Return to Jewish Kurdistan

A Father and Son Journey to Iraq During the Height of the Insurgency

It was the hottest part of the afternoon—a dry 110 degrees—when my father and I reached Iraq’s northern border. We were queasy after a stomach-churning four-hour taxi ride from the airport in southeastern Turkey but saw right away that the Habur border crossing offered little in the way of rest.

Cab drivers were playing chicken for parking spaces before dashing off with passengers onto a dusty street lined with customs offices.

Our driver, Tariq, a wiry young Turk, grabbed my father’s passport and mine, scribbled some numbers in a ledger and led us to a small office where a throng of other drivers pressed against a counter clamoring for passport stamps.

Tariq tore off a paper ticket. But to judge from a semi-functioning electronic sign with flashing red numbers, more than 100 people were ahead of us.

It was July 2005. My father was 67 and had knee and back trouble. I led him through the crowd to an empty chair, then went out for some air. A torrid wind was scattering empty water bottles across the pavement. Knots of men in sweat-stained shirts leaned against the walls, talking or clicking prayer beads. Boys peddled warm soda from plastic buckets.

I tried to sit on the curb, but the pavement burned and I shot to my feet.

Two hours passed and the numbers on the sign had scarcely moved. Tariq tried a bribe, then begged for pity. His fare, he told the police, was a distinguished American professor who was not feeling well. “Please, let us get our stamps so we can get him someplace where he can rest,” he said in Turkish, nodding toward my father.

A uniformed official behind the window sprang out of his seat, gesturing angrily and shouting.

“What did that guy just tell Tariq?” I asked my father, my heart thumping.

“Emm,” my father said, clearing his throat. “He said, ‘I don’t give a shit who that old man is or where he’s from. He can stay in his seat and wait for his God-damned number, or he can go to hell.’”

I looked at the sweat gathering at my father’s temples and the way he clutched his briefcase to his chest like armor, and wondered whether our trip had been a mistake. He was nearing retirement and living a life of simple comforts in southern California. What was I doing dragging him halfway across the world, to the edge of a war zone?

My father and I had sparred for months over my idea of traveling together to his Iraqi hometown. I had quit my job as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun to write my father’s story—how a boy born to an illiterate Jewish mother in the hills of Kurdish Iraq wound up at the University of California at Los Angeles as a professor of Aramaic, his ancient mother tongue. But I wanted my book to be something more: a way to repair a relationship with a man I had always kept at arm’s length.

Trying to grow up cool in the 1980s, I had wanted nothing to do with him. His hair, a froth of curls combed over to one side, embarrassed me, even though some of my friends compared it to Einstein’s. His pastel-plaid J.C. Penney suits would have won more style points on the back nine than at the faculty club, except that he didn’t play golf or any other sport. As for his books, devoted to a 3,000-year-old language almost no one speaks anymore, they never made Oprah.

I was a son of Los Angeles, a skateboarder in Bermuda shorts and sun-glasses. He was a son of Zakho, Iraq, raised in a mud shack in one of the world’s oldest and most isolated corners of the diaspora. We quarreled. I lied to friends about his heritage, mortified that he was from a part of the world many associated with hostage crises and fanatical ayatollahs. At some point, as a teenager, I even stopped calling him abba [dad]. He was just “Yona.” He was 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.

After the birth of my own son in 2002, though, I began to consider my debts to history. I saw that I didn’t spring into existence fully formed but had come from somewhere, and from someone, just as my son Seth had. I began to feel the past’s tug—its gravity—more forcefully than ever before.

If I wanted to understand my father, I knew I had to travel with him to his childhood home. I had to see the place that had made him: the house where he grew up, the market stall where his grandfather dyed clothes, the roaring river where he swam races with the other Jewish boys, the synagogue where he was bar mitzvahed, the cool, pure water of the Habur River he still dreamed about.

But my father saw my proposal to travel to Iraq as frighteningly detached from reality.

For a year, he had tried to talk me out of it. First, he insisted, the Zakho of his day—the houses, the people—was long gone. Second, I could get a fine picture of the city from interviews with Kurdish Jews who had left a half century ago and were now living in Israel. And third, the height of the insurgency wasn’t the ideal time for a sentimental journey to Iraq by two American Jews, one of whose names sounded a good deal like Ariel Sharon’s.

