Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C. Peggy Pearlstein: Good afternoon everyone,
and welcome to the African and Middle Eastern Division
of the Library of Congress.   My name is Peggy Pearlstein.
I'm head of the Hebraic section, and today we're sponsoring the talk
by Ariel Sabar along with the Near East section
of the Library of Congress.
I want to thank my colleague, Mr. Hirad Dinavari, who's the librarian
for the Iranian World collections,
for his help putting this program together today.
Before I begin, on your seats is a flyer, which tells you
about a whole lecture series that the African
and Middle Eastern Division is sponsoring
on Iraq history and society.
Today is the first in the series, and it will end on March 10,
when Michael Alban will be speaking,
and he's in the audience today as well.
So I hope you'll be able to attend as many of these as possible,
and also note that this talk is being webcast today,
and so in about six weeks, it will be available
Ariel Sabar is an award-winning former staff writer
for the Baltimore Sun, and the Providence, Rhode Island, Journal.
His work has also appeared in The New York Times,
The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Monthly,
Mother Jones Magazine and other publications.
I read his book, which is the same cover as the flyer.
I found it very compelling.   In fact, I couldn't put it down.
The book will be for sale afterwards in the gift shop downstairs
in the Library of Congress and Mr. Sabar said
that he would be very happy to autograph a copy for you
The book is really about your story and your father's story,
and it's so up-to-date that he was just in Iraq in the past few years.
Also he told us that he did some of his research here at the Library
of Congress, and I think he's going to tell us about that,
But without further ado, I'm going to introduce Ariel Sabar,
and when he's through speaking, then we'll have a chance
for some questions and answers from him.
So thank you very much.
[applause] Ariel Sabar: Thanks, Peggy,
for that wonderful introduction, and thank you, Hirad,
for also helping organize this.
I did, indeed, do some of my research right here
in this wonderful institution, and one of the coolest things
about this place is it just has stuff that nobody else does.
I remember -- my father comes from, you know, a relatively small town
on the Turkish border called Zakho.
And I really wanted a sense -- I mean, I planned to travel there,
but I really wanted a sense of how the town was laid out,
where things were, where the orchards were,
where the boys' school was that my father went to in the 1950's
at around the time my father was there.
So I came here and I went to the map room and asked,
"Do you have any maps of Zakho."
They sort of searched the catalogue at first and they said "Well,
don't really see anything that would get you that up close."
And I said, "Can you check again?"
And a librarian goes in the back and reappears about 15 minutes later
with this enormous map of Zakho.
It's like something -- it was like a street map from the 1950s.
I think it was produced by maybe an Egyptian,
but it was a beautiful map.
It really gave me, for the first time,
a sense of how this town was laid
out in the years my father lived there.
So that's one of the wonderful things
about coming back here and speaking.
And the other wonderful thing about it is that this is the first stop
on my national book tour that I've been able to walk to.
[laughter] We live on Capitol Hill just a couple of blocks away,
and on a beautiful day like this, it was a real treat.
I'll talk for about a half hour, and then happy
to open it up for questions.
I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and really tried
to make myself kind of the consummate Southern California boy.
I read "Surfer" magazine for fashion advice.
I played two-on-two volleyball in the sand on Santa Monica beach,
hammered skate board ramps together in the back yard,
played drums with a group of musicians
who worshiped the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- great L.A. band --
and at least a few of the kids I went to school with and knew
in West L.A. were actually in the movies or on TV.
So to keep up, I went
to an after-school children's acting program.
Youth acting classes were kind of L.A.'s version of Little League.
Now even as a boy, I sensed that my L.A. act was a house of cards,
because I knew that there was one man who if I let him too close
to me could knock the whole thing over.
Worse, he happened to live with us.   He was my father.
He was, as I saw him then, kind of a stone-age relic,
a man born in a forgotten village of Jews
in the mountains of Kurdish Iraq.
And these were Jews who were so cut off from the rest of the world
that they still spoke Aramaic, the 3000-year-old language not only
of the Talmud but of Jesus.
And no one in all of L.A., I was convinced,
was less cool than my father.
He dressed in a -- I remember how he dressed,
he dressed in these clashing pastel plaids he bought off the bargain
rack at J.C. Penney.
He cut his own hair with a razor combs,
I don't know if you've ever seen them,
that I think he ordered them through the mail.
And in a city of BMWs and Audis, he drove a Chevette
without so much as a working radio.
Now, many kids rebel against their parents,
but my defiance had just one target and that was my father.
At one point I even stopped calling him Abba, or Dad.
When I addressed him, which wasn't that often,
I simply called him by his first name, Yona.
It didn't help that I came of age during the early 1980s,
and this was, as many of you might remember,
this was just after the Iranian hostage crisis.
