My Father's Paradise Quotes

“Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“You have certain hopes,” he began, the subject making him visibly uncomfortable. “You do this as a nostalgic trip, and nostalgia is you feel like you will see a place again. And when you see nothing is left, it’s in a way a comment on life itself. You see that life doesn’t stand still. Nothing waits for you to visit it again. The river keeps flowing. It may be smaller. But still it flows. And with it your life flows by. This is what life basically is.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“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.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“Some 94 percent of the planet’s population speaks a mere 5 percent of its languages.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“No continent has been spared. Gooniyandi in Australia is down to its last 100 speakers; Dama in Cameroon, 50 speakers; Kavalan in Thailand, 24; Xipaya in Brazil, 2; Plains Miwok in the United States, 1.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“Though Aramaic’s longevity is remarkable, its fate is common. Of the roughly seven thousand languages now spoken, half are expected to vanish over the next century.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“Saddam was renowned in the Arab world for his hatred of Israel. He spoke of “scorching” the country with chemical gas and paid $25,000 rewards to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“In Mosul, there is no difference between Kurds and Jews,” Lubayd said, exhaling a rope of smoke. “They say killing a Kurd is like killing a Jew.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“Western culture is geared to success, rewarding people with money, power, and prestige. In Middle Eastern culture, it’s about being loved.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“Let’s see: The Romanians are thieves. The Polish are unclean. The Yemenites—that’s our family—are peasants. The Moroccans are brutes. And the Kurds have it worst of all: They’re just morons.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“Language lives. It inhales culture and history. It sprouts new limbs, sloughs off old ones. It goes through cycles of rapid growth, unremarkable periods of stable maturity, decay, and sometimes, as with Hebrew, miraculous rebirth.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“In life, she had always felt helpless against abandonment. In death, she had perhaps finally asserted herself. For four short days she was the center of a family, and that was how Miryam Sabar wanted to leave the world.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“The Manhattan businessman’s daughter would never have met the Kurdish shopkeeper’s son were it not for their aloneness in America.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“But he sensed that Judaism’s currency in America masked a spiritual shallowness. His Jewish friends at Yale rarely went to synagogue.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“America, it seemed, was a land of contradictions.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“Midrash for the People.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“But how could my father listen to this bearer of his own culture and not be drawn in deeper?”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“But he came from people who survived by keeping their heads down, and he journeyed inward. He wanted to give his people a voice, but in another way, a quieter way, a way he hoped would still count.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“He took one look, went back to his car, and left, Levi recalled. He said, "This is not a police matter — politicians should take care of it.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“The man shook his head and left. But Rahamim understood: Family was all Ephraim had left.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“Zionism had always been a European solution to a European problem.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“You must learn to read, yourself. And you must judge for yourself what you believe and what is important.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“In my father’s obsession with his mother tongue, I had already glimpsed this: If you knew which levers to pull, you could stop time just long enough to save the things you loved most.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“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 adrift, unsure of who they are, I want that candle to still be burning.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“Even when she was a girl, the kitchen was a source of pride and power. A separate vestibule off the main room, it cocooned her in glorious aromas. She had proven herself a skillful and painstaking chef, famous in the family for yaprach that tickled the tongue with notes of tomato, lemon and dried sumac. Shmuel and her half brothers teased that Miryam's date-sized yaprach were tiny, like her. Miryam didn't mind the ribbing; she rolled grape leaves at half their usual size precisely so that her family would recognize them as hers, rather than her stepmother's or her aunts'.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“The sense that I might have gotten my father wrong--and that I might actually be his son--came slowly.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“If you knew which levers to pull, you could stop time just long enough to save the things you love most.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq