For much of their lives, Yona Sabar and his son Ariel were like warring countries with radically different customs, languages and concerns. In those days, Ariel was, he says, “a very bratty, 1980s L.A. kid who bought into many of the superficial values of that era.” His father, a professor of Aramaic at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1972, was a Jewish immigrant from Kurdish Iraq, a gentle, modest man grounded in Old World courtesies and academic formalities.

“Ours was a clash of civilisations,” Ariel writes in his memoir My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Family’s Past, which won a 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and has been reissued in paperback. “When we collided, it wasn’t pretty.”

Yet as Ariel, 38, grew up, he developed a curiosity about his father’s past. Over time, he would probe Yona’s upbringing in the town of Zahko in Iraq, near the Turkish border. He would learn about the tenacious faith of his ancestors, the Jews of Kurdistan, who had lived among Muslims for centuries, tending their religious beliefs in one of the Middle East’s toughest neighbourhoods.

He would listen to his father relate how, at 13, he had immigrated to the new state of Israel, part of a mass exodus triggered by growing Arab-Israeli hostilities. And he would delve into the foundations of Aramaic, the nearly extinct 3,000-year-old language to which his father’s career had been devoted, the mother tongue of Jesus.

“I didn’t give him the chance to tell me any of these stories,” says Ariel, a former staff writer for The Baltimore Sun and The Providence Journal.

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