I remember skateboarding in West L.A. and Santa Monica
and seeing graffiti, ugly graffiti, on the walls that said things like
"Iranians go home" or "USA all the way - Death to Iran,"
and my father was neither Iranian nor Arab nor Muslim,
but I saw those angry words as meant expressly for me.
I wanted to be all-American and I was pretty sure
that the only thing holding me back was my Middle Eastern father.
It would take me a pretty long time to see
that our roots didn't have to hold us back.
My father, I would come to learn, was born into a community
that defied nearly every Jewish stereotype.
The Jews of Kurdistan live not in the cities, but in the mountains.
They were not primarily merchants and shopkeepers, but they had kind
of unusual jobs for Jews, they were lumberjacks, wheat farmers,
black marketeers, river rafters.
And while their brethren in Europe suffered centuries of persecution
and obviously the Holocaust, the Jews of Kurdistan lived mainly
at peace among Muslim and Christian neighbors for hundreds of years.
In my father's home town of Zakho, for instance,
which as I mentioned earlier sits just south of the Turkish border,
Muslims would stub their cigarettes in respect as Jews walked home
from synagogue on Saturdays.   At the conclusion of Passover,
they would bring Jews gift baskets of milk and bread.
My Uncle Tsion [Spelled phonetically],
he was kind of the Kosher kebab king of Mosul.
Hard to imagine today, you know that Mosul was one of the hubs
of the insurgency, but back in the day,
my Uncle Tsion ran a place called Tsion Kebabshi [Spelled
phonetically], which basically means "Tsion the Kebab Guy," right there
in the Mosul market and Jewish traders would come and eat there.
He didn't buy his meat from a Jewish butcher, but he bought it
from an Arab Muslim butcher who let a rabbi into his shop to certify
that his cuts hewed to the Jewish dietary laws.
And it was these relations between Muslims and Jews that were one
of the reasons my father came to see his hometown as a kind of paradise.
Now for outsiders, this little known corner
of the Jewish diaspora was exotic and even heady.
There was a Jewish-American professor named Walter Fischel
who was at UC-Berkeley for many years.
He went to Kurdistan in the 1940s, and when he came back and reported
on the trip, he sounded less like the button-down,
German-trained scholar that he was than a breathless teenager.
He wrote, "Such Jews!"
and there's like a lot of exclamation points here.
I mean this is an academic, not folks given to exclamation points,
but in his report he clearly was sort of swept away.
"Such Jews!"
he wrote. "Men, virile and wild-looking!
Women wearing embroidered turbans, earrings,
bracelets, even nose rings!
And with symbols tattooed in their faces!
Our brethren and sisters!"
Now, I know we see some of these tattoos and nose rings among Jews
in the American suburbs today, but you know, back in the 1940s,
traveling all the way to Kurdistan, you didn't expect to see that.
So it did titillate the Westerns
who occasionally visited, but it shouldn't have.
All they have to do is read the Bible to know that Kurdistan,
or Assyria as it was then called,
was the very birthplace of the diaspora.
After capturing Samaria, or Northern Israel, in about 720 B.C.,
the Assyrians marched the Israelites across hundreds of miles of desert
and resettled them in places that the Bible actually names.
And if you plot these places on old maps,
you'll see that they pretty much overlap, more or less,
with the region we today call Kurdistan, which for those
who aren't familiar is the sort of crescent-shaped region of mountains,
it's about the size of Spain, that arcs across northern Syria and Iraq,
across south-eastern Turkey, and then down through western Iran.
Now, scholars often speak of the Jews of Iraq as a single people,
lumping them all into this catch-all phrase, "Babylonian Jews."
But the story is far more complicated and far richer.
The mysterious band of Jews that I've been talking about,
the Israelites exiled to Assyria, lived very different lives
from those more famously exiled to Babylon.
Babylon is basically central Iraq and the Jewish deportation there,
about 150 years after the Assyrian one, is far better known.
The Babylonians marched another group of Jews, the Judeans,
who were from southern Israel to the prosperous urban centers of Babylon
and Nippur, both within about a hundred miles of Baghdad.
Now the Psalms -- there's a very famous excerpt from the Psalms,
and the Psalms kind of wax lyrical about this Babylonian exile.
You probably know this phrase, "By the rivers of Babylon,
Jews were said to have sung, 'We sat down and wept
when we remembered Zion.'
" But the truth is they didn't weep for all that long.
The Jews dropped off in Babylon were at the crossroads
of Mesopotamian civilization
and they leave a pretty well-known legacy.
They would build major yeshivas and synagogues,
they'd establish bustling centers of rabbinical activity,
and write the Talmud, the definitive book of Jewish laws.
They would eventually abandon Aramaic for the Arabic
of their Muslim neighbors, and rise into the highest circles
of Iraqi business and government.