He had me on the last one. The summer of 2005 was one of the Iraqi insurgency’s bloodiest stretches, with 400 people killed over a single two-week period. True, life was quieter in northern Iraq. The world’s 25 million Kurds live in Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria, and have long dreamed of an independent state of Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurds suffered terribly under Saddam Hussein, most notorously in 1988, when 5,000 were gassed in the town of Halabja. But, under an American-imposed no-fly zone since the first Persian Gulf War, the Kurds prospered, and they escaped much of the violence that bedeviled the rest of Iraq after the U.S. invasion. Still, tensions were high at the Iraqi-Turkish border. Turkish guards were on alert for Kurdish separatists, and to reach Zakho, we would have to drive through an area where rebels and Turkish troops had recently clashed.

I was aware of the risks. But with my father’s advancing age, I thought that if we didn’t go that summer, we never would.

I knew that my father saw Zakho as a kind of paradise of religious pluralism, where for hundreds of years Muslims, Jews and Christians had lived together in peace. “What do we have to fear?” I asked, playing to his nostalgia. But in the end, it was something else that moved him.

“I can’t let you go alone,” he said. “God forbid anything should happen to you.”

Yona Sabar was born into a community that defied every Jewish stereotype. The Jews of Kurdistan lived not in cities but in remote mountains. They were not primarily merchants and shopkeepers but lumberjacks, farmers and muleteers. They spoke neither Yiddish nor the local tongue, but Aramaic. While their brethren in Europe suffered centuries of persecution and the Holocaust, they were largely unmolested.

“Such Jews!” the Jewish-American professor Walter Fischel wrote after visiting Kurdistan in the 1940s. “Men virile and wild-looking; women wearing embroidered turbans, earrings, bracelets, even nose-rings, and with symbols tattooed into their faces—our brethren and sisters!”

Contrary to popular belief, Kurdistan—not Babylonia—was the birthplace of the Jewish diaspora. According to the Second Book of Kings, the Assyrian king who banished Jews from northern Israel, or Samaria, in the 8th century B.C.E. marched them across the desert to “Halah, in Gozan on the Habor River and in the towns of the Medes.”

Translation: He deported the Israelites to Kurdistan. Scholars generally agree that the Habor River of the Bible is none other than the Habur that rings Zakho, my father’s hometown, before flowing into Syria. Gozan is modern-day Tell-Halaf, Syria, a prehistoric pottery-making city 150 miles to Zakho’s west. The Medes lived in northwestern Iran. And Halah, some believe, is Nineveh, just across the Tigris River from Mosul.

It was not until some 140 years later that Judeans, from southern Israel, were exiled to Babylonia, an area that today is central Iraq. At the crossroads of Mesopotamian civilization, these Jews would leave a well-known legacy: They would write the Talmud, create a worldwide hub of rabbinical activity and erect major synagogues and yeshivas. They would eventually trade Aramaic for the Arabic of their Muslim neighbors and rise to the highest circles of Iraqi business and government.

The Samarian Israelites, by contrast, settled in villages scattered across remote Kurdish mountains, largely cut off from one another and from the crosswinds of civilization. The Bible reserves no poetry for their exile. The Israelites, says Isaiah 27:13, were simply “lost” in Assyria. In some translations, the word “lost” is rendered, more darkly, as “perished.” The Babylonian Talmud, drafted just a few hundred miles to the south, makes scant mention of the Kurdish Jews. So little was heard from them in Palestine, where a few Jews had returned from exile, and in Babylonia, that they were dubbed the “Lost Tribes” and consigned to the realm of fable.

They did not reappear to the world until the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s made Jewish life increasingly precarious in once tolerant Islamic lands. From 1948 to 1951, virtually all 25,000 Kurdish Jews—some 18,000 from Iraq, the rest from Iran, Syria and Turkey—joined the mass exodus of Middle Eastern Jews to the new state of Israel.

