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

Introduction

I am the Keeper of my family’s stories. I am the guardian of its honour. I am the defender of its traditions. As the first-born son of a Kurdish father, these, they tell me, are my duties. And yet even before my birth I resisted.¹

These words are the opening paragraph of My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Father’s Past (2009), a memoir by journalist and novelist Ariel Sabar, who was born in America to a Jewish-Iraqi-Kurdish father and an American mother. As the title and opening paragraph suggest, Sabar’s memoir emerged out of his personal curiosity to know more about his father’s past and his later sense of duty to document the life of his father’s forgotten people, hometown, and language. As much as being Sabar’s memoir, My Father’s Paradise is the memoir of Sabar’s father, Yona Sabar, a linguist professor at UCLA who devoted his life to working on the culture and language of his people and the childhood homeland he lost. The first chapter of the memoir deals with Sabar’s troubled and shifting relationship with his father. Initially, Sabar had no interest in his father’s past, homeland, cultural background, or his father’s mother tongue, and wondered why his father was so strongly engaged with his past life and his “paradise,” Zakho in Kurdistan of Iraq. However, the birth of his own son made Sabar rethink his relationship with his father and the past.² Becoming a father himself ignites Sabar’s need to rediscover his family’s history and what links him to his father and his own son. Sabar asks himself: “Who is my father? How did he wind up so far from home? I wrote this book in part to answer those questions. I wanted to conjure the gulfs of geography and language he crossed on his way from the hills of Kurdistan to the highways of Los Angeles.”³ As Sabar’s father left Kurdistan when he was twelve years old and has never returned, he could not be the only source for Sabar to discover the past. Therefore, Sabar decided to go back to his father’s homeland to speak to the older generation and take advantage of their first-hand memories. For Sabar, the fear of the older generation’s death and memory loss was urgent enough to quit his job, travel back and record these memories and stories.

However, in the second chapter of the memoir titled “Zakho,” Sabar is not in Kurdistan but in Jerusalem, in a neighborhood called Katamonim, “the heart of Kurdish Jerusalem.”⁴ As Sabar’s story goes on, readers discover that the homeland and the paradise the memoir revolves around is not just Kurdistan in Iraq but also Israel. Also, the inherited resistance in Sabar’s identity—as cited in the memoir’s opening paragraph—is not only the Kurdish resistance but also the Jewish resistance, and, as a self-defined “defender of tradition,”⁵ Sabar defends multiple traditions, identities, cultures, and histories. A close reading of My Father’s Paradise reveals a fusion of multiple cultures, senses of home and belongings, and identification with various places and groups of people. In Sabar’s memoir, as will be discussed in more detail, there are multiple sites of memory and act of remembrance “cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites,” thus turning his work into a site of multidirectional memory, what Rothberg terms in his book with the same title.⁶

Sabar’s hybrid identity, however, is far beyond being from or growing up in a hybrid family of an American mother and a non-American father. Aside from being a second-generation child of an immigrant father, Sabar is a third generation of Jewish Kurds, a distinct and unique ethnic group in the Middle East whose identity is tied to more than one place, culture, and history. Sabar’s father belongs to the last generation of Jewish Kurds who left their home of Kurdistan in the 1950s to go back to another home, Israel. Sabar’s accounts of his father’s story reveal his hybrid identity that encompasses Kurdishness, Jewishness and his strong attachment to both Kurdistan and Israel. Yona’s hybrid and unique identity can be traced back to the history and culture of his tribe. Jewish Kurds, as discussed in more depth later in this article, have experienced multiple exiles and displacements—forced and voluntary—which has led to a unique diasporic experience and hybrid identity. Due to the multiple “uprootings and regroundings” this community has experienced, to use Ahmed et al.’s terminology (2003), Jewish Kurds have a complicated relationship with “home,” and their identity bears markers of multiple national, cultural, and political belongings and senses of place. Moreover, Yona’s migration to the US not only uprooted him from his Kurdish culture and Jewish identity, but it also further hybridized his hybridity and sense of home and belonging, as he found new attachments and made a new home in the US. These migratory trajectories affected Yona’s identifications and perceptions of home and, as the memoir shows us, this hybridity is transmitted to the subsequent generations, Ariel Sabar, and his son.

Given this background and inspired by Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory (1997, 2001, 2008, 2012), this paper introduces Ariel Sabar’s memoir as the postmemory of Jewish Kurds. Postmemory is a term Hirsch has coined to describe the inter-/cross-generational transmission of historical memories from one generation to another. More significantly, this study argues for the diasporic and hybrid nature of this work of postmemory and indicates how this hybridity manifests itself not only and simply thematically, but also in structure and form. Indeed, the hybrid nature within Sabar’s memoir is evident in various aspects, including language and composition, settings, genre, as well as themes, memories, and sites of memories. It is worth noting that postmemory, as Hirsch underscores, inherently possesses a hybrid nature and it is “a hybrid form of memory.”⁷ The concepts of postmemory and hybridity are thus tightly interwoven. Yet, the hybridity of Sabar’s identity and his postmemory goes beyond the hybridity associated with postmemory. As highlighted earlier, this hybridity transcends the usual blending of belonging, identity, and memory often observed in diasporic contexts—spanning the departed homeland and the newly embraced one. Notably, Sabar and his predecessors face an additional layer of complexity within their diasporic situation. This complexity arises from their dual allegiance to two homelands, Kurdistan, and Israel, resulting in a multidirectional shaping of their identity and memory.