This is a statistic that amazed me as I was doing my research,
but after World War I, fully one-third -- one-third --
of Baghdad's population was Jewish.
By the 1940s, Jews would hold positions in the Iraqi cabinet,
in parliament and on the high court.
I don't want to play to any sort of crude stereotypes here,
but the Jew who was in the Iraqi cabinet was the finance minister.
We won't go there.
But it could be argued -- I mean, these were very high positions
for Jews to have obtained in a part
of the world we just don't think is particularly friendly to Jews now.
And one of the remarkable things is that you could reasonably argued,
if you look at the historical record,
that without the tolerance Jews found in parts of Iraq,
Judaism would have had a very hard time surviving all those hundreds
of years in exile.
Now my father's people, the Israelites or the Kurdish Jews,
never left the wilderness, on the other hand.
So these are these two populations of Jews living about 250 miles
from each other who really have very little contact
and having lived very different lives.
The 25,000 Kurdish Jews in my father's day live
in some 200 villages scattered
across a region comprising about 200,000 miles.
They were cut off not only from the centers of Jewish life,
but even from each other.
They lived hard-scrabble lives at the mercy of a harsh climate,
forbidding geography, and punishing cycles of famine
and Muslim tribal warfare.
The Bible reserves no poetry for their exile.
There's no "by the rivers of Babylon" for the Kurdish Jews.
In fact, according to Book of Isaiah,
the Israelites were simply "lost."
In some translations, the Bible doesn't even give them
that courtesy.
The word "lost" is rendered even more gloomily as "perished."
So little was heard from these Jews
that the Bible basically writes them off as goners.
Now over the years, you know, you hear Jews from places as far-flung
as China, India, Venezuela
and Ethiopia asserting ancestry in the lost tribes.
But in my view anyway, the Jews in Kurdistan might just be said
to have the strongest claim, because for better or for worse,
they stayed exactly where the Assyrians had put them.
They hadn't perished; they weren't even lost.
They were just sort of too far outside the Jewish Beltway
for anybody to notice.   Life was tough for the Kurdish Jews.
The men in my father's home town of Zakho,
they worked back-breaking jobs, guiding timber down the Habor River
or traveling the back roads on donkeys with saddlebags full
of wool, nuts and other goods that they would sell in the villages.
So many died, Muslim and Jew, at the hands of roadway bandits
that it was said of Zakho men that none died in their own beds.
These were tough Jews, working class Jews.
There were no real nebbishes in Kurdistan.
Now for work, my grandfather smuggled fox and mink pelts
across the Turkish border, dodging both bandits and customs agents.
My grandmother had 12 children but only six survived childhood.
Five of the others died young and a sixth, her first born,
a girl named Rivka, was kidnapped by a wet nurse and never found.
My father was one of the lucky ones.
As befit his status as the eldest male, he was the oldest,
he lived a footloose life.
He swam with his friends in the Habor River,
the same Habor mentioned in the Bible.
He believed in angels and demons.
And he knew how to cross the entire town by leaping
across its rooftops -- it's one of my favorite images
from the stories he told me.
That as a boy, he knew precisely where these flat,
mud shack rooftops came close enough together to literally hopscotch
across them from one side of town to the other.
In many ways, this was my father's paradise, a place where,
for centuries, time really did seem to stand still.
Then comes the 1940s, and everything seems to fall apart.
Iraq is one of the Arab states to declare war against the new state
of Israel, and Jews and Muslims who had lived together as neighbors,
friends and business partners for all those years started looking
at each other more suspiciously.
My father was the last boy Bar Mitzvahed
in Zakho before his family joined the mass exodus of Jews from Iraq
in the 1950s, about 120,000 in all left Iraq for Israel.
It was regarded at the time as one
of the largest peace-time airlifts in history.
Now the new Jewish state was supposed to be the promised land,
and for many Jews, particularly survivors
of the Holocaust, of course, it was.
But for my father and his parents, life in Israel was harder,
and its culture in many ways less tolerant than Kurdistan's.
Israel's European leaders branded the Jews from Kurdistan
and from other Muslim lands as back-country primitives in need
of a good scrubbing and civilization.
They were sort of hillbilly Jews.
When my father's family arrived at Lod Airport outside of Tel Aviv,
they were literally herded into a disinfection chamber and sprayed
with the insecticide, DDT.
Speaking about Jews from the Middle East,
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, "How shall we be able
to elevate these immigrants to a suitable level of civilization?"
It was a real quandary at the highest levels of Israeli sort
of intelligentsia and leadership.
How do we deal with these Jews from the Middle East who are so different
from the rest of us, and who frankly come from countries
who are now sworn enemies of Israel?
My grandfather, who had hoisted himself into the ranks
of successful shop keepers in Iraq, never got a business off the ground
in Israel's more sophisticated economy.
