Memoirs of a hesitant heir

Yet as Ariel,38,grew up,he developed a curiosity about his father’s past. Over time,he would probe Yona’s upbringing in the town of Zahko in Iraq,near the Turkish border. He would learn about the tenacious faith of his ancestors,the Jews of Kurdistan,who had lived among Muslims for centuries,tending their religious beliefs in one of the Middle East’s toughest neighbourhoods.

He would listen to his father relate how,at 13,he had immigrated to the new state of Israel,part of a mass exodus triggered by growing Arab-Israeli hostilities. And he would delve into the foundations of Aramaic,the nearly extinct 3,000-year-old language to which his father’s career had been devoted,the mother tongue of Jesus.

“I didn’t give him the chance to tell me any of these stories,” says Ariel,a former staff writer for The Baltimore Sun and The Providence Journal.

Watching the rapport between father and son in Yona’s book-strewn study in the family’s suburban L.A. home,it’s hard to imagine that they once were divided by everything from musical tastes (Red Hot Chili Peppers versus “Kurdish dirges” played on an old tape recorder) to speech (Ariel’s surfer-dude cadences versus Yona’s “five-car pileup of malapropisms and mispronunciations”).

Ariel’s perspective began to shift when the Iranian hostage crisis started in November 1979. A wave of anti-Iranian and anti-Middle Eastern sentiment swept the United States,and Ariel saw the handwriting on the wall,literally,in the form of hostile graffiti. In 1992,Ariel accompanied his father when he revisited Zahko for the first time in about 40 years. Saddam Hussein was in power,and what Yona calls the “Arabisation” of Kurdistan was in full throttle.

His hometown’s rapidly receding Kurdish-Jewish character was even more evident when Yona and Ariel returned to Zahko a few years ago. That made Ariel resolve to tell his father’s story. “I realised that the landscape and the physical place was going to be gone,” he says. “I was aware of this sense of time getting ahead of me.”

Something else pushed him to tell the story: becoming a father himself. “People come before you,people come after you,” Ariel summarises. “What are you going to do as the middleman?”