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Father, son search for paradise — via Iraq, Israel, Los Angeles

Yona Sabar was 12 years old when he left his home in the isolated mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan and made his way to Israel. The year was 1951, the Middle East was in postwar turmoil, and Sabar was armed with just three childhood possessions: a school medal he had won in the 100-meter dash, an old spoon — and one of the world’s most ancient languages now on the verge of extinction.

The language that Sabar took to Israel was Aramaic, which Jesus spoke and the Jews considered the second-holiest language after Hebrew. Sabar would eventually teach Aramaic — and Hebrew — at UCLA, where he is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. But 58 years after he was uprooted from his birthplace, Sabar still battles with several complex, competing identities — Iraqi, Kurdish, Israeli, American — and doesn’t feel fully at home in any of them.

His predicament is brilliantly captured in a book, “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq,” written by Sabar’s son, Ariel. An exploration of cultural history, identity and redemption, the memoir, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, recently won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and is already being translated into Hebrew and Dutch.

The book is a personal journey by father and son to rediscover their ancestral homeland, where Jews lived in relative harmony among Muslims and Christians for hundreds of years. The author, a former journalist for the Baltimore Sun and the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal, chronicles the history of Kurdish Jews, who consider themselves the direct descendants of the Lost Tribes. All of them immigrated, mostly to Israel, in the early 1950s and now number some 150,000 people, one of the world’s oldest and least-known Jewish communities.

“My Father’s Paradise” is also a deeply moving saga of intergenerational and cultural conflict enlivened by an assortment of eccentric characters Dickens would have envied. By far the most delightful of them is Yona Sabar himself. An unusually modest man with decidedly old-world values, he is one of the most sought-after experts in Aramaic, especially its rich folklore, which he largely culled from his mother in their Iraqi hometown of Zakho.

“Most of my colleagues took the field as dealing with dead civilizations,” Amin Banani, a former chair of the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, told the author in 2005. Banani, who hired Yona Sabar at UCLA in 1972, when Ariel was just a year old, considered the professor a rarity in Semitics because Aramaic, the language of classical empires, was his mother tongue.

Yona Sabar was, as Banani put it, “a living culture right in front of us,” not to mention a “guileless and likable human being.” But Banani did have one reservation about hiring Sabar — even though he was then teaching at Yale and at Yeshiva University in New York City. The department head feared that Sabar would feel out of place in Los Angeles because “he didn’t have any of the airs of the urban sophisticate.”

As his son would discover years later, Sabar was unwilling to fit in. “My dad drove a dented Chevette with hand-cranked windows,” writes Ariel, who grew up in a white stucco ranch house in West Los Angeles, played the drums and wanted nothing more than to have a rock ’n’ roll dad. “When the car radio stopped working one day, he went to Radio Shack for a battery-operated transistor radio and hung it by its hand strap from the turn signal arm, where it remained, tuned to the same station, for the next decade.”

That wasn’t all. The professor cut his own hair and bought suits off the bargain rack at J.C. Penney — “in pastel plaids that designers had intended for the golf course, then wore them cluelessly to campus faculty meetings,” writes his son, adding: “His accented English was a five-car pileup of malapropisms and mispronunciations. Ours was a clash of civilizations. When we collided, it wasn’t pretty.”

What Ariel didn’t realize at the time was that his father had been experiencing an existential crisis ever since he came to the U.S. in 1965 for graduate studies at Yale. “Everyone here, and especially the intellectuals, is an individual,” Sabar wrote in a 1965 letter to his elder sister who wanted to leave Israel for America. “The innocent, simple man who accepts things at face value, the nice guy who worries about people and not just himself, that person disappears.”

By teaching Aramaic, Sabar has been able to bridge his wistful past with his chaotic present, effectively parlaying his homesickness into a successful academic career. “There’s something that moved me in that direction,” he said, referring to Aramaic one recent afternoon in his office, located in an obscure corner of the third floor of the Humanities Building. “My career is all about my past — I go forward but live in the past — it’s a paradox.”

Students adore him because, as his son puts it in his book, “their struggle to grasp a new language and culture had been his own.”  They also encounter a self-effacing figure of authority. “To walk into one of his classrooms, you might think he was just an older, slightly more knowledgeable undergrad who had taken over while the professor was out,” writes Ariel, adding that despite 36 years of university teaching, his father “still gets stage fright on the first day of class each quarter.”

Sabar has a perfectly rational explanation for his puzzling behavior: Avoiding the spotlight is a cultural value that enabled him and his ancestors to survive for millennia in Kurdistan. “We were taught to be humble — the less known you are, the better for you,” he recalled. In fact, every time the professor enters his office, he is reminded of the importance of keeping his head down. There, staring at him from the wall facing the door, is a painting of the famous scene in which the boastful Babylonian king Balthazar trembles in front of God’s cryptic “writing on the wall” — a four-word omen in Aramaic that foretells his impending doom.

Words excite Sabar; when he first arrived in Israel, along with his parents, grandparents and three siblings, he was struck by the sight of Hebrew writing on everything from cigarette packets to road signs. “In my hometown, Hebrew was only the language of religion,” he explained. “My mother, who was very conservative, picked up every piece of paper in Hebrew from the road and put it somewhere higher.”

These days, Sabar often worries about the fate of Israel — and Iraq’s future after U.S. troops depart. For all his nostalgia about his childhood, he has no desire to live in Zakho, which has changed beyond recognition. Still, during a 2005 trip to the Kurdish town, Sabar and his son were welcomed by its Muslim inhabitants with open arms. What’s more, the district where he grew up, Sabar noted with surprise, is still called by its old name, “the Jewish Neighborhood,” even though Jews haven’t lived there for more than half a century.

Paradise is a leitmotif of Sabar’s journey, but it’s hardly limited to the Middle East, the promised land of Israel notwithstanding. The quintessential dream factory of Los Angeles is paradise, too. Sabar spends most afternoons sipping iced coffee at a fancy outdoor mall bordering Beverly Hills, where he mentally blocks out the neon signs and focuses instead on the trees swaying in the breeze. They remind him of Zakho, an oasis away from the world that now exists only in his mind.

Back in his office, he opens a desk drawer and reaches for a box of Turkish Delights, a sweet that he dreamed of buying by the fistful as a child in Zakho — but couldn’t afford to. Now he enjoys offering it to visitors. “If only you could reconstruct the world you had imagined,” he said longingly.  “But there’s no way to do that.”