My grandmother struggled to learn Hebrew, and lived a life
of social and cultural isolation.
Kurds of their generation faced so much bigotry in Israel
that many lied about their heritage.
Then, as now -- do we have any Israelis in the audience?
Anyone? Sir, do you know what it means
to call someone a Kurd in Israel?   It's not a nice thing.
To this day, the word Kurd means sort of blockhead.
If you call someone a Kurd, it's a way of saying you're a moron,
and so that sort of insult still lingers to this day.
Now as a teenager, my father watched with a sinking heart
as his younger brothers and sisters forgot Aramaic.
His mother tongue, he had learned,
was once the boisterous common tongue of the entire Middle East.
It was the English of its day.
It was the lingua franca of what was then the very center
of civilization.
It stretched all the way from the Mediterranean to as far east
as parts of China and India.
I mean, this was before printing presses, before the Internet,
you had these languages that dominated and crossed borders,
crossed lines of faith and nationality.
Now, however, Aramaic was a whisper
and it was growing quieter by the day.
Soon, during a day job, while in college and my father came to Israel
and right away had to go to work to support his family,
so he would go to school at night.
And during a day job at a labor union office while he was
in college, he began gathering discarded scraps of paper --
old receipts, note cards, any kind of piece of paper that was around --
and would write down all the Aramaic words he could remember
from his childhood.
One day he would write down words from nursery rhymes; another,
words for food; the next day, words for parts of the landscape.
He'd proceed pretty methodically like this for weeks,
inscribing these words in Aramaic and stuffing them in his pocket.
Now fast forward here.
Several decades later, as a professor at UCLA
where he still teaches, he would publish his life's work,
which was one of the world's first definitive Aramaic
to English dictionaries.
And it was that ticker tape of dying words, all the discarded scraps
of paper he started inscribing as a teenager
that would form the foundation for that dictionary.
Many scholars had long assumed that Aramaic was a dead language.
It was a language of the Talmud, it was a language of old texts,
it was maybe the language of parts of the liturgy in the synagogue,
but not a language that people really spoke anymore.
But my father proved otherwise.
He spoke his first words, his baby words, in Aramaic.
He knew its contours and its cadences from the inside,
and before long that got the attention of scholars
at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
At age 26, he was sort of unsure of his future in Israel, and you know,
thinking that maybe he'd sort of climbed far enough
for a Kurdish Jew of his generation.
He'd settle down in Israel, become a high school teacher,
and that would be it.
But a letter would arrive when he was 26 from Yale University
and it would change his life.
It offered him full admission to their graduate program
and a full scholarship
to more formally document his fading mother tongue.
Now you can imagine how exhilarating the sight
of my father must have been for some of these professors,
these great professors of Semitic languages, who were giants
in their field and many of them educated
in Europe's top universities.
The parallel that sort of came to mind for me is
if you were an anthropologist of South American jungle tribes, say,
and you show up to teach a class one day
and found a Yanomamo tribesman sitting
in the front row taking lecture notes.
Someone from inside the culture you think you know everything
about is sitting in part of your classroom, and so for a lot
of his professors, it was sort of heady.
I remember going back to Yale and getting one of the secretaries
to sort of show me some of the recommendations
that his professors wrote for him when he graduated.
One of the scholars at Yale I remember describing him
to prospective employers as both an asset
to any Middle Eastern studies department and an ornament.
I don't know what exactly was meant by ornament,
but you can figure it out for yourself.
[laughter] I knew a few of these stories and none of this history,
and really cared to know nothing about it, until a cold night
in December of 2002 when my own son, Seth, was born.
As a boy, I had tried to remake myself.
I tried to construct this identity wholly apart from my roots.
I went to college clear across the country, wanted to get as far away
from my parents as possible.
I disappeared into a world of my own making, working my way
up through a series of newspaper jobs and living on the coffee
and adrenaline-fueled life of a daily journalist.
But now, on that cold night in December 2002,
as I cradled my own boy in my arms, I saw for the first time
that I wasn't the end of the line, but rather a bridge
between an ancient world and a modern one.
My own life wasn't the first chapter in some new story
or the final chapter in an ancient one, but rather the middle
of an ever-unfolding story of Jewish survival in lands not our own.
I began to see that I had obligations in many ways to people
who came before me and to the children who would come after.
Now Jews made up something like one-third of one percent
of the population in Kurdistan, a tiny, tiny part,
and it would have been very, very easy for them to melt
into the background; to become lost, just as the Bible predicted.
But the fact is, is that they kept their language, their stories
and their belief in a Jewish God alive for nearly 3,000 years.
And the tragedy is that when they finally left that paradise
in the early 1950s, most left their language
and their traditions behind, but not my father.
For reasons I think that owe as much to his temperament as to a yearning
for a childhood lost, he took his language and his stories with him.
