![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “I’d wake up in the morning,” Ariel recalls, “I’d have Led Zeppelin posters on the wall, and I had surfboarding stickers on the wall. Watching the rapport between father and son in Yona’s book-strewn study in the family’s Brentwood 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”). Weaving it all together are Ariel’s unflinching reflections about the border wall of misunderstanding that once stood between his father and him. Transcending mere reportage, it acquires a novel-like warp and weft. Yona’s odyssey, and the larger story it embodies, forms the heart of “My Father’s Paradise.” Actually, the book offers several narratives: a biography, a memoir, a meticulously reconstructed history of a largely vanished people and place, and a meditation on one of the world’s oldest languages. ![]()
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