{"id":3232,"date":"2022-09-06T20:23:36","date_gmt":"2022-09-07T00:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/?p=3232"},"modified":"2024-10-05T18:51:15","modified_gmt":"2024-10-05T22:51:15","slug":"my-fathers-paradise-by-ariel-sabar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/my-fathers-paradise-by-ariel-sabar\/","title":{"rendered":"“My Father’s Paradise” by Ariel Sabar"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\"My Father's Paradise\" by Ariel Sabar<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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\"MyAriel Sabar,\u00a0My Father\u2019s Paradise: A Son\u2019s Search for His Family\u2019s Past<\/em><\/i>\u00a0(Algonquin Books, 2009). Nonfiction. This book, the author\u2019s debut, won the National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography.<\/strong><\/b><\/p>

Discussed at our Book Club on September 6, 2022.<\/p>

Ariel Sabar<\/strong><\/b>\u00a0is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in\u00a0The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Harper’s, The Washington Post,\u00a0<\/em><\/i>and many other periodicals. Since his debut book, he has gone on to write several others, including\u00a0Heart of the City<\/em><\/i>\u00a0(2011) and\u00a0Veritas<\/em><\/i>\u00a0(2020).<\/p>

Ariel Sabar was present at the meeting and opened by explaining that his father, Yona Sabar, grew up in an isolated community of Jewish Kurds in Zakho, in the mountains of northern Iraq. There Kurdish Jews had lived at peace with their Muslim and Christian neighbors for thousands of years. People in Zakho spoke neither Hebrew nor Kurdish but neo-Aramaic, a language with ancient roots. Two thousand years ago it had been the common language spoken over much of the civilized world. But by the modern era, Aramaic had been reduced to remote enclaves like Zakho, isolated from the rest of the world. Most language experts assumed it was dead.<\/p>

Ariel\u2019s father, Yona, born in 1938, had an idyllic childhood in Zakho. Then after 1948 his family moved to Israel, where he studied languages at the university. He became a scholar of neo-Aramaic, his mother tongue, and over the course of his professional career he all but singlehandedly rescued it from obscurity. He taught for many years at UCLA.\u00a0\u00a0His son Ariel grew up in southern California\u2019s sun-and-surf culture and was long oblivious to his father\u2019s origins, the significance of Yona\u2019s contribution, or his own Kurdish Jewish heritage.\u00a0\u00a0Only as an adult, as a new father himself, did Ariel start to look for it. His book is the story of that journey of discovery.\u00a0<\/p>

To the Book Club, Ariel observed that everyone who emigrates from a country has to make a choice about how much of the ancient history they will preserve and how much they will leave behind.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cWould I be the one to break the chain?\u201d he asked himself after his son was born. He had a promising job but quit \u201cbecause something important was slipping through my fingers.\u201d He could not miss this chance to make things right with Yona, his father. He interviewed Yona and wrote this book to explore what happens when we leave an ancient world in favor a modern one. \u201cWhat did Yona take with him, what did he leave behind?\u201d he asked himself. It\u2019s important for us to talk to our immigrant parents now, he urged the Book Club, because \u201cif we wait, our ancestors will elude us. If we wait, our children will venture too far into America to find their way back. I haven\u2019t found all the answers yet, but if you\u2019re clever enough, you can stop time long enough to look for them.\u201d<\/p>

My Father’s Paradise<\/em> is available for purchase at Bookshop.org<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“My Father’s Paradise” by Ariel Sabar Ariel Sabar,\u00a0My Father\u2019s Paradise: A Son\u2019s Search for His Family\u2019s Past\u00a0(Algonquin Books, 2009). Nonfiction. This book, the author\u2019s debut, won the National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. Discussed at our Book Club on September 6, 2022. Ariel Sabar\u00a0is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in\u00a0The New York […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3234,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-club","category-nonfiction"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3232"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12347,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232\/revisions\/12347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nykcc.org\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}