He carried them across borders to a new land in hopes
that they might live another day.
As a boy, I kind of see my dad as hopelessly mired in the past.
He was a dinosaur who really sort of refused
to make any concessions to modernity.
But now I began to see something different.
He was a man who found a way to ride his past into the future,
who discovered a way to get ahead without having to let go.
Instead of fleeing his past as I tried to do,
my father had exalted it.
Instead of casting it off, he set it on a pedestal in hopes
that a few others might also see through to its beauty.
As I watched my own son grow from an infant to toddler to little boy,
I had to ask myself: would I, after all those 3,000 years,
would I be the one to break the chain?
Would I let all those years of history die with me?
I had grown up enough by then -- I'm not somewhat totally grown up,
but I'd grown up enough by then --
to see that I might have an opportunity; that as a writer,
I could do something, even if it was small, to keep the stories
of the Kurdish Jews alive for at least one more generation.
But I saw something else, too, which is that I had the chance,
perhaps my last, to make things right with my father.
He was a man who had staked his belief, his whole belief system,
really, on the principle that the past did matter, and that our roots,
even when tangled and strained by these great distances,
anchored us and sustained us.   Now I'll be honest.
At first my father wasn't quite sure what to make
of my newly professed interest in his life.
You know, after all those years of neglect,
why was I suddenly so curious?
But there was another reason my book idea initially made him queasy,
and that's that he's still, a few people here that know him,
he's still a pretty modest guy.
Even though he graduated from Yale, he's been teaching at UCLA
for nearly three decades, he gets invitations to lecture at places
like Harvard, Cambridge and the Sorbonne.
But still, at the start of every quarter, when he stands
up before his latest crop
of undergraduates, he gets stage fright.
He wonders if he'll make a good impression,
whether he'll be interesting enough, and attentive enough.
I think his humility is very much a part of his culture.
In Kurdish Iraq, there was even an expression,
which was that you don't put yourselves in the mouths
of other people, which means essentially steer clear
of the spotlight, don't get people talking about you.
So the news that his journalist son was planning to cast him
as the lead character in a book was a little unsettling.
But month by month, and we spent a lot of time together, you know,
across the table talking about his past, you know,
asking him to transcribe old documents, translate oral history
as he had done with his mother.
He watched me gathering these family stories, interviewing relatives
and digging through old letters in archives,
and he grew more comfortable with the project.
I think he came to see that my motivations weren't all
that different from his own, which was that I was trying
to build a kind of ark for our people's fast-vanishing stories,
just as he had for their language.
He began to tell me -- eventually, it took a while --
he began to tell me he was proud of me.
But as with many true stories,
I quickly saw that I couldn't really tie this one up with a pretty bow.
After some effort, I persuaded my father to travel with me
to his Iraqi hometown in 2005 in the middle of the insurgency.
You know, my father, maybe with some justification,
argued that maybe 2005 wasn't the best year for a sentimental journey
by two American Jews to Iraq.
But I was sort of stubborn as I've always sort of been,
and eventually sort of prevailed on him.
I really felt that if we were sincere about making this connection
with our past, if we were sincere about capturing it in some way,
we have to make a search for his older sister Rivka,
the one who I mentioned was kidnapped as an infant
by a wet nurse some 70 years before.
She was, after all, a sort of flesh and blood embodiment of our roots
in Kurdistan, and I thought we owed it to his mother's memory to try
to find her, at least make some inquiries.
But my father, enigmatically, decided he wouldn't help me.
If I wanted to find Rivka, he told me, I was on my own.
So just as I thought my father and I were drawing closer,
our relationship would face this wrenching final test.
On one level, my book's a straight-forward immigrant story,
which is -- immigrant stories are American stories.
But on another level, a deeper level I hope, it's an exploration
of what happens when we leave an ancient world for a modern one.
My father was born to an illiterate mother in a mud shack
in the foothills of Kurdistan.   Then in fairly short order,
he lurches across these great distances, somehow winding
up as a tenured professor at UCLA.
So in just two decades, there's this giant, kind of gravity-defying leap
from this far away past to the blazing edge of the Western world.
This is Los Angeles, after all, a place that's sort of obsessed
with the future, a place where nothing stands still.
What interested me while writing
"My Father's Paradise" was how a man survives this double exile.
What can he take with him and what does he have to leave behind?
But there's also a more personal question,
and one that I had to answer myself.
That's what happens when, as children of immigrants,
we find ourselves just a few steps to the other side
of that great gulf our parents crossed.
I knew it would be easy to march on never looking back.
I had a good job and a promising future at "The Baltimore Sun".
I was getting promoted, winning a few awards, but I quit cold
in the fall of 2004 because I saw something important slipping
through my fingers.