Israel’s second president, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, cast the Kurdish Jews as living relics, time travelers from the ancient past. In his writings in the 1950s, he rhapsodized about a “forlorn Jewish tribe” of “hardy mountaineers,” who “may well be regarded as a faint shadow of the Jewish people as it was at the end of the period of the First Temple.”

Moreover, they were beefy and ready to work—just the sort of immigrants the young state needed to throw up new buildings and till the land. No nebbishes, these Jews. “There is no justification for keeping them in immigrant or even transit camps at a time when the barren hills of western Galilee...and the expanses of the Negev await eager hands,” Ben-Zvi pronounced.

But most Israelis didn’t share Ben-Zvi’s romantic vision. At the bottom of Israel’s ethnic totem pole, Kurds were warehoused in cheaply built housing projects in the Katamonim section of Jerusalem, where they struggled against poverty and discrimination. In the minds of many of Israel’s European-born leaders, they were hillbillies, uneducated and unwashed.

The Kurdish Jews watched their culture and language slip into near oblivion. “A Jew from Eastern Europe is worth twice as much as a Jew from Kurdistan,” proclaimed Nahum Goldmann, a Lithuanian who rose in the 1950s to the presidency of the World Zionist Organization and chairman’s seat at the Jewish Agency. In Israel, then as now, the word “Kurd” is as much a putdown as an ethnic label. To call someone a “Kurd” is to brand him a halfwit.

My father was the eldest of six children and the last bar mitzvah in Zakho before the exodus. Israel was not easy for my father’s parents. My grandfather had been a successful shopkeeper in northern Iraq but lost nearly all his status and wealth in Jerusalem. My grandmother, whose native tongue was Aramaic, never had formal schooling. Flummoxed by price tags and Hebrew product labels, she scarcely left the family’s overcrowded apartment. When she did, it was usually to clean the homes of professors in the city’s wealthy Rehavia neighborhood. My father went to a night high school so he could work during the day at a cement factory.

But while many Kurds of his generation came to see their past as a millstone, my father never stopped longing for the lost paradise of his childhood. While cleaning old bags at his job, he let the sounds of Aramaic swirl in his head. He inscribed words—as best as he could remember—on scraps of paper.

By his late teens, he had amassed a phone-book sized pile, a ticker tape of whispers, a tether between an Israeli boy and his people’s faraway past. It was an improbable hobby in a country where the Jews of Muslim lands were viewed as primitives, in need of Western civilization. But my father kept at it. As an undergraduate at Hebrew University, he descended into the language labs and tape-recorded the Kurdish Jews’ greatest storytellers. He wanted to document their language and stories before they vanished.

His parents were mystified. Why would their firstborn waste an education on preserving a language they saw as worthless? He had come so far. Why not become a doctor? A lawyer? But my father saw a way to move ahead without letting go of what had come before. He won a scholarship to Yale University and eventually a professorship at UCLA.

He devoted his career to recording his people’s language and culture for a generation of scholars who will come too late to ever meet a Kurdish-born Jew. It took me too long to see that he had also done it for another reason: his children.

Tariq, our cab driver, finally emerged from the passport office grinning, our stamped passports in hand. I felt something in my chest unclench. A minute later I was looking out the cab window at a concrete arch bearing words I thought I’d never see: “Welcome to Kurdistan of Iraq.”

Zakho is a five-minute drive from the border. Suleiman, our Kurdish-Iraqi guide, an earnest father of seven who spoke English with the punctilious cadences of someone who rarely used it outside a classroom, was waiting for us at a pullout along the road into the city.

“You are now in your father’s town,” he declared as I stepped out of the cab onto Kurdish ground.

After a decade and a half of semi-autonomous rule, Iraq’s Kurdish region was flourishing. The economy was booming and Zakho had mushroomed into a city of 150,000. Just inside the relatively safe border with Turkey, Zakho was now the commercial gateway to northern Iraq. Every day thousands of trucks hauling petrol, consumer goods and, lately, building supplies for Iraq’s postwar reconstruction rumbled down its roads.

