Critiques en avant-première

Award-winning journalist Ariel Sabar weaves a tale of two men--father and son--and two worlds--Ancient Iraq and Modern America--in this enlightening journey through Kurdish-Jewish history in search of clues to his own family story. Born to illiterate parents in the mountains of northern Iraq and raised in an isolated village of Kurdish Jews who still spoke Aramaic, Ariel Sabar's father, Yona, emigrated to Israel in the 1950s as part of an exodus of some 120,000 Jews from Iraq. The Jews of Kurdistan were peasants and peddlers, and also renowned storytellers, with a distinct exotic culture and language--the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus. In Israel, the Kurdish Jews suffered poverty and bigotry and watched their culture all but vanish. Yona eventually reinvented his life in California, where he remains a professor at UCLA and has dedicated his career to preserving his people's traditions in a race against time. But to his first-generation American son, Ariel, trying to grow up cool in 1980s Los Angeles, he was a reminder of a strange immigrant past, and their relationship was strained. In My Father's Paradise, Ariel Sabar conjures his father's past, traveling with Yona across America, through Israel, into Kurdish Iraq, finally connecting to a heritage on which he had turned his back.