However, before embarking on the details of how Sabar’s memoir acts as a hybrid work of postmemory and how hybridity manifests itself in various ways in his work, this study first provides an overview of Jewish Kurds’ history and looks at how the ideas of home, identification and belonging are constructed and reconstructed through the movement and migration of individuals. It seeks to show how for Jewish Kurds, home(s) and belonging(s) have been formed in relation to their collective migrations, and how home(s) and identification(s) are made and remade in the multiple places they have lived. In doing so, this paper relies on a number of theoretical frameworks, including diaspora and cultural studies—particularly Stuart Hall’s (1996, 2003) theories of hybridity, cultural identity, and diaspora—and migration and mobility studies, specifically Ahmed et al.’s (2003) work in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. It draws on Hall’s argument that identity, specifically in the context of diaspora, “is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture.”⁸ Moreover, “we need to situate the debates about identity within all those historically specific developments and practices which have disturbed the relatively ‘settled’ character of many populations and cultures.”⁹ Thus, this study aims to contextualize Sabar’s memoir within the specific historic and cultural context from which Sabar’s identity and memoir emerged. It investigates how this specific context has disturbed the relatively “settled” character of the identity of this community and how it has led to the formation of a unique hybrid identity that encompasses both Kurdish and Jewish elements of identity.

It is important to acknowledge that this study recognizes Kurdish identity as a national form and Jewish identity a religious one. Nonetheless, within both Jewish and Kurdish contexts, these religious and national identities have significantly influenced their cultural sense of self. Equally noteworthy, both Jewish and Kurdish identities are inherently tied to a geographical location. The Kurdish question is widely recognized as revolving around territorial claims, while the land of Israel holds profound symbolic importance for Jewish identity. This circumstance lends intrigue and distinctiveness to the situation of Jewish Kurds, whose identity is a fusion of both Kurdish and Jewish components, influencing their relationship with their homeland(s) in compelling ways within both the Kurdish and Jewish contexts.

As far as questions of home and belonging are concerned, this study draws on the contemporary definitions of these terms in which home is not “always fixed in a single location … home and belonging may involve attachment and movement, fixation and loss, and the transgression and enforcement of boundaries.”¹⁰ Utilizing theories from migration and mobility studies, this paper examines how “movements of bodies and communities are intrinsic to the making of homes, nations, identities and boundaries.”¹¹ Through its analysis of My Father’s Paradise, this paper shows how Sabar’s accounts of his own life, his father’s life, and those of his ancestors affirm that there are “different experiences of being at home, leaving home, and going home.”¹² His memoir is rich in examples of uprootings and regroundings, their effects on the ways identities are made and remade, and how homes are constructed, lived, imagined, and remembered. The final point that needs to be mentioned here is that, to the best of my knowledge, only a limited number of book reviews and a single journal article titled “Zakho: A Town of Tolerance and Coexistence in Ariel Sabar’s My Father’s Paradise,” have addressed Sabar’s memoir. As the title suggests, this article delves into the themes of tolerance and coexistence within Zakho, primarily discussing the historical and cultural context of Sabar’s work. In a more recent study by Bahar Basher and Duygu Atlas (2021), the first comprehensive exploration of Jewish Kurds, references to Sabar’s work are made. However, the current article stands as the first literary study on Sabar’s memoir, which explores the ideas of postmemory, multidirectional memory, and hybridity in this work, concepts have not been explicitly discussed by the author within the memoir itself.

Who Are the Jewish Kurds?

Bahar Basher and Duygu Atlas’s study of Jewish Kurds—the first comprehensive study on this community—introduces Jewish Kurds as a “unique ethnic group” with a “distinct identity” and argues that “Kurdistani Jews … constitutes a complex case that pushes the boundaries of diaspora studies.”¹³ The history of Jewish Kurds can be traced back to the “eighth century BC, when Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel and forcibly resettled them to the region later known as Kurdistan.”¹⁴ Being uprooted from their place of origin, the Jewish community exiled to this region of the Middle East grounded their life in their new home and lived there for hundreds of years. They, who lived peacefully among Muslim and Christine Kurds, also grounded their own roots in Kurdistan and maintained a sense of attachment to their Jewish cultural roots and identity. While displaced from their home, the Jewish community in Kurdistan felt at home and enjoyed a better life among Kurds, compared to the Jewish communities in Europe that suffered centuries of persecution and the Holocaust, or those in other parts of Iraq, like Baghdad, where Jews were subjected to oppressions such as the Farhud program in 1941.¹⁵ For them, Zakho was “the Jerusalem of Kurdistan.”¹⁶ Like any diasporic Jewish community or any diasporic group across the world, they attempted to maintain their connection with their lost homeland and their cultural identity.

This continued sense of identity among Jews of Kurdistan best exemplifies Hall’s (1996) theory of identity and concept of historicization, which emphasizes historical connection in maintaining a sense of identity across place and time. According to Hall, our identities are formed through historicization, which is “constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group, or with an ideal, and with the natural closure of solidarity and allegiance on this formation.”¹⁷ He asserts that historicization is important in how individuals define their own sense of identity, and it plays an important role for diasporic people who have been cut off from points of identification that previously defined their sense of identity. That is why maintaining a connection to elements of their past is an essential part of how many diasporic people live and define themselves. In the Jewish context—specifically Jewish Kurds, whose sense of identity as Jews is historicized and defined by specific shared discourse and practices—they have drawn on elements from their lost homeland and their cultural identity to historicize and maintain their sense of identity in their new setting, Kurdistan. Their religion and language—Aramaic—are among the significant elements they draw on to maintain their sense of Jewish identity far beyond their place of origin. As Sabar writes in his memoir: “The Kurdish Jews faced almost none of the virulent anti-Semitism that bounded Jews in Europe or even, to a far lesser extent, Baghdad. They went to work, prayed to a Jewish God and spoke their own language …. In important ways, they were Kurds first and Muslims, Christians, and Jews second.”¹⁸ What needs to be emphasized here is Sabar’s statement that his ancestors in Kurdistan were Kurds first and Jews second. It seems that like any diasporic group, the Jews of Kurdistan have integrated into their host community, and their cultural identity has undergone transformations. As Hall affirms, while history and historicization play a significant role in how individuals form identity and maintain a connection to their historical and cultural identity across place and time, identities are also “constantly in the process of change and transformation.”¹⁹ He contends that diasporic identities “are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.”²⁰ According to Hall, there are two different but connected ways of thinking about cultural identity: one “in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’… which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.”²¹ In this perspective, “cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people’, with stable, unchanging, and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history.”²² In the case of Jewish Kurds, this first conception of cultural identity has played a significant role. Their continued sense of Jewish identity and culture in diaspora proves how strongly these shared historical and cultural elements connect Jews across the world, including Jews of Kurdistan, as one people despite all the complexities and diversities of Jewish identity.

