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.