Starred review from June 23, 2008
For his first 31 years Sabar considered his father, Yona, an embarrassing anachronism. “Ours was a clash of civilizations, writ small. He was ancient Kurdistan. I was 1980s L.A.” Yona was a UCLA professor whose passion was his native language, Aramaic. Ariel was an aspiring rock-and-roll drummer. The birth of Sabar’s own son in 2002 was a turning point, prompting Sabar to try to understand his father on his own terms. Readers can only be grateful to him for unearthing the history of a family, a people and a very different image of Iraq. Sabar vividly depicts daily life in the remote village of Zahko, where Muslims, Jews and Christians banded together to ensure prosperity and survival, and in Israel (after the Jews’ 1951 expulsion from Iraq), where Kurdish Jews were stereotyped as backward and simple. Sabar’s career as an investigative reporter at the Baltimore Sun
and elsewhere serves him well, particularly in his attempt to track down his father’s oldest sister, who was kidnapped as an infant. Sabar offers something rare and precious—a tale of hope and continuity that can be passed on for generations. Photos.
September 1, 2008
Sabar, a former political reporter for the "Christian Science Monitor", grew up as a typical California kid. His father, a Kurdish Jew, is the foremost scholar of Aramaic, the language of Jesus, which most people think is extinct. The disconnect between his present and his past launched Sabar on a quest to understand the history of Kurdish Jews, who spent 2000 years in northern Iraq until the 1950s, when most of them emigrated to Israel. Interweaving the community's history with his family's stories, Sabar tells of his visits to Iraq and Israel to trace his father's journey from an isolated Kurdish village to UCLA, where at one point he provides Aramaic dialog for "The X-Files". Although Sabar ultimately fails to discover the fate of his father's sister, who was kidnapped from their village in the 1930s, he does begin to understand his responsibility to his ancestry. Throughout the narrative, he focuses on identity and community and this central question: "When we carry our languages and stories from one generation to the next, from one country to another, what exactly do we gain?" Written with a reporter's flair for people and places, this is recommended for public libraries.Diane Harvey, Univ. of Maryland Libs., College Park
Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
August 1, 2008
For almost 3,000 years, a tiny Jewish enclave existed in what is now the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The Jews and their Christian and Muslim neighbors spoke the ancient tongue of Aramaic, which had once been the lingua franca of the Middle East and was spoken by Jesus. Sabars father, Yona, was born in that enclave but immigrated to the U.S. when the creation of the state of Israel created hostile conditions forIraqi Jews in the 1950s. Yona, however, maintained strong emotional ties to his native language and culture even as he ascended to a prominentacademic position at UCLA. Meanwhile, Sabar showed virtually no interest in his fathers background; however, after the birth of his own son, he felt a desire to reconnect withhis father and their shared cultural heritage.Their joint visit to their ancestral town of Zakho rekindles memories of the ancient community while strengthening the ties between father and son.An involving memoir that works as both a family saga and an examination of a lost but treasured community.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)