Status Updates From My Father's Paradise: A Son...

God bless Ariel Sabar's sense of investigative journalism.

Ariel and Yona's journey to Kurdistan, seeing Zakho turned to a medium sized city, coming across well intentioned men and women along the way despite their fears was fascinating and heartwarming. Yona is the sweetest. Will they find clues about this sister who's been abducted by a Bedouin as a baby?

- She was not particularly sick, she had no known terminal illness, so why else would she have chosen to go just then? It was poetic but I wasn't sure it was true. It was equally possible she that she feared dying alone. All her life people had abandoned her, her mother dies when she was a girl leaving her to a cruel stepmother. she was too quick to give her first born to a wet nurse and the girl disappeared forever

"Savta Miriam was now a permanent inhabitant of the part of the cemetery the Jewish Kurds called "Zakho City". No one kept track of birth dates in Kurdistan, by my father's best estimates she'd been about seventy nine. My relatives wasted no time in assigning meaning to her death. Miriam, they said, has died to stop our dangerous trip north, death was one last gesture of self sacrifice for her offspring. -"

Yes, I cried when Savta Miriam died.

Heartwarming biography of Sabar's father, Yona, an armaic history professor who immigrated from Zakho, Kurdistan in the 1950s to Jerusalem's Katamonim and went on to Phd studies in Yale, building his life in the US while never being able to shake off his foreignness. He handles Jewish and Israeli history with outmost neutrality, bringing to light both the positive and the negatives.