I was already too much -- I knew my limitations --
I was already too much a product of America to make a full U-turn,
I wasn't going to sort of travel back to Kurdistan and sort
of make a life for myself there.
I knew that too many years had passed for me to turn back time
or to throw up a road block against the inexorable forces
of history and assimilation.
But I knew I still had a chance, however fleeting,
to put some of our people's fading light
into a bottle before there was only darkness.
As the children of immigrants, I realized the choice is ours because,
if we wait, our ancestors and their homelands
as they once were, will allude us.
If we wait, our own children will adventure too far
into the blinding promise of America to know how to find their way back.
When I was a boy, you know, shunning my father and his strange looks
and his funny accent, it seemed like the only way
to survive here in America.   But what if I'd been wrong?
What if the past could remake you?   What if it could redeem?
So my book is both a search as story and story as search.
I traveled across the United States to Israel, and finally twice
to Iraq, to see if I could touch a candle to my people's dying fire.
I wanted to see if it still burned brightly enough
to help light our way here in a new world.
Now I know I haven't found all the answers yet,
but if my father's story taught me one thing, it's this:
that if you're clever enough, if you know what levers to pull,
you can stop time just long enough to save the things you love most.
Thanks. [applause] And before questions,
I want to just read a very short passage from the book.
This is towards the end, and just to give you a sense of that,
a chapter called "Sabar's Music."   There's a counterpoint
to the familiar immigrant story of opportunities won.
It is a story less often told of cultures lost.
Its trope is not a better life for our children, but broken bonds
to ancestors, land, identity and history.
For many immigrants, the past is painful, and best forgotten.
It is the reason they left.
But for my father, it was where the best part of himself resided.
It was a place where life could still be glimpsed
through a child's eyes.
Once my father left Zakho, he could never return.
In going to Israel, and then America,
he had set in motion a chain
of events whose ineluctable end was a son with weaker ties to his past.
My father does not regret his choices.
They did, indeed, afford him and his children a better life.
But unlike many immigrants,
he saw value in swimming hard against the tide.
It was in the collision of past and present
that he found he could see himself most clearly.
My motives were different.   I had not lost anything.
I had not left any place.   In tunneling back through time,
I wanted only a better sense of my debts to history.
I grew up believing I could be anybody,
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.
Jews had carried a flame into the hills of Kurdistan,
and they carried it out still burning 2,700 years later.
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 a drift, unsure of who they are,
I want that candle to still be burning.
Thanks, again.   [applause] Peggy Pearlstein: Okay.
If you have questions to ask,
please do it as loudly and clearly as possible.
And you may want to repeat the question if you can.
[Q.] Ariel Sabar: I mean, I do know -- [break in audio] --
fell in love with different parts of that past.
He's sort of the language maven, and for me,
I think maybe it's my inclination as a journalist,
was the stories of the Kurdish Jews.
That's what I was interested in preserving.
I think even my father realized that a more practical, useful language
as a Jew in America is Hebrew, and he did send me to Jewish day school
for nine years, and so I do understand quite a bit of Hebrew.
There was a time when I was fluent but I can't say that I am any more.
One Aramaic phrase that I do remember very well is the one my
grandmother Miriam [Spelled phonetically] would use
when we would visit her in Jerusalem.
You know, she would cook wonderful Kurdish food for us,
stuffed grape leaves and kibbeh, and a sour soup called hamusta,
and you know, I ate quite a bit, I thought,
but it was never enough for her.
So sometimes she would look at me and say,
"Lochaloc chimidy [Spelled phonetically]" which means
"You haven't eaten anything."
So I think that might be universal for Jewish grandmothers everywhere.
So I do know a few phrases, but I can't claim to be conversant.
Male Speaker: Could you describe a little bit of Iraq,
northern Iraq [unintelligible]?
Ariel Sabar: Yeah, I mean, it was -- we were --
of course, before we left we had the same trepidation
that anyone would have who read the headlines,
which was that Iraq is not a place where anyone recommends you go.
If you look at the State Department warning, it's one of those 10
or 12 countries that you're not supposed to go to.
But when we got there, we crossed -- we flew to south eastern Turkey,
Diyarbakir, and took a four hour, very scary taxi ride,
not because there were any explosives or anything
but these taxi drivers are sort of speed demons,
and they're dodging fuel trucks, and it was quite an adventure.
But then we crossed Iraq's northern border.
Didn't need -- we had applied for a visa from Baghdad, never got it.
In fact, when I called the embassy they said "Why are you going?
We don't think it's a good idea."
But we were also told beforehand, you don't need it,
the Kurdish border doesn't care what kind of stamps you got from Baghdad.
Show up with an American passport and a minimal excuse for being there
and you'll be let through, and that's exactly what happened,
especially when we said my father was born here.
They said "Please, please, welcome," and then "This is your town.
You're welcome to it."
