My Father's Paradise by Ariel Sabar (Review by Renee Levine)

It has been a while since I sent a piece in to the RWB website, but then, we have left Paris and I haven't done much reading while the move took us to North Carolina and a new life. The book I am telling you about allowed me to think about things other than the most dreary daily mess. It is a beautiful book about language and history, My Father's Paradise, by Ariel Sabar about just that: finding meaning in the past, in this case the extraordinary survival of the aramaic language in a jewish village in Kurdistan. The story of a refugee who becomes a professor of linguistics in order to hold on to this pre-christian survival of a three thousand year old tongue. Not written now but only spoken and that only by a handful of scattered refugees in this century. A beautiful tale of a people living harmoniously together and yet separate, in the same town, getting on for practical purposes they are together , separate for family and religious ties. A journalist son who is embarrassed by his foreign, old-fashioned and weird father while growing up in modern american Los Angeles and only very slowly immerses himself in the history of his family and of their country.
I am standing here in the "laundry room" over my computer, waiting for the people to come and fetch the rented bed, etc. and find myself caught up in this book I have only just finished. The one I began last night is about Armenians and Turkey, also by a young, in this case, british journalist, who becomes immersed in finding out more of the history of what, accidentally, is happening in the next door spot to the Kurdistan of the other book, the kurdish north in Turkey, the former was the kurdish bit of Iraq. Rebel Land, by Christopher de Bellaigue tells the story of modern Turkey and its past in that small corner of Turkey which touches the Kurdistan of Sabar's tale. I heartily recommend them both to fans of history, to people who would like to understand a little more of what is now going on in Iraq and its surrounding lands.

Renee Levine

Upcoming Poetry Reading

15 April at 7pm : THE RED WHEELBARROW BOOKSTORE invites you to a reading by poets ELLEN HINSEY, DENIS HIRSON, & SUE CHENETTE. ELLEN HINSEY will read from her new collection, Update on the Descent (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), a powerful meditation on violence, war, and human division, which was a 2007 National Poetry Series finalist. She is also the author of The White Fire of Time (2003) and Cities of Memory (1996), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. She edited and co-translated Tomas Venclova’s The Junction: Selected Poems (2008). Her poems, essays and translations have appeared widely in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Irish Times. Her translations of contemporary French fiction and memoir are published with Riverhead/Penguin Books. Her other awards include a Berlin Prize Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a Lannan Foundation Award. She has lived in Paris since 1987, and teaches writing and literature at Skidmore College’s program and the French graduate school, the École Polytechnique. DENIS HIRSON’s new book, Gardening in the Dark (Jacana Media, 2007), begins by evoking a childhood in South Africa under apartheid, and ends with the author as a father evoking his own children and life in France. Hirson is the author of four other critically-acclaimed books: The House Next Door to Africa (1986); I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) (2005); We Walk Straight So You Better Get Out the Way (2007), and White Scars (2006), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. He is also the editor with Martin Trump of The Heinemann Book of South African Short Stories (1994); and the editor of The Lava of this Land, South African Poetry 1960-1996 (1997). His poetry, stories and essays have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Boston Review, City Lights and New Directions. Hirson lived in South Africa until the age of 22. He is a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, where he studied Social Anthropolgy. Since 1975 he has lived in France, where he works as a teacher and writer. The poems in SUE CHENETTE’s new book Slender Human Weight (Guernica Editions: 2009) explore a world both familiar and mysterious. In a notebook found in a Paris flea market, or a dragon hacked out of a fallen tree along a Toronto river bank, she finds the richness of physical objects as they embody what is felt, dreamed of, longed for, and remembered. Sue Chenette is the author of three chapbooks: Solitude in Cloud and Sun (2007); A Transport of Grief (2007), and The Time Between Us ( 2001), which won the Canadian Poetry Association’s Shaunt Basmajian Award. She is also a co-author of the renga Weathering (2008). Her poems appear in Canadian journals such as The New Quarterly, Descant, The Fiddlehead, and CV 2 as well as in reviews in the US, England, and France; they have been anthologized in A Time of Trial and In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry. Sue Chenette is a poet and pianist who grew up in northern Wisconsin, has lived in Toronto since 1972, and spends part of every year in Paris. At: The Red Wheelbarrow, 22 rue St Paul, 75004 Paris M° St Paul/ Sully-Morland.

(Via Paris Readings and Events)