My Father's Paradise

By Ariel Sabar,

Book cover of My Father's Paradise

Book description

In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and…

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Why read it?

1 author picked My Father's Paradise as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

In this exquisite narrative -- part biography, part memoir, part gift of atonement – Sabar poignantly explores the love, tensions, and misunderstandings between a father and son born into utterly different worlds.

Sabar’s father spent his childhood in a mudbrick home in a small village in northern Iraq, a region inhabited by Jews for 3,000 years. When the Jewish population was forced out of Iraq in 1951, Sabar’s father, barely 13, immigrated to Israel, ultimately becoming a renowned scholar and professor of Aramaic in the U.S. – where his son experienced a middle-class suburban childhood and adolescence in 1970s Los…

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