Very gracious, very hospitable -- I mean, I can't count the number
of invitations we got almost from the moment we crossed the border,
to drink tea with people, to meet with the elderly generation
who literally still remembered the names of Jewish neighbors
and business people they had traded with and these wonderful stories.
When we, in fact, went to that village
where my Aunt Rivka was last seen and we met with the village elder,
he was so excited, "Jews, Jews you're visiting us again!
You've come back!"
And I said, "Wow, how long -- " because he told these great stories,
when the Jews left Iraq in the '50s, how they came and traded
with them one final time, and he remembered the Jews staying up late
and singing with them, with the Muslim villagers,
staying up all night singing and partying, you know.
So I said, "When was the last time you had a Jew visit you here?"
and he said the last time was 1951.
And so there were some places where we were
that the elders remembered Jews, but it had been 50 years
since they had seen a Jewish face.
That was profoundly moving, to feel like there was still this sense
of brotherhood with the Jews.
I think one of the reasons that they feel this brotherhood is,
and I'm hardly the first one to say this,
is that the Kurds are a very large non-Arab population
in the Middle East in search of their own state.
Guess what other relatively large non-Arab population has a state
in the Middle East?
The Jews, and so they do feel bon homme,
and quite a strong attachment.
One of the things that was also really moving was to go
to the old neighborhood where my father's family lived which,
at some point after the Jews left,
at some point Saddam Hussein's forces had come there
after crushing some Kurdish rebellion
and renamed the Jewish Quarter to something like the Liberated Quarter
or Liberty Quarter or something.
But none of the Kurds -- I mean, as soon as his forces left,
the Kurds went back to calling it what they always called it
which was Mahala Juhea [Spelled phonetically],
which is the Jewish Quarter.   To this day, that part of town
where the Jews lived is the Jewish Quarter.
The Kurds were in no hurry to sort of erase that memory.
There was no sort of shame attached to it.
And I think that speaks volumes about the kinds
of religious pluralism that has always been a part of Kurdistan.
I don't want to portray Kurdistan --
the Kurds, I don't think anyone would describe
as sort of peace-loving.
I mean there certainly is -- there is a lot of warfare there,
tribal warfare over the years, but it wasn't along lines of faith.
It was territory.
It was Muslim agas or chieftains fighting each other
for power and control.
But if you were a Jew that was part of the community,
that Muslim aga would protect you as they would one
of their own Muslim subjects.
[Q.] Ariel Sabar: It's about half and half, so three siblings stayed
in Israel and three came here to the United States, right.
Female Speaker: So it's between the United States and Israel.
Ariel Sabar: And Israel, yeah.
And you know, remarkably for children of an illiterate mother
and only a partially literate father, five of the six are teachers
and two of those five are professors.
I think one of the -- the reason for that is they simply had a role model
that very few Kurdish Jews in Zakho did, which was their own --
my father's grandfather, Ephraim, who, he had a day job,
he was a working man by day, he was a dyer of clothes.
He had these big vats of dye, he was a one-man operation.
People would come to him with their shalou shabiks [Spelled
phonetically], their billowy outfits, and he would dye them,
give them a new coat of paint, basically.
But in the evenings, you know, after eating dinner
and taking a short nap, he would walk to Zakho's one-room synagogue
with a big stack of books, and you know, they were books
on righteous Jewish living, some commentary on the Torah, you know,
some mysticism, and he'd spend much
of the night reading these books by candlelight.
So he developed this reputation in Zakho as kind of a self-made mystic,
and by morning, you know, he was either so moved by what he read
or just delirious from lack of sleep,
he would literally start crying out to angels
that he was sure had surrounded him.
So, you know, either he was talking to himself or he was actually sort
of communing with spirits.
But because of that, he was known in Zakho as kind of a righteous man
who saw value in books for their own sake, whereas many others in Zakho,
simply because they needed to live by their hands and life was hard,
couldn't afford to spend much time with books.
So for my father, I think that made a very deep impression,
and then my father became sort of a role model
for all of his younger siblings.
[Q.] I think, you know I was describing a bit of the brat I was
in Los Angeles, just never much -- just always being sort of skeptical
of authority and wanting, you know, a way to --
I think when you get older you want to find a way
to question it in more acceptable ways.
You sort of sublimate it, and I think journalism was
for me initially a way to ask questions of authority
and hold people to account.
[Q.] So this was, why did I go to Kurdistan
and did we have any helpers or guides there?
The main reason I went is that --
my father would have preferred I never went and I simply read books,
interview him, interview the Kurdish Jews in Israel,
which there were many, and that would give me a good enough picture
of the place.
But as a journalist, I really felt like I needed
to see it with my own eyes.
I wanted my father to show me the river he swam in.
I wanted him to show me the Jewish neighborhood.
Where was it that his grandfather had his shop?