More significantly, Jewish Kurds’ experiences affirm Hall’s second observation of cultural identity, which challenges the unchanging nature and elements of cultural identity. While emphasizing and acknowledging identity’s relationship with history and the past—what he calls historicization—Hall argues that “in this perspective, cultural identity is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture.”²³ He believes “cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.”²⁴ While strongly rooted in their history, the identity of Jews of Kurdistan and their place and culture of origin has undergone transformations; their settlement in Kurdish society transformed their experience and identifications; they found new roots in their new setting, new identifications, and cultural and political ties beyond the Jewish boundaries. These new identifications and cultural and political belongings have been so strong among Jews of Kurdistan that they are sustained and continued today that their diasporic condition has been ended after decades of living in their Jewish homeland.²⁵

Jewish Kurds, who left their Kurdish homeland and returned to their Jewish homeland in the 1950s when the Iraqi government announced that Jewish communities across Iraq were free to leave, experience a double exile and uprooting. While leaving their Kurdish homeland was a traumatic experience for Jews of Kurdistan, leaving Iraq might have offered them an escape from oppression and discrimination. Iraq was one of the states that declared war against the new state of Israel, which directly conflicted with its Jewish community settled in Iraq. Jewish Kurds who found Israel a safer place to live decided to return. They surrendered their citizenship, all their belongings, lands and homes, and returned to Jerusalem in an exodus organized by Jews in Israel and diaspora.

As Sabar describes it, while for many this was voluntary and they happily agreed to leave Iraq to return to the ancient homeland they had desired to return to for many years, for many, including Sabar’s father and his family, it was a forced and traumatic departure. Sabar explains in his memoir that many Jewish Kurds left Kurdistan in agony and with the desire to return one day. Similarly, their regroundings in their new home of Israel were also traumatic. As Ahmed et al. argue, “both uprooting and regroundings can entail forms of mourning, nostalgia, and remembrance as well as physical sickness and experiences of trauma.”²⁶ Jewish Kurds’ traumatic experience was not only due to their sense of nostalgia and longing for the Kurdish home they left behind, but also the discrimination and stigmatization they faced in their Jewish homeland, as well as the cultural and social isolation they experienced. In Israel, Jewish Kurds “were subjected to double discrimination.”²⁷ “Their homecoming was supposed to provide them a life without stigmatization or discriminations”²⁸; they were treated differently from other returned Jewish communities as they returned to the promised land from Muslim countries. Living under such circumstances, many Jewish Kurds “abandoned their cultural heritage due to the negative stereotypes in predominantly white Israel,”²⁹ “stigmatized in Israel as back-country rubes, many lost touch with their culture, seeing no use in passing it to their children.”³⁰ This is while many Jewish Kurds attempted to maintain their Kurdishness and Kurdish culture in Israel: they built “a mini-Zakho” in Jerusalem and “maintained distinct clothing traditions, eating habits, customs, and language.”³¹ Jewish Kurds were also involved in political activities that supported the Kurdish cause and Kurdish independence, including demonstrations and petitions.³² They have pursued transnational activities “to create a bridge between Israel and Kurdistan,”³³ between their homelands.

The history of Jewish Kurds, as seen, is marked by multiple uprootings and regroundings. First, they are uprooted from their place of origin and forcibly resettled in the Kurdish region in the Middle East. The second uprooting Jewish Kurds experienced and their regroundings in their place of origin disrupted them from the Kurdish ties and belongings they formed in their regroundings in Kurdish society. Thus, the mobilities this community have experienced are not simply physical; rather, they are ethnic, cultural, and political. These mobilities have shaped their identifications, senses of belonging and places, and led to a kind of distinct hybrid identity that contributes to both Jewish identity/history and Kurdish identity/history. For Jewish Kurds, home and belonging have been formed in relation to their collective experiences of migration. They have “different experiences of being at home, leaving home, and going home.”³⁴ Further, they best exemplify Ahmed et al.’s argument that “movement does not only happen when one leaves home, and those homes are not always fixed in a single location.”³⁵ As Ahmed et al. argue, we must “consider home and migration in terms of plurality of experiences, histories and constituencies,” as “homes are always made and remade as grounds and conditions (of work, of family, of political climate, etc.) change.”³⁶ It is on this understanding and definition of home and belonging, as well as Hall’s observations that identities are constantly in the process of change and transformation while always in the process of historicization, that this study argues for the hybrid identity of Jewish Kurds and their hybrid sense of home and belonging.

