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