BOOKS-IRAQ: Kurdish Jews Recall a Paradise Lost | October 11, 2008

BOOKS-IRAQ: Kurdish Jews Recall a Paradise Lost
By Aaron Glantz

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 10 (IPS) - It's become popular, when talking about ongoing violence in U.S.-occupied Iraq, for officials in Washington and the media to paint the Iraqi people as savages who can't help but keep killing each other.

In last Thursday's Vice Presidential debate, Democrat Joe Biden said "the history of the last 700 years" showed the Iraqi people could never get along with each other.

But is that really true?

A different, more accurate version of history comes in a beautifully-written new book by Kurdish-American journalist Ariel Sabar: "My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Northern Iraq."

In it, Sabar tells the story of his father Yona, who grew up in 1940s Zakho, a small northern Iraqi city where Jews, Muslims, and Christians mixed relatively seamlessly. Though their community was small, Jews like Yona Sabar "went to work, prayed to a Jewish God, and spoke their own language without major disruption" just as they had "without major disruption for some twenty-seven hundred years".

Read the rest of the review here (<-- click)