There was construction everywhere. New housing developments, with names such as Martyrs and New Martyrs, honoring Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish victims, stretched across open fields that once separated Zakho and the border. Hotels housed vacationing Baghdadis desperate to escape the capital’s constant violence. Suleiman told us that a local military academy, a university campus, factories and a new hospital were all in the works. The windows of a downtown travel agency advertised trips to Norway, Germany, England, Australia and the United States. A few doors down was an Internet hotspot called Zakho CafeNet.

“Before, it was a sleepy town,” Omar Shemdin, the son of the late tribal chieftain Shemdin Agha, the region’s most powerful agha in my father’s day, told us when we went to see him later in the week. “This border was closed. There was no movement across it, except by smugglers. The road to Ibrahim Khalil, ‘the highway into Zakho,’ was dirt. We used it for picnics. It all changed after the first Gulf War. Saddam got isolated, and the Kurds got enterprising.”

The more I saw, the more I despaired of finding any trace of my father’s past.

“That was the graveyard of the Jews,” Suleiman announced before turning down the street to our small hotel.

“Where?” I asked.

He nodded back at a busy four-way intersection.

After Iraqi troops crushed a Kurdish rebellion in 1976, he explained, Saddam’s steamrollers had come and buried the centuries-old Jewish cemetery under a layer of asphalt.

Up until then, almost everything I knew about Zakho’s Jewish district had come from my father and other Kurdish Jews, now living in Israel.

The Jews, they told me, had lived on Zakho’s island, a crescent of rock ringed by the arms of the Habur. It was the city’s oldest district and commercial heart.

The Jews’ mud-brick houses had lined narrow alleys that zigzagged down to the river. On the riverbanks, packs of children would scamper, loggers would tie up rafts and men at the chaykhana [the traditional Kurdish teahouse] would sip glasses of tea while cooling their toes in the frothing currents. Every morning would find its two stone synagogues—“the big” and “the small”—thronged with peasants and peddlers in prayer. On Saturdays, as the Jews filed home from services, their Muslim neighbors stubbed their cigarettes in respect.

Now, as we walked the rutted alleys of the old Jewish quarter, I saw that my father had been right about our prospects of finding his family’s past here. It was now the city’s poorest neighborhood, and in the heat, the smells were unforgiving. Pipes poking from the crude concrete houses spewed wastewater into the alleys, washing rotten food and other garbage into the river.

A half century since all of the Jews left, only a few relics remained. Impoverished Kurdish families were living in the crumbling stone synagogue. A set of menorah-shaped stone tablets were languishing on a nearby roof, their Hebrew lettering worn to near illegibility by sun and rain.

Zakho’s Jewish history seemed to live in just one place: memory. Gray-haired Kurds we met spoke warmly of the days when their families traded, drank tea with and worked alongside long-departed Jewish brethren. One man showed us the cramped market stall where my great-grandfather Ephraim dyed clothes. Another begged us to tell the Jews to return.

Saddam’s regime had tried to rename the old Jewish district “The Liberated Neighborhood,” people told us. But to the Kurds of Zakho, it still was and would always be the mahala Juheeya, the Jewish quarter.

This had always been the spirit of Kurdistan: a place where differences were respected, not spurned. A place that didn’t care what language you spoke at home or where you worshipped, so long as you contributed something to your village. A place that, for my father—who left as a child and could see it no other way—would always seem more hospitable than the promised land of Israel.

The next afternoon, Suleiman drove us into the hills that surround the city like giant sand dunes. We stopped at an overlook where people were gathering for a wedding celebration. Suleiman walked in and somehow wangled us invitations. We took seats outside an elliptical concrete floor where a line of women in shimmering dresses danced with clasped hands in a growing circle. They swayed to traditional Kurdish music booming from a DJ booth.

On our way back to the truck, we waded through knee-high grasses. Zakho unfurled beneath us in the pale evening light: beyond the glinting green ribbon of the Habur a checkerboard of flat-roofed houses melted into dun-colored plains until there was nothing but mountains.

I could see a redness in my father’s eyes.

“Even in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine sitting here with my son at this magnificent wedding and looking at Zakho,” he said. “God from Heaven sent me this.”

My throat tightened, and for that brief moment, I believed that all my failings—as a son, as a Kurd, as a Jew—might soon be forgiven.