Where was it that his grandfather read those books
that stirred him so much?
And so I really wanted -- to be able to describe it in an authentic way,
and in a way that I thought was real, I needed to go there,
breathe that air, you know, inhale that dust,
and so that was very important to me.
I also saw it as a chance, I hoped, to kind of bond with my father;
to show him, in real terms, that I finally cared enough
about where he came from to go there with him
at a maybe less than ideal time.   We did have helpers there.
We had a guy who I think was, when my father went in '92,
the guy who helped him who was then affiliated
with the Kurdish Democratic Party.
I think back then, they had minders for foreign visitors who served
as a translator and guide, and now he had moved on from that job,
and we looked him up, and he was helpful in sort of opening doors
for us and taking us to the places we needed to go.
When I went back in 2006, to search further for my Aunt Rivka,
my father did not come with me, and so I relied
on translators on that trip.   [Q.] Yeah, sure.
So he's asking about a trip that I took to Jerusalem with my father
and my wife in 2001 in which my grandmother passed away.
And so what was the experience like?   This was, I mean, we used to go
to Israel every other summer when I was growing up.
Then right about the time I turned a teenager and I was sort
of moving away from that part of my identity, I didn't go back.
And in fact, something like 14 years had passed
and I just didn't visit my family in Israel, including my grandmother,
Miriam, and my grandfather who had passed away some time before.
So after I got married, I thought, you know,
my grandmother's getting very old, I haven't seen her in 14 years,
I should go back there, at least
so she can meet my wife and just reconnect.
And so we went back.
And it was a time of great violence in Israel
and there were some suicide bombings,
and my wife got pretty scared and said, "You know what,
we're going to stay inside.
I don't want to go to any more restaurants.
I don't want to go to any tourist spots.
Let's just stay inside with your grandmother in the evenings
and spend time with her,
because isn't that why we came here, really?"
And so over the course of four nights, she told us the stories,
the births of her twelve children, again, only six survived.
But my wife, who had just completed her child psychiatry residency,
so she was, I think, practicing a little bit on my grandmother,
and sort of getting, you know, family history
and understanding a person's childhood.
And so we've got these sort of astonishing stories of the births
of her twelve children and her marriage
at age 12 to a much older man.
We would come back every evening and she would talk to us,
and on the fourth night, we told her that we wouldn't be able
to come the fifth night because our uncle, my Uncle Uri, had invited us
to his moshad [Spelled phonetically] up north,
we were going to spend the day with him.
She made a very big protest saying, "Don't go, it's not safe.
I don't think it's wise.   You shouldn't go."
Like, all right, Saftha [Spelled phonetically].
You're just being a grandma.   Everything's going to be fine.
We'll be back the night after that.   And then, even though she was older,
I don't know quite how she quite had the strength to do this,
she sort of pulled herself up off the couch and with her walker,
followed us out in the hall begging us not to go, and also praying
that in nine months, nine or ten months,
my wife and I would have a boy.
And so it was just these very strong words
and we just didn't quite understand,
and so very early the next morning we got a call from a woman
in her building saying she'd passed away in her sleep that night.
And so for me that was a sort of very big exclamation point,
that here we were, I'd neglected this for so long, and we get there
and we hear all these precious stories,
and then they disappear like that.
And unless you act now, you not only sort of see relationships
with people you love sort of deteriorate, but also their stories
and their wonderful histories are gone with them.
So that was, for me, one of the turning points,
along with the birth of my son.
[Q.] Good question; so, the status of Aramaic today --
you know, the older generation of Kurdish Jews
in Israel still speak Aramaic among themselves.
Their children know a little bit and their grandchildren,
people sort of at my stage, know almost nothing.
So among the Jews, outside of the synagogue, it's used as part
of the synagogue service,
it's pretty much gone once this elderly generation dies.
Among Christians, there are still speakers in the mountains of Turkey
and Syria, and there are even monasteries that are trying
to teach the children Aramaic.
You'll also see it in suburbs of Detroit and Chicago
where the Chaldeans and so-called Assyrians who are
from the Middle East continue to speak Aramaic, and God bless them,
they are still trying, some of them,
to sort of pass it to their children.
I frankly don't know how much hope they have.
Iraqi Christians, of course, are increasingly persecuted,
and as they move to bigger cities and more cosmopolitan places,
Aramaic is not going to be on their list of languages
to teach their kids, because it's not going
to be particularly practical, so it really is endangered
and I would say nearly extinct language as an everyday language.
Peggy Pearlstein: Thank you, that was wonderful.
And if you want to purchase a book in our gift shop downstairs or some
of you have books with you, Ariel Sabar would be happy
to autograph them, and I think he can answer some more
questions privately.
So thank you all very much for coming.
You were terrific.
[applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.   [end of transcript]