Americans and Jews in Iraq — and were greeted with kindness; many people remembered Sabar’s grandfather and could tick off the names of the Jewish families they did business with, and some spoke of missing the Jewish presence. The Jewish neighborhood was now the poorest section of town, and the shuls had become private homes. The Sabars realized that the generation that recalled Jews fondly, remembering the brotherhood they experienced, wouldn’t be around much longer.

    “Journalism can be pretty cynical. But to cross the border and see the sign, ‘Welcome to Kurdistan of Iraq” — I was euphoric” the author says. Zakho is grittier than he expected, and it’s also fast-growing, with traffic, construction and Internet cafés, not like the sleepy mountain town his father left. While there, they attempted to track down Yona’s long-lost sister.

    Ariel Sabar explains that for his father, the idea of Paradise is not only Zakho, but also the Israel he had dreamed of, and even California, where he finds much tolerance of difference and is able to preserve his mother tongue. In the unlikely setting of an upscale L.A. mall, drinking iced coffee under the palm trees, he also experiences a kind of paradise, where he’s able to negotiate past and present.

    Today, the younger Sabar, 37, is covering the presidential elections for The Christian Science Monitor. He and his wife raise their two children as Jews, playing Kurdish music at home, teaching them the Hebrew alphabet and prayers.

    When asked how his father feels about the book, Sabar says, “He saw that I had gone on a journey not unlike his own, to preserve those parts of the past we can take with us. He has a measure of pride that his son, in his own way, would follow in his footsteps.”

    Source: TheJewishWeek.com