MY FATHER'S PARADISE by Yona Sabar's son Ariel, is reviewed in the Christian Science Monitor (for which he writes):

My Father’s Paradise

A journalist learns to embrace the ancient roots of his past in Iraqi Kurdistan's Jewish community.
By Chuck Leddy | September 15, 2008 edition

My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq Algonquin 352 pp. $25.95

“Ours was a clash of civilizations, writ small,” writes Ariel Sabar of his relationship with his father. “He was ancient Kurdistan. I was 1980s L.A.”Sabar, who until recently covered the 2008 US presidential campaign for The Christian Science Monitor, is the son of an Iraqi Jew from Kurdistan, a gentle scholar forced from his homeland by politics, a man who grew up in a corner of the world so isolated that he was raised speaking the ancient Aramaic of Jesus.

If this sounds exotic or thrilling to the rest of us, it was nothing but mortifying to the youthful Sabar who was raised in Los Angeles.

“Mostly … I kept my distance,” he writes of his father. “He lived in his world, I in mine…. [A]t some point, as a teenager, I even stopped calling him Abba or Dad. He was just ‘Yona’ … the odd-looking, funny-talking man with strange grooming habits who lived with us and who may or may not have been my father, depending on who was asking.”

My Father’s Paradise is Sabar’s quest to reconcile an ancient past with his own life today – and to knit his father’s story to his own. It was when Sabar began his own career as a journalist and then became a father himself that the formidable challenges his father had faced began to earn his respect.

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Earlier reviews are noted here and here.