Jewish Kurds hold a unique position that sets them apart from other Kurdish and Jewish diasporic groups. However, they contribute to enriching the diversity and complexity of both Jewish and Kurdish identities. Within the realm of Kurdish studies, scholars have elaborated on the transnational and hybrid aspect of Kurdish existence, which fundamentally shapes their Kurdish identity.³⁷ These scholars argue that despite division, displacement and dispersion, the Kurdish community, whether at home or in diaspora, exhibit remarkable linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity. Nevertheless, their shared Kurdish heritage unites Kurds worldwide, rooted in common historical experiences and shared cultural norms that bind them as a collective. The example of Jewish Kurds vividly illustrates how Kurdishness and Kurdish identity takes on a new dimension when interwoven with another facet of identification, namely Jewishness. Similarly, in the Jewish context, the experience and attachments of Jewish Kurds to a Kurdish homeland and culture further enhance the diversity and multiplicity of Jewish encounters, as result of the dispersion of Jews across the globe.³⁸ Following the subsequent section, wherein this article aims to indicate how Sabar’s memoir functions as an example of postmemory, the final section will provide more concrete instances that exemplify how hybrid identities are formed and transmitted, building upon the narrative of Sabar’s father and his own life.

My Father’s Paradise: A Work of Postmemory

Sabar’s memoir, aside from the specific historical and cultural context it has been produced from and its contribution to Jewish and Kurdish identity/history, is the postmemory of Jewish Kurds in which Sabar pieces together his family history and the history of his ancestor. Sabar’s narrative of discovery and return; his reasons for writing the memoir; the processes he has gone through; his position in the history of his ancestors; his relationship with the past, the stories and memories he narrates and how they are narrated; and the memoir’s structure and style all fit into Hirsch’s framework of postmemory. Hirsch coined this term to describe the inter-/cross-generational transmission of historical memories from one generation to another. She argues that postmemory generation inherits memories of the past indirectly “by means of stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up.”³⁹ Hirsch first used this term in “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory” (1997) to describe the relationship the generation after Holocaust bears to the personal and collective traumatic memories that preceded their birth. Hirsh devoted most of her later works to refining her theory of postmemory and exploring its various dimensions and manifestations, mainly through her readings of the works of photographers, artists, and writers of the Holocaust postgeneration. Hirsch belongs to the second generation of Holocaust survivors, and she has personal connections to this idea of postmemory.

The term has now expanded to not only the subsequent generations of Holocaust survivors but also many communities other than Holocaust. As Hirsh asserts, she does not “want to restrict the notion of postmemory to the remembrance of the Holocaust, or to privilege the Holocaust as unique or limit experience beyond all others.”⁴⁰ In addition to visual and material cultures, the term has also been discussed in relation to works of literature. In Hirsh’s view, postmemory “is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.”⁴¹ She believes works of postmemory are shaped as the result of exposure to the previous generation’s memories and stories. Further, they are shaped by the ethical and moral responsibility this generation feels towards their family or ancestor, those who survived or did not survive exile, genocide, or any form of extremity. As Hirsch argues: “second generation fiction, art, memoir, and testimony are shaped by the attempt to represent the long-term effects of living in proximity of the pain, depression, and dissociation of persons who have witnessed and survived massive historical trauma. They are shaped by the child’s confusion and responsibility, by a desire to repair, and by the consciousness that her own existence may well be a form of compensation for unspeakable loss.”⁴² There is no doubt that the cultural ruptures and loss of home caused by migration—as Sabar’s father experienced—cannot compare with or be treated in the same space as the trauma of the Holocaust or other genocides. However, Sabar’s father’s experience of being ruptured from his childhood homeland, the double exile he experienced later and their ever-present effects on his life, in conjunction with Sabar’s troubled and shifting relationship with his father’s lost past and home, and Sabar’s journey to discover this forgotten people and history, resonate with Hirsch’s considerations and her notion of postmemory. While Sabar partly wrote the memoir to make sense of his connection to the past and find his place in his family history, the greater reasons are the sense of responsibility he felt to document and preserve the history and memory of his ancestors and transmit it to the next generations. His memoir is also generated by an urgency driven by the fear of death and memory loss of the older generations of Jewish Kurds, including his own father. This led Sabar on physical journeys to the distant homeland(s), where he has never lived or even seen himself. To discover his family history, Sabar decided to go back to Jerusalem to find the older generation of Jewish Kurds with first-hand experiences and memories of Zakho and record their memories and stories. In Jerusalem, Sabar looked for Zaki Levi, a Zakho native who is said to have an “encyclopaedic memory,” to ask him for the stories and memories of the past.⁴³ Sabar finds Zaki Levi and explains, “I had come here to learn more about my family. I was particularly keen on stories about my great-grandfather.” This issue of “returning” to the parents’ places is among the significant points Hirsch and Spitzer (2010) raised in their study of the second-generation Holocaust survivors. As they state, “returning to the place” with their parents “seemed the first step in a process of reconnection and recovery, in both senses of the word.”⁴⁴ However, the specific place Sabar needed to visit concerning his father’s history was Zakho in Kurdistan. He also travelled back there with his father to see his father’s paradise and what remained of his tribe there after their exodus to Israel. By returning to Zakho with his father, Sabar made his father’s dream of returning to his homeland come true. His journey back to Zakho even turned into one of discovery of a missing aunt named Rifqa, whom he uncovered in his father’s memories. As Sabar narrates in his memoir, his aunt was abducted in her early childhood and has never been found.⁴⁵

