Postmemory and Hybridity in Ariel Sabar’s My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Father’s Past

Abstract

In his memoir, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Father’s Past (2009), Ariel Sabar narrates the story of his father and how he has survived a double exile. In and through his memoir, Sabar aimed to explore his father’s lost past and his own connection to this past. However, in this exploration, Sabar uncovers a greater history, transforming his personal journey of self-discovery into a quest to resurrect the lost history of Jewish Kurds, a “unique diasporic ethnic group” in the Middle East (Bahar Basher and Duygun Atlas, “Once a Diaspora, Always a Diaspora? The Ethnic, Cultural and Political Mobilization of Kurdistani Jews in Israel.” Politics, Religion Ideology 22, nos. 3–4 (2021): 302–328, 2021). Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this article introduces Ariel Sabar’s as the postmemory of Jewish Kurds. More significantly, it argues for the diasporic and hybrid nature of this work of postmemory, as well as its multidirectionality as a work of memory. This hybridity—of cultural identity, sense of place and belonging, as well as memory—can be traced back to Sabar’s inherited history within the Jewish Kurdish context, transmitted over place, time, and generation. Also, relying on cultural studies, diaspora studies and mobility studies, this article reveals how the identity of Sabar’s father, and his subsequent generations, bear markers of different ­cultural belonging and senses of place(s) due to the multiple “uprootings and regroundings” they have experienced over time.

Keywords:

• Postmemory
• hybridity
• Jewish Kurds
• Kurdish identity
• Jewish identity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 1.

2 Ibid., 3.

3 Ibid., 5.

4 Ibid., 9.

5 Ibid., 1.

6 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 11.

7 Hirsch qtd. in Goertz, “Transgenerational Representations,” 33.

8 Hall, “Who Needs Identity?,” 226.

9 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 4.

10 Ahmed et al., Uprootings/Regroundings, Abstract.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Basher and Atlas, “Once A Diaspora, Always a Diaspora?,” 307.

14 Ibid., 308.

15 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 76.

16 Ibid., 53.

17 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 2.

18 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 69.

19 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 4.

20 Ibid., 235.

21 Ibid., 223.

22 Ibid., 223.

23 Ibid., 226.

24 Ibid., 225.

25 Basher and Atlas, “Once a Diaspora, Always a Diaspora?”; Sabar, My Father’s Paradise.

26 2003, 9.

27 Baser and Atlas, “Once a Diaspora, Always a Diaspora?,” 315.

28 Ibid., 312.

29 Ibid., 317.

30 Ahmed et al., Uprootings/Regroundings, 5.

31 Basher and Atlas, “Once a Diaspora, Always a Diaspora?,” 313.

32 For instance, Jewish Kurds “gathered in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to rally for Kurdistan’s bid for Independence”; “various Kurdish newspapers published headlines claiming ‘Kurdish diaspora in Israel’ support Kurdish self-determination”; “at the 2019 Sehrane wore black scarfs, and pictures of Kurdish fighters in Syria were projected on the screen in a display of solidarity” (Baser and Atlas, “Once a Diaspora, Always a Diaspora?,” 303, 318, 324–325). Also, “Hadasaa Yeshurun, an Israeli-born singer of Kurdish origin, released a song in Kurdish titled ‘We Are All Peshmerga’ in February 2017 as a tribute to the Peshmerga fighting against ISIS in Syria. She is seen wearing a soldier’s uniform and holding Kurdish and Israel flags in her music video” (Baser and Atlas, “Once a Diaspora, Always a Diaspora?,” 318). Baser and Atlas also argue that Mostafa Barzani, as the leader of the Kurdish rebellion, is very famous among the Jewish Kurds.

33 Basher and Atlas, “Once A Diaspora, Always a Diaspora?,” 304.

34 Ahmed et al., Uprootings/Regroundings, Abstract.

35 Ibid.

36 Ahmed et al., Uprootings/Regroundings, 9.

37 Vali, “The Kurds and their ‘others’,” “Genealogies of the Kurds”; Bengio, “Separated but Connected.”

38 Charmé et al., “Jewish Identities in Action.”

39 Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 106.

40 Hirsch and Suleiman, “Material Memory: Holocaust Testimony in Post-Holocaust Art,”11.

41 Hirsch, Family Frames, 8.

42 Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,”112.

43 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 10.

44 Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home, 19.

45 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 287, 297.

46 Ibid., ix.

47 Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home, 237.

48 Ibid., 235.

49 Ibid., 245.

50 Hirsch, Family Frames, 22.

51 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, ix.

52 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3.

53 Ibid., 11.

54 Ibid., 11.

55 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 264.

56 Ibid., 105.

57 Ibid., 114.

58 Ibid., 315.

59 Ibid., 3.

60 Ibid., 192.

61 Ibid., 193.

62 Vertovec and Cohen, Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism.

63 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 203.

64 Ibid., 226.

65 Ibid., 284.

66 Ibid., 338.

67 Ibid., 1–5.

68 Ibid., 234.

69 Ibid., 254–255.

70 An Aramaic baby word for stomach.

71 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 262.

72 Ibid., 263.

73 Ibid., 11.

74 Ibid., 339.

75 Ibid., 324–325.

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Notes on contributors

Zhila Gholami

Zhila Gholami earned her PhD in Literary Studies from Griffith University. Her doctoral thesis, “Roots and Routes: Kurdish Literature as World Literature,” explored the negotiations of traumatic memory in English-language Kurdish writing as a way of understanding how the Kurdish people struggle for recognition and self-determination in and through diasporic cultural production. She is currently an Adjunct Fellow with the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University, working on the initial phase of a longer-term project on contemporary Kurdish art in cosmopolitan art spaces. Her works have been published in Continuum, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and Routledge.