Writer Ariel Sabar Speaks Tuesday, April 13
The English Department welcomes Ariel Sabar, author of the prize-winning My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Family’s Past, for a reading Tuesday night, April 13, at 7 p.m. in the Marvin Center Grand Ballroom. A Washingtonian, Sabar is a seasoned journalist. He covered the 2008 presidential campaigns for The Christian Science Monitor, and has published in the New York Times, the Washington Monthly, and many other publications.
Sabar brings his journalist’s skill for fact-finding and storytelling to My Father’s Paradise, his first book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, as well as the Roda Book Award, given by the Church and Synagogue Library Association once every three years. My Father’s Praradise tells the fascinating story of Sabar’s father, a Kurdish Jew who grew up in Iraq as the member of a small population speaking the ancient language of Aramaic. When Sabar’s father was a child, his family emigrated to Israel, escaping persecution and increasing violence in their native country. Sabar’s father eventually became a linguist, one of the few scholars in the world capable of translating among Aramaic, Hebrew, and English.
Ariel Sabar grew up in California, where his father was a professor of Near Eastern languages. His autobiography also details his own struggles to understand his family and come to terms with his immigrant father’s “strangeness.”
We hope to see many of you there for this last reading of this spring’s Jewish Literature Live class taught by Prof. Faye Moskowitz and generously supported by English department alumnus and GW Trustee David Bruce Smith.