Through his travels back to Jerusalem and Zakho, Sabar heard many unheard stories and memories and made connections with many Jewish Kurds from old and newer generations. In his memoir, he pieces together all these stories and memories gathered from different parts of the world. While his memoir narrates his life story too, it is more the memoir of his father and his family’s history. Thus, he has no direct experience of most of the memories he narrates or the double exile his father experienced. More importantly, Sabar’s memoir is also grounded in and through historical and journalistic research. His work combines personal, familial, and collective memory with historical and archival documents, information, and evidence. The mode of storytelling shifts throughout the memoir and at times takes the form of journalistic and research accounts. This might be affected by his journalism career, but it can also be the result of the process and purpose of his memoir’s production. To uncover and discover the past, Sabar conducted historical and archival research and interviews and used these sources—archival images, references, letters, and people—to document and record his family history. Sabar’s memoir also incorporates multiple quotations from scholars, journalists, and travelers to Zakho. Together with the archival images he includes in the memoir, these academic, historic, and scholarly references supplement the stories and history he narrates and evidences his historical accounts. At the beginning of his memoir, Sabar explains his writing process and includes a bibliography of the sources utilized at the end. As he writes in “A Note on Method” at the beginning of the book: “to search this book, I interviewed nearly one hundred relatives, family friends and acquaintances, scholars, and others. I conducted research at libraries, special collections, and government archives in the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom. I travelled to Iraq, Israel, and cities across the United States to see crucial settings with my own eyes. I collected family letters, diaries, photographs, and official documents. I read transcript of my grandmother’s recorded oral histories. And I spent untold hours harrying my father with questions. I took pains to find every living relative and acquaintances in a position to shed light on my family’s story.”⁴⁶ These lines further highlight that Sabar’s work is beyond a memoir and acts as more than a medium of self-discovery. His work embodies elements of different genres—memoir, biography, journalism, and historical account—reinforcing the hybrid quality of the book. Thus, the hybridity in this memoir is seen on multiple levels, not only in genre and style of writing but also in its context, content, setting, and language. Sabar’s memoir is a linguistically hybrid text. It utilizes a great number of Kurdish, Aramaic and Hebrew words, expressions, and proverbs within the main language of the text, English, reflecting the linguistic hybridity of both the text and its author. Also, the images and archival photos Sabar uses in his memoir stem from multiple sites and places due to his hybrid background. The photos included are from all three homelands: Kurdistan, Jerusalem, and America. For instance, the memoir cover is a photo of Zakho in Iraq, showing the image of a man in Kurdish clothes on his way to return. In the front pages before the story begins, Sabar provides a map of Iraq with the Kurdish regions highlighted. There are multiple photos from Zakho and Kurdistan, several photos of Sabar’s family and Jewish Kurds in Jerusalem, and images of his family in the US.

The use of archival images and photos in Sabar’s memoir further highlights the role of his work as a practice of postmemory. These images are what Hirsch and Spitzer call “points of memory … [that] link past and present, memory and postmemory, and individual remembrance and cultural recalls.”⁴⁷ Hirsch and Spitzer believe such images within these narratives “offer evidence of the past … [and] function as supplements”; “they create an opening in the present to something in the past that goes beyond the information they record.”⁴⁸ Further, they argue that these images have the “potential to provoke historical memory.”⁴⁹ Sabar’s memoir contains multiple photos he found in the archives of Jewish Kurds. He brings photos of the people whose stories he narrates, such as Mamo, Zakho’s master storyteller, and pictures of the Kurdish families on the day they left Zakho and the day they arrived in Israel. There are photos of Jewish Kurds’ Iraqi passports and their new IDs issued for them in Israel, including that of his great-grandfather. Sabar also incorporates several photos of his family, particularly his father in Zakho, Israel and the US, and Sabar himself with his siblings during their childhood. There are also photos of his return to Kurdistan and images of what remained from Jewish Kurds in Iraq, such as the shattered Hebrew tablets. The images, maps, and parts of letters he found in his family archive serve to supplement the stories Sabar narrates of the Jewish Kurds and provide evidence of his memories and postmemories. They are evidence and documents of those places and people and facilitate a dialogue with the past for the readers, particularly for the next generations of the Jewish Kurds.

However, aside from its documentary and archival aspects, Sabar’s memoir is also characterized by Hirsh’s idea of “imaginative investment, projection and recreation” in and through postmemory works. According to Hirsh, postmemory’s “connection to its object or its source is mediated not through recollection, but through an imaginative investment, projection, and creation.”⁵⁰ In other words, as postmemory is not fueled by direct recollections and lacks the personal experience of somebody else’s past, the narrative might be compensated by imagination filling the gaps in a person’s knowledge. Similarly, as Sabar does not possess an immediate experience and knowledge of the past and the history he narrates, and his access to the past has been indirect and shaped from a space of disconnection, he relies on his own imaginations in some parts of his memoir. As Sabar explains in his discussion of method, for parts of the story where key sources had died or where memories had faded, he has used his own imagination to build the story; he invented a few minor characters to streamline the narrative; and he changed the name of a few people, for their security.⁵¹ This fictional and imaginative aspect of Sabar’s memoir further adds to its hybrid quality, structure, and embodiment of diverse genres as a work of postmemory.

This aspect of imagination within Sabar’s work, or any works of postmemory, also brings to light the notion of the “productivity of memory,” a key characteristic describes by Rothberg in his explanation of the concept of multidirectional memory. According to Rothberg, memory is not unidirectional; rather, it is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and barrowing”; it is “productive and not privative.”⁵² Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory emphasizes “the dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance.”⁵³ As he argues, “remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites.”⁵⁴ In Sabar’s memoir, we witness the origins of memory/postmemory in diverse places, histories, and cultures, including visual elements like photographs that Hirsch describes as points of memory. This work of postmemory encapsulates the collective aspects of all the memory sites it interacts with, encompassing the various memories these sites conjure. The manifold nature of memory in Sabar’s work, along with its interplay, cross-referencing, and incorporation of diverse histories and cultures, and imaginative elements, echoes Rothberg’s observations and arguments. It can be perceived as an embodiment of Rothberg’s idea of multidirectional memory. The memoir effectively binds two formally discrete geographies and cultures, along with their respective memories and histories—Jewish and Kurdish identities.

