Although the father-son bond can be a strong one, tales of struggles between the generations also abound, particularly once sons become teenagers. Whether the clash has to do with the onset of puberty, cultural differences or the desire for a different lifestyle, the conflict between the two men often leaves them feeling as if they are strangers. Two recent books, "My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq" by Ariel Sabar (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) and "My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith" by Benyamin Cohen (HarperOne), explore father-son relationships, showing how two sons learned to better understand their fathers and themselves.
The impetus for "My Father’s Paradise" was the birth of the author’s son. Sabar fears that his relationship with his newborn might be similar to the one he has with his own father, Yona: filled with animosity, misunderstandings and arguments. He calls their clash one of differing "civilizations, writ small. [His father] was ancient Kurdistan. I was 1980s L.A. He grew up in a dusty town in northern Iraq, in a crowded mud-brick shack without electricity or plumbing. I grew up in a white stucco ranch house in West Los Angeles, on a leafy street guarded by private police cruisers marked BEL-AIR PATROL." Yona embarrassed him as a teenager by dressing in mismatched outfits. He spends his days bent over note cards recording words of Aramaic, once spoken by all the Jews of his Iraqi village, but which is now a dying language. Yona is cheap, not wanting to eat out, or spend money on the recreational activities his son considers essential. But, suddenly, Sabar realizes he wants, needs, to know who this man, this stranger, really is.
Knowing that he "lacks the big-heartedness of, say, Barney the Dinosaur or even Dr. Phil," Sabar approaches his father with the only tools at his disposal: "I reached for a reporter’s notepad. If I dug far enough, asked enough questions, I thought I might find the girders that linked his world to mine." The result is part history, part biography and part personal exploration. The different sections add up to an absorbing and moving tale not only about Sabar’s father, but the Jewish community that once lived in Kurdish Iraq.
The historical sections of "My Father’s Paradise" were among my favorites. One fascinating chapter traces the history of Kurdistan Jews back to the first expulsion from Israel, suggesting the settlement is ancient enough to make its inhabitants descendants of the lost tribes. Living off the beaten track, the village’s existence was almost unknown to the Western world until the 20th century. The members of the village were not Zionists, but after the creation of the state of Israel, they were forced to emigrate for their own safety. Unfortunately, their experience in Israel was not always positive: the state was ill prepared for their aliyah, they were treated like second-class citizens and many of the older generation, who were once respected merchants and craftsmen, were forced to perform backbreaking manual labor.
Some of the younger generation, including Sabar’s father, were luckier, managing to overcome difficulties and establishing themselves as academics or businessmen. Yet, although Yona not only graduates from Hebrew University, but receives a Ph.D. from Yale University and becomes a beloved professor at UCLA, he almost didn’t go to graduate school. His first thought after graduation from Hebrew U. was to find a job so he could help support his extended family. Even after he becomes well-known for this scholarship, Yona never truly overcomes the feeling of inferiority instilled in him during his time in Israel, something his son never before understood. "What I had not figured on," Sabar writes, " was the way a person’s self-estimation could sink dreams. The way one’s own culture could slap down hands that reached too high. The way a nation’s priorities could whither the ambition of certain of its citizens. My father would never put it this way. He would only blame himself. He would point out his weaknesses, his limitations. But this is what I see."
The culmination of Sabar’s search for understanding arrives when he and his father travel to Yona’s former village in Iraq. Sabar fixates on one part of the family story, wanting to find a quick and easy way to make amends to his father for all their past struggles. What he learns, instead, is that the job of connecting to Yona will not be as easy as he once thought. Sabar also comes to understand that Yona’s academic work is not, as he originally believed, a crusade to save Aramaic from extinction, but, rather, a way of holding onto one of the few remaining possessions of his childhood: its language. This makes Yona’s career "the outward expression of an intensely personal struggle to reconcile the past and the present."
Sabar also feels a connection to that past: "The Jews carried a flame into the hills of Kurdistan, and they carried it out, still burning. 2,700 years later. My father touched another candle to it and brought it across continents. I don’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."
"My Father’s Paradise" is a wonderful look at a disappearing world, a marvelous and loving history of Sabar’s extended family and a study of how a reconciliation between father and son is an ongoing, never-ending affair.
While differences in country and culture caused the divide between Sabar and his father, that’s not the case in Cohen’s very funny "My Jesus Year." This son of an Orthodox rabbi, who is the only male child in his family not to become part of the rabbinate, was always a bit envious of those who attended church and celebrated Christian holidays. He calls himself a rebel from the start, listing the minor ways he’s strayed (watching too much television, eating a non-kosher candy bar, etc.), although even during his most rebellious phase, he was, and still is, a practicing Orthodox Jew. Although in the past he found some fulfillment in his Jewish practice, something always seemed missing. This feeling is exasperated by his disagreements with his father, which grew worse when Cohen’s mother died shortly after his bar mitzvah. Now, as an adult, his Jewish practice feels sterile and his continuing alienation from his father bothers him. Yet, rather than deserting Judaism, Cohen looks for a way to connect to the spiritual aspects of his religious heritage, deciding the most appropriate way to do this is to explore Christianity. Of course, feeling guilty about his search, he seeks a rabbi’s permission, which comes with the stipulations that he must always wear his kippah and identify himself as Jewish.
So, for a year, Cohen visits a wide variety of Christian groups and experiences everything from traditional church services to Christian wrestling. He attends a megachurch, a Christian music concert and a faith healing workshop. He interviews members of a sect of Black Israelites (who practice polygamy and follow a vegan diet) and tags along with Mormon missionaries. His moments of inspiration might strike readers as banal: Cohen realizes that everyone’s religious customs look odd to strangers; that he needs to be proactive in approaching God, focusing on his practice rather than performing rituals by rote; that Judaism could do well to borrow innovative practices from the churches he visits; and that not even all Jews are the same.
What redeems "My Jesus Year," though, is his humor. Cohen turns his sarcastic, flip tone not only on the churches he visits and the people he talks to, but on Judaism itself. For example, when looking at the differences between the customs of Jews and Christians, he writes, "Come December, you guys put a Christmas tree in your house. If this were a Jewish tradition, it would turn rather quickly and depressingly into a Talmudic dissertation on forestry. What kind of tree? How tall is it required to be? How many branches does it need to have? Can we outsource the purchase of the tree or is the commandment itself the actual action of buying said foliage." His riffs on Jewish Orthodox dating, studying Talmud as a boy and Jewish ritual and liturgical practices made me laugh out loud. These were my favorite parts of the book, making me wonder whether Cohen shouldn’t take another journey, this time visiting different Jewish groups, from the secular to the ultra-Orthodox, to describe Jewish idiosyncracies the same as he does Christian ones.
What Cohen didn’t expect is that his exploration would help him better understand his father. Both men had gone on spiritual searches in order to connect with their Judaism, although Cohen’s journey was far more offbeat than his father’s, who only traveled from secular Judaism to Orthodoxy. The two men finally come to an understanding, with the author realizing that his father may have known him better than he realized.
Perhaps Sabar’s and Cohen’s greatest achievement is their new ability to see their fathers as human beings, as men who also struggle with family, jobs and life choices, not just as authority figures put on earth to thwart their desires. The authors learn to appreciate the wisdom their fathers offer, to realize that experience can be its own consolation. They also discover that the past has gifted them with treasures worth cherishing, ones worthy of being passed to the next generation of sons and daughters.