Just Added! Journalist and Memoirist Ariel Sabar To Speak September 24

Fall for the Book is thrilled to welcome to this year’s festival Ariel Sabar, author of the stirring and timely memoir, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.

A melding of cultures and generations, My Father’s Paradise traces Sabar’s and his father’s journey through today’s postwar Iraq in an effort to locate his father’s birthplace—or what is left of it. Along the way, the journey becomes one of self-discovery and reawakening for both men.

Sabar will read from and discuss the memoir on Wednesday, Sept. 24, at 3 p.m. in the Provident Bank Tent, outside the Johnson Center, on Mason’s Fairfax Campus.


Sabar’s father, Yona, was born in ancient community of Kurdish Jews in Northern Iraq — a community of “self-made mystics and gifted storytellers, humble peddlers and rugged loggers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors.” After emigrating first to Israel and then to the U.S., Yona became a professor at UCLA — but despite his new country, he was also determined to preserve the heritage and traditions of his people.

Though son Ariel has not originally shared this wish, the birth of his own child left him reflecting on his past — and soon sent him and his father off on a quest to revisit Yona’s homeland.

As the book’s publisher states, “My Father’s Paradise is Ariel Sabar's quest to reconcile present and past. As Ariel and his father travel…, Sabar brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, telling his family’s story and discovering their place in the sweeping saga of the Sephardic Jews' millennia-long survival in Islamic lands…. Populated by Kurdish chieftains, trailblazing linguists, Arab nomads, and devout believers, this intimate yet powerful book is an improbable story of tolerance and hope set in what today is the very center of the world’s attention”

A former staff writer for the Baltimore Sun and the Providence (RI) Journal, Sabar is now covering the 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns for the Christian Science Monitor. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Monthly, Mother Jones magazine, and other publications.

An essay adapted from My Father’s Paradise appeared in the August 15 issue of the New York Times Magazine. Another essay appears in the latest issue of Moment Magazine. The complete book will be released the week before Fall for the Book opens.