Notably, in the case of Sabar and the Jewish Kurds, despite their sense of home and belonging to their Kurdish homeland being greatly towards that small village in Kurdistan—Zakho—not Kurdistan as a whole, and despite choosing Israel over Kurdistan, we can see that elements of Kurdish culture and history occupy a significant part of their identity, and a Kurdish consciousness could be detected in them. There are themes, motives and images peculiar to Kurdish conscious that are raised in Sabar’s writings, while Jewish Kurds do not share them with Kurds. For instance, there is a chapter in Sabar’s memoir titled “Mountains are Our Only Friends,” in which he writes about Kurdish mountains, which are their only friends as Kurds. Yet Jewish Kurds have never experienced Kurdish displacement in the mountains. Sabar’s work embodies multiple references to the history and culture of Kurds alongside the history of the Jewish Kurds. His memoir includes accounts about Kurdish statelessness and displacement, oppressions perpetrated against Kurds, forced assimilation of Kurds to the dominant cultures, and Kurdish resistance throughout history. As a Jewish-Iraqi-Kurd, most of his accounts about Kurds and Kurdish history revolve around the Kurdish population of Iraq, particularly the period under Saddam Hussein. He narrates stories from Kurdish uprisings and revolts in Iraqi Kurdistan, or the story of Kurdistan’s greatest warrior, Saladin Ayubi, and his braveries, which he might have read about in his historical research or heard from his father. Much of the stories he narrates of the Kurds are the stories of the people he met in his travels back to Kurdistan with his father. Moreover, there are many references to Kurdish culture, language, foods, clothes, and music, which constitute a large part of Jewish Kurds that they have attempted to preserve back in Israel.

Yet, Sabar’s memoir also has a Jewish context that is even more dominant than its Kurdish context. A large part of Sabar’s text revolves around the Jews, Jewishness, and the Jewish land. His work includes historical accounts of the diasporic history of Jews and their dispersion from their ancestral land, Jewish resistance and struggle throughout history, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust and its aftermaths. His memoir also includes many details about Jewish culture, their religion, beliefs, values and rituals, and multiple references to the Book of Exodus and the Bible. Thus, like its author, this memoir is culturally, linguistically, and historically hybrid; it deals with multiple histories, cultures, languages and geographies, all of which are tied to Sabar’s identity, each constituting part of it. As seen, this hybridity inherent in his identity and background manifests itself in the structure, language, and context of his memoir. The remaining part of this article delves deeper, offering additional intricacies and illustrations of how the identity of the Jewish Kurds is imbued with hybrid elements. These elements have traversed geographical, temporal, and generational boundaries.

My Father’s Paradise: Hybrid Cultural Identity and Its Transmission over Generations

As mentioned earlier, Sabar’s father belongs to the last generation of Jewish Kurds who left their Kurdish homeland and returned to their Jewish homeland. As Sabar describes in his memoir, their departure was traumatic for his father, who “had dreamed of homecoming since he left as a twelve-year-old boy.”⁵⁵ The day they left Zakho, Yona thought “he would come back here someday soon as an Israeli fighter pilot. He would land a gleaming jet right in the centre of town, and all the Kurds would pour from their houses to cheer his return.”⁵⁶ These few lines clearly show a dual sense of identification as well as a dual sense of place for Yona, coming back to “Zakho” as an “Israeli” pilot while “Kurds” cheer his return. The day his father’s family arrived in Jerusalem, his great-grandfather, Ephrahim, “dropped to his knees, bent forward, and kissed the tarmac,” but the new home and life were not what he was expecting: “Ephrahim must have sensed early on that this state of Israel was not the Land of Israel he had daydreamed about in Zakho,” writes Sabar.⁵⁷ “Yona’s family’s loss of status in Israel sharpened his longing for the lost paradise of his youth.”⁵⁸ As Yona recalls for his son, when they returned to Jerusalem, his father and other families hired teachers to teach their children Hebrew, their Jewish language. This is while they also tried to use and maintain their native language, Aramaic.

After spending his teen years and finishing his university in Jerusalem, Yona decided to go to the US to continue his education and work on “the language and folklore of his own obscure tribe: the Jews of Kurdistan.”⁵⁹ Both his family and surroundings tried to discourage him from leaving his homeland. “For two thousand years, Jews across the world prayed to God for the return to their homeland, to have their own state, their own independence. And now that God has listened to us, you get up and leave,” says Yona’s friend Moshe. “No one is abandoning anything. I’ll be back, Yona answers.”⁶⁰ Yona’s mother also asks him: “why it is so important to leave?” “If Zakho was so special, why did we all leave? May God wipe Zakho off the face of the Earth,” says his mother.⁶¹ These conversations illustrate the tensions in their loyalties between their two homelands, a tension central to the diaspora experience. Diaspora contains a tension that invokes at least two places.⁶² For Yona’s mother, this tension is between Zakho and Israel and the new home where her son has decided to move.

