My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

You have certain hopes,” he began, the subject making him visibly uncomfortable. “You do this as a nostalgic trip, and nostalgia is you feel like you will see a place again. And when you see nothing is left, it’s in a way a comment on life itself. You see that life doesn’t stand still. Nothing waits for you to visit it again. The river keeps flowing. It may be smaller. But still it flows. And with it your life flows by. This is what life basically is.

But my son’s birth was a comeuppance. It was a stark reminder of continuity, that we are who we come from as much as who we make of ourselves.

Some 94 percent of the planet’s population speaks a mere 5 percent of its languages.

No continent has been spared. Gooniyandi in Australia is down to its last 100 speakers; Dama in Cameroon, 50 speakers; Kavalan in Thailand, 24; Xipaya in Brazil, 2; Plains Miwok in the United States, 1.

Though Aramaic’s longevity is remarkable, its fate is common. Of the roughly seven thousand languages now spoken, half are expected to vanish over the next century.

Saddam was renowned in the Arab world for his hatred of Israel. He spoke of “scorching” the country with chemical gas and paid $25,000 rewards to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

In Mosul, there is no difference between Kurds and Jews,” Lubayd said, exhaling a rope of smoke. “They say killing a Kurd is like killing a Jew.

Western culture is geared to success, rewarding people with money, power, and prestige. In Middle Eastern culture, it’s about being loved.

Let’s see: The Romanians are thieves. The Polish are unclean. The Yemenites—that’s our family—are peasants. The Moroccans are brutes. And the Kurds have it worst of all: They’re just morons.

Language lives. It inhales culture and history. It sprouts new limbs, sloughs off old ones. It goes through cycles of rapid growth, unremarkable periods of stable maturity, decay, and sometimes, as with Hebrew, miraculous rebirth.

In life, she had always felt helpless against abandonment. In death, she had perhaps finally asserted herself. For four short days she was the center of a family, and that was how Miryam Sabar wanted to leave the world.

The Manhattan businessman’s daughter would never have met the Kurdish shopkeeper’s son were it not for their aloneness in America.

But he sensed that Judaism’s currency in America masked a spiritual shallowness. His Jewish friends at Yale rarely went to synagogue.

America, it seemed, was a land of contradictions.

Midrash for the People.

But how could my father listen to this bearer of his own culture and not be drawn in deeper?

But he came from people who survived by keeping their heads down, and he journeyed inward. He wanted to give his people a voice, but in another way, a quieter way, a way he hoped would still count.

He took one look, went back to his car, and left, Levi recalled. He said, "This is not a police matter — politicians should take care of it.

The man shook his head and left. But Rahamim understood: Family was all Ephraim had left.

Zionism had always been a European solution to a European problem.

You must learn to read, yourself. And you must judge for yourself what you believe and what is important.

In my father’s obsession with his mother tongue, I had already glimpsed this: If you knew which levers to pull, you could stop time just long enough to save the things you loved most.

My father touched another candle to it and brought it across continents. I didn’t want it to die with me. If my children ever feel adrift, unsure of who they are, I want that candle to still be burning.

Even when she was a girl, the kitchen was a source of pride and power. A separate vestibule off the main room, it cocooned her in glorious aromas. She had proven herself a skillful and painstaking chef, famous in the family for yaprach that tickled the tongue with notes of tomato, lemon and dried sumac. Shmuel and her half brothers teased that Miryam's date-sized yaprach were tiny, like her. Miryam didn't mind the ribbing; she rolled grape leaves at half their usual size precisely so that her family would recognize them as hers, rather than her stepmother's or her aunts'.

The sense that I might have gotten my father wrong--and that I might actually be his son--came slowly.

If you knew which levers to pull, you could stop time just long enough to save the things you love most.