My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Family's Past,   ISBN:9781565129337

Customer Rating: 

Though I enjoyed this book, I kept wanting to give it only 4 stars for the earlier sections in which Sabar writes accounts of his grandparents' and his father's lives in Iraq and Israel. He treats them as if they were characters in a novel, recording their thoughts and conversations - in English, not their native Aramaic - like an omniscient author. There was a breezy Sunday supplement style to all this that rang wrong for me.

But by the mid-point, as the author himself appears as a character in this biography of his forebears, I was turning pages without concern for all that, fascinated by what his research has uncovered, laughing along with the anecdotes, touched by the deepening relationship between a father and son who grew up in worlds so utterly different - a remote Kurdish town in northern Iraq and a leafy residential neighborhood in up-scale Westwood, Los Angeles.

Others here have covered the content of this wonderful book thoroughly already, and there's no need to add more, except to say that I feel my own world enriched by learning of both these men and the amazing story of a continuously spoken language, Aramaic, which survived from biblical times into the 21st century.

Customer Rating: 

We read and discussed this book in our book club. It is about a widely acclaimed and respected UCLA professor whose roots were from Kurdish Iraq, and how he was viewed by his American born son. When the son matured and had a son of his own, he became interested in his father's background and wanted to explore his "father's paradise".
The book presents information on Jewish life in pre-1950's Iraq, a subject that is not widely known. Although the members in the book club came from varied backgrounds, the book stimulated good discussion by all the members.

Customer Rating: 

An outstanding book which intertwined a family's story with the relatively recent history of increasing tensions in the Middle East. It told the story of the Kurdish jews living in Iraq for 2,700 years in peaceful harmony with muslims and christians, living much like their ancestors who were taken there in the 700's B.C. And the struggles of one family who left this ancient culture, finally ending up in Los Angeles--talk about time travel. It warmed my heart and gave me hope to know that jews and muslims lived peacefullly for all those years. A compelling tale with lovable characters.

Customer Rating: 

Hard to put down. Spell binding story, shows how little we know of world. True story of a family & it's stranger than life path.

Customer Rating: 

This book was a throw-in to get free shipping, and it turned out to be very very interesting. I knew very little about Iraqi Jews and less about Jews who came out of Kurdistan. Mr. Sabar told this family story about Jews who left Iraq in the 50's, went to Israel, and then settled in LA before he wound up in Maine. My only negative is Sabar's becoming obsessed with trying to find an aunt he never knew back in Iraq in 2006.