Yona took the language and folklore of his tribe with him to a new land and devoted his personal and academic life in the US to preserving them from oblivion. Like any migrant, Yona also maintained a longing for the place of origin he left behind. However, his nostalgia has been for more than one homeland: both Kurdistan and Israel. Moreover, Yona finds attachment to his new homeland, New Haven. In the letters Sabar found in his grandfather’s home in Jerusalem that his father had written while studying in the US, he explained to his sister, Sarah, how he was caught between these places: “In Israel, I myself was divided between two worlds: Zakho and Jerusalem. Now I have a third world, New Haven. Sarah, if you know how many dreams I dream where Zakho, Jerusalem and New Haven mix together in the strangest way.”⁶³ Yona’s migration to New Haven gave him a new sense of belonging to this land. Sabar describes how for Yona, America felt more like home than Israel: America had come to feel more like home. In its openness and innocence and freedom, it had more in common with Zakho than Israel ever did. Here … he could close his eyes and be home.⁶⁴ For Sabar’s father, Zakho in Kurdistan was still the place he most longs for; that is, his sense of home and belonging is strongly towards his Kurdish homeland. On his return to Zakho with his son, Yona feels a real sense of being at home: “I feel like a tree uprooted … you can plant it somewhere else, but it will never be the same,” he told Sabar while they were in Zakho.⁶⁵ Thus, for Yona, home means more than one place and feeling at home in America added another sense of place and belonging to his dual senses of place and belonging—that of Kurdistan and Israel. As Sabar states in his memoir, paradise for Yona is all three places: “each of the principal settings of the book represents a kind of paradise: Zakho, where Jews and Christians lived in harmony with the Muslim majority; Israel, the long-sought promised land of the Jewish people; and Los Angeles, a dream factory at the edge of the new world where people come to conjure their own Edens.”⁶⁶ Sabar’s sense of place and belonging to America is stronger than his father’s, as he was born and grew up in America. His American identity formed a significant component of his identity. As noted earlier, Sabar began his story detailing his father’s differences with him, his difficult and strict personality, and their often tumultuous relationship. He describes his life as that of a typical American child who finds his father’s lifestyle, accent, clothes, and hairstyle strange: “my father listened to Kurdish dirges on an off-brand tape recorder”; “I got behind my rock drum”; “his accented English, mine, a smooth California vernacular”; “he grew up in a dusty town in northern Iraq, I grew up in a white stucco ranch house in West Los Angeles.”⁶⁷ Unlike his father, Sabar had the “desire to be the part of California mainstream,” yet his father “was the only thing standing in the way.”⁶⁸ Despite his father’s desire and attempt to raise Sabar with his own culture and language, it was only after the birth of his own son that Sabar’s relationship with his father shifted, and he attempted to connect with and maintain his historical cultural background(s). Sabar himself, who had no ties with his father’s past and cultural background, became his son’s point of connection with his roots. The following passage from Sabar’s memoir describing the time his family insisted his son be circumcised clearly shows the inter-generational conflicts between Sabar and his father and the rupture and continuity of his cultural identity across place, time, and generation. It also shows the hybridity that marks Sabar’s identity: “I was hardly an observant Jew. I couldn’t remember that last time I had been to Temple. My wife is a Gentile, so in the strictest sense, Seth wasn’t Jewish to begin with … I cautioned them to read nothing into it. We were still committed to raise Seth Jewish. But I didn’t see circumcision as the lynchpin of Jewish identity. I resented the pressure. I found myself getting irritated with my father. Hadn’t he laid the groundwork for this precise moment nearly forty years ago when he left Israel? When you abandon the Jewish homeland and raise your children in metropolitan Los Angeles, you can’t expect life to go on as it always has. Zakho may have been an insular backwater where Jews never wavered from tradition. L.A. was not.” ⁶⁹ As an American-born second-generation immigrant with Jewish Kurdish background, Sabar is neither fully Jewish nor fully Kurdish. In other words, neither of these identities has been lost, and neither is fully taken. As noted in the above passage, he is not an observant Jew, could not remember the last time he had been to Temple and opposes some Jewish rituals, but he finds himself committed to raising his son Jewish. Sabar, complaining about his father’s cultural beliefs and tradition back at home asks, “hadn’t he laid the groundwork for this precise moment nearly forty years ago when he left Israel?” However, in the following sentence he says, “Zakho may have been an insular backwater where Jews never wavered from tradition. L.A. was not.” Here, Sabar contrasts LA, the place where he was born and feels he belongs, to his father’s homeland. However, this homeland is not one but two: Israel and Zakho in Kurdistan.

The hybridity discussed above is central to Sabar’s identity because he has been raised by a culturally hybrid father with multilocal ties. Sabar has grown up with a mixture of different cultures and languages, in addition to his American self and identity. Sabar recalls that his father always tried to raise him as a perfect Jew. He sent him to Hebrew classes with native Israeli teachers that Sabar found bizarre and sent him to Jewish summer school, which held no interest. Sabar’s father also tries to teach his children the Aramaic language: “I thought when I taught you to say bumbeh”⁷⁰ … “that was the best thing I could do,” Yona tells Sabar.⁷¹ Sabar’s linguistic hybridity—English, Hebrew, Aramaic, and a little bit of Kurdish—further highlights his cultural hybridity. For Sabar’s father, the most important thing is to preserve his mother tongue, Aramaic, and transfer it to Sabar and his grandson. Despite knowing that the world his son lives in is very different from his, what mattered to him most was keeping Sabar in touch with his cultural background. As Sabar writes about his father: “He never had high expectations that his children, raised in America, would care about his family’s roots in Kurdistan. ‘I thought that would end with me and that’s it,’ he said. ‘Because you are in America. I see there is a new generation. I cannot expect you to know about the past forever. I didn’t expect you to become super Kurdish, wearing Kurdish pants wherever you go.’ So what were your expectations? I asked. ‘I thought when I taught you to say bumbeh’—an Aramaic baby word for ‘stomach’ he taught me as a boy—‘that was the best thing I could do’.”⁷² The above passage represents the hybrid space in which Sabar has grown up—his American identity and his non-American backgrounds and ethnic identities (Kurdish and Jewish). Here, Yona tells his son he did not expect him to follow his roots in Kurdistan or wear Kurdish clothes, yet he says he did his best to teach him words in Aramaic language, not Kurdish language.

