Little has been written about the place of the Jewish Kurds in Iraq. Certainly, when I read the subtitle to the book, My Father's Paradise : a son's search for his Jewish past in Kurdish Iraq I wondered what I could learn about the Kurds? Ariel Sabar has written about being an American child and teenager with a father who immigrated from Israel but told wonderful stories of growing up in Kurdish Iraq. His father and his grandfather and generations past spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. This exotic culture and language existed in almost isolation for years in the norther mountains of Iraq along side Muslims and Christians in the town of Zakho. What a fascinating journey this read was into the past; into a way of life of cooperation and mutual respect for other religions, and what an enlightening glimpse into the forces that create an environment where a culture and its language become extinct. Sabar traveled to Zakho in Kurdish Iraq and to Israel to meet some of the people and their descendants who knew his father as a boy and he shows us the world of the Aramaic speaking peoples past and present both in Iraq, Israel and America. And the story of his father's childhood in Jewish Zakho in Iraq is a revealing story indeed!

Da Chenn wrote Colors of the Mountain, a story of growing up in China during Mao's cultural revolution and after Mao's death. Before the cultural revolution, the family owned land, but it had been taken from them as a result of Mao's rule and Da often had nothing but old yams to eat for months before harvest. At Mao's death the rules suddenly changed and Da had a chance to change his life. It is a memoir of a boyhood full of spunk, mischief and love. He befriends a gang of hoodlums and learns English from an elderly Chinese Baptist woman, and vies for the opportunity to go to college. I checked out this book, read it and hope Da Chen writes a sequel.