Ariel Sabar, a journalist, has gone into the story of his family, Kurdish Jews from Iraq, who speak Aramaic and whose language and world, after nearly three thousand years of persistence, very nearly disappeared. His father became a scholar and brought the obscure Neo-Aramaic language into the discourse of global linguistics. The tale follows his father’s childhood in an obscure mountain town in Kurdish Iraq, where long-exiled Jews maintained a continuous cultural world that survived the Assyrian, Babylonbian, Persian and then Islamic powers by virtue of being “insignificant.” Many were barely literate, but among them were devout scholars. The beh Sabagh family were dyers and cloth merchants. The author's father agreed once in Israel that the more Israeli-sounding name, Sabar, would be better for his children’s future. This beautifully written book is the product of meticulous research by Ariel Sabar, who grew up in 1980s Los Angeles; like so many children of immigrants, he was semi-ashamed of his father’s other-worldliness and old-fashioned ways, thus coming rather late to the realization that his family’s history is a treasure trove – partly as a result of becoming a father himself. The family was forced to emigrate to Israel in the 1950s, where middle eastern Sephardic Jews were very low on the social ladder. But they valued education and Yona, the author’s father, went to University and ended up studying in the USA. The stories of his family members, the closeness and love of this family, are simply inspiring. Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Levant for millennia; It was the language that Christ spoke and in which the Talmud was written in Spain. Even when Arabic dominated, it survived in the town on an island in a river high in the Kurdish mountain areas. Endless new ideas and facts about history, ancient and modern, about language ... Read this.
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