Sabar himself is aware of his hybrid identity. In his travels back to Jerusalem, he found Jewish Kurds still living in the Kurdish neighborhood, Katamonim, “the heart of Kurdish Jerusalem,” still hanging photos of the time in Zakho on the wall, wearing Kurdish clothes, making Kurdish foods, listening to Kurdish music, watching Kurdish satellite TV channels to follow the news of Kurdistan, and still longing for their Kurdish homeland. “The photographs, the food, the Kurdish machers, the music. Was this some kind of crash course on my heritage, on the side of me that was Sabagha?” Sabar wonders when he sees these in Jerusalem.⁷³ Sabagha was the previous family name his family had in Zakho, which is an Arabic word for “dyer.” Sabar’s grandfather was a dyer in Zakho. When they returned to Israel, they changed their family name to Sabar, which literally means “native-born Israeli.” We see that Sabar seems aware of this hybridity, saying these are “on the side of him that is Sabagha,” his Kurdish side. What is notable here is that Sabagha is an Arabic word, not Kurdish. This itself shows another layer of hybridity, as Kurdish experience and culture as the result of assimilation and acculturation have been mixed with the cultures and languages of the countries they have been divided into—in this case, the Arabic culture and language. Thus, here, the Sabagha side means the Kurdish side of his identity and the Kurdish side of the identity of Jewish Kurds, which Sabar sees among Jewish Kurds in Jerusalem. Similarly, the identity of Sabar’s son, Seth, carries traces of both Kurdish and Jewish culture. Like his father’s experience, what has been and is transferred to Seth through Sabar is a mixture of the Kurdish and Jewish cultures, multiple languages and senses of longing for the places he has never been. This is apparent from the way Sabar writes about how he is trying to connect his son with his roots:

I am very far from a perfect Jew. I married outside the faith, I don’t go to temple every Saturday, I don’t always keep Kosher. But I try in small ways to teach where he came from, to connect him with his roots. I show him photos of my trip to Zakho. We listened to Kurdish music in my laptop. I taught him the Shabbat prayers, which he recites over the candles and bread on Friday nights. I take him to temple, I am showing him the letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and he’s learned some basic words. The point for me is that passing our culture to the next generation isn’t always easy.⁷⁴

And this is how Sabar ends his memoir:

I look to Seth now for signals about what part of our past might survive into the future. Some nights, before bedtime, I call him into my office and put on a CD of a Kurdish song my father sang to me as a baby.

“That’s Saba’s music!” he says, climbing into my lap with a big smile.

Can I see the picture too?

I turn on my laptop and click through my photos of Zakho. He has seen the slide show many times but always has burning new questions.

“What’s that, Daddy?” he asked one autumn night, pointing to a picture of a grizzled blacksmith in the market where my great-grandfather once had his dye shop.

“That’s an old man in his store in Zakho,” I said.

Seth looked thoughtful for a moment. “I want to go to store in Zakho,” he said. “I need go.”

I looked at his serious face for a long moment before speaking.

“One day,” I said, pulling him closer. “One day we’ll go together, Okay?”⁷⁵

Here, we see Sabar’s endeavor to establish a link between his son and their ancestral heritage and original culture—a continuation of the tradition passed down by his father. Within this context, we witness the fusion of both Jewish and Kurdish cultural aspects. Despite not strictly adhering to the role of “a perfect Jew” and not being a regular attendee of the temple, Sabar takes his son to the temple, introduces him to “the Shabbat prayers” and imparts knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet, all aimed at fostering a connection to their Jewish roots to connect him to his Jewish roots. Simultaneously, Sabar exposes his son to Kurdish music and songs, despite Seth’s inability to understand the Kurdish language. Moreover, he shares images of Zakho, their Kurdish homeland, with Seth. This sparks Seth’s desire to visit Zakho someday, and Sabar promises to accompany him on this journey. Consequently, Seth becomes the inheritor of the cultural, linguistic, and geographic hybridity discussed in previous sections of this article.

Conclusion

This article aimed to show how Sabar’s memoir functions as a work of postmemory, effectively gathering fragments of his family’s history and his ancestor story. It looked at the characteristics of his postmemorial work, such as its documentary and fictional aspects. Of greater significance, the article explored how Sabar’s memoir, as a postmemory narrative representing a unique diasporic community, embodies a hybrid and diasporic character. This hybridity revolves around multiple histories, places, cultures, and memories. This intricate fusion reveals itself both thematically and structurally within Sabar’s narratives, and its origins can be traced back to the identity and history of Jewish Kurds, whose embody a blend of Jewish and Kurdish identities. The interplay between these two identities constructs a multilayered identity and memory evident in their affiliations and sense of belonging to various cultures and places. Within this framework, this study emphasizes the memoir’s contributions to both Kurdish and Jewish history and identity. Moreover, Sabar’s work provides a unique case of multidirectional memory, illustrating how the notions of identity, hybridity, memory, and postmemory are interconnected. Amidst the pages of this memoir, we witness the crystallization of the ambivalence tied to belonging to dual homelands and diasporic cultures experienced by the father and his family. Simultaneously, there is an ongoing process of negotiating the shifting boundaries of identity, memory, and border. Above all, the intertwined concepts of postmemory and hybridity in Sabar’s work encapsulate the idea that memory and postmemory narratives can be perceived as discursive constructs. They mirror the fragmented and ever-evolving nature of identity itself.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

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.

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.