My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Family's Past

Ariel Sabar’s My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Family's Past is a very accomplished work, and shines a light on one of the most prominent aspect of Jewish life in the twentieth century: displacement.

Sabar’s father is a Kurdish Jew, and like most Jewish communities in the Arab world major social, political, and religious changes  irrevocably altered life for the Kurdish Jews in the twentieth century.  They were forced to leave Iraqi, and now live in  Israel or America.  This follows the wider trend of Jewish twentieth century demographic shifts: most Jews are either Israeli or American.

But this book is so much more than demographics.  It is about a son growing closer to his father; his mature understanding of his father’s plight; the full drama of his family, contextualized; and how time takes a corrosive toll on us all.  As such, this is a deeply Jewish book.

Sabar scratches and claws his way to recapture a dying past.  In this book he leaves a lasting monument to the Kurdish Jews and their unique community that pulsates with life.

Love Letters to the Divine

Julian Lynn’s collection of ecstatic verse, Divine Fruit, is a rare commodity in current writing: love letters to the divine.  The author explains in the preface that this work is created from “a seat of devotion and in gratitude toward the Divine Creative Force…” We are told that this poetry will be about “Union” and the experience of Oneness; but along the way we will experience “The Face of God” though the incredible multiplicity of our world.  There is room for multiplicity within unity.

Lynn’s poems are necessarily erotic.  Her experience of the divine is close and intimate, so the language of erotic love is the perfect medium to express these encounters: “I want to touch You / The way You embraced Me.”  Elsewhere, God comes and goes like a friend and lover in the poem While Napping: “Breaking into my fouled / And fractured bones, / God’s touch bound me / Side to side, top to bottom / Repairing my vessel.” The poet’s voice pleads with the Divine for the relief a lover can provide: “I almost died / waiting for You / Cast me / reignited / into the where / of Your willing.”

Lynn’s powerful and intimate poems are startling in their clarity, steadfast in their vision, and a delight to read; she discovers the Divine in our everyday moments, and she shapes and forms the mundane into rapture.

How We Don't Work

In Nathan H. Lents book Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes the author truly gives us a view of all the ways natural selection has failed to select positive traits.  This is not how we tend to view natural selection.  Traits that don’t help us survive should be eliminated.  But this ignores plentiful examples of shades of gray where a trait, while not positive, is not overly negative.  It may be a pain, or cause pain, but it does not affect reproduction.

Take bipedalism.  This change was crucial for our development, but our spines did not adjust well; we suffer from slipped and herniated disks because our spinal bones fail to fully support our upright stance.   We have bad sinuses because our largest sinuses are below the nose, and must be emptied through a small tube (defying gravity, another post-upright down side).  Our ancestors on all fours probably never got colds or sinus infections.

Lents most important point, at the end, is that we are the first creatures to have more or less eliminated natural selection.  Poor men can marry and have children.  A person with bad eyes will not be eaten by a predator.  We now mold our environment instead of it molding us.  The trick is, we will mold the world for our benefit and in the process destroy it? 

10% Good Enough

There is certainly nothing glaringly bad about 10% Happier by Dan Harris. Harris in entitled to his own journey, and his own solutions.  This book is an excellent introduction to meditation stripped of all its adornments.  Harris takes it simple and slow. For me, a long term mediator, his insights helped me re-discover some of the reasons I meditate in the first place.

Harris’ tone is annoying.   This is more on me than him; I could have stopped reading!  I found his tone too cute; his humor too pat.  He wants balance, but he is a TV anchorperson and journalist!  Is there a worse profession to find balance?  Maybe or maybe not, but his craft is near the pole position. He could have spared himself a great deal of grief by finding a new trade.

1947: Where Now Begins

1947: Where Now Begins by Elisabeth Asbrink is a fascinating book about the post-war world.  Written as a series vignettes, Asbrink shows how 1947 was a key year for the formation of world order. In many ways, we are living with the results (or failed results) of this pivotal year.

This was the year when UNSCOP issued its report recommending the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state.  Britain rushed through its own talks in India, drawing boundaries between India and Pakistan that would cause lasting animosity and violence.  

Europe was in ashes, but looking for a way forward.  Things had ended, but not really; Asbrink devotes considerable time to the fascist underground that developed in Sweden in 1947, and laid the foundation for far right nationalist movements we see today.

1947 is well written, extensively researched, and pertinent for our time.

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is a science fiction classic.  Both men and women fight in this forever war, and free love is a part of combat service.  Young women have sex with their male comrades through custom and military directive. Really? But there is a least one section where some women seem less than keen to perform their sexual duties.   All this is disturbing.

Later in the novel, all of humanity become homosexuals to curb overpopulation.  This anomaly is later “fixed.”  The characters are "corrected" to become mainstream heterosexuals.  Again, disturbing.

Haldeman was a Vietnam vet, and this novel was supposed to mirror the experience of that war in the future.  Veterans, after traveling at near light speed, return to an Earth they no longer recognize; eventually, the very war they fought for centuries is deemed unnecessary.  Their sacrifice was based on a faulty premise.

Haldeman does a great job depicting the distortions and stresses of war.  Through his skill he is able to depict sci-fi combat in a harrowing way.

Between the Desert and Ohio: Patricia Murphy's Bully Love

Patricia Murphy is the editor of Superstition Review, which in 2011 published one of my short stories.  As well as being a talented and nurturing editor, she is also an accomplished poet.  So it is a great honor to review her collection of poems, Bully Love.

The poems center on the theme of life in the desert west, more or less in the present time, and the Ohio of the poet’s past.  At times, there is an interplay of a western poem, followed by an Ohio poem, for many pages.  Although this form is not continued throughout, a thematic pattern is established.  Murphy’s poetic voice examines the present against the past, looking for patterns, ruptures, and discontinuities. There are plenty to be found.

The desert west is, for the most part, the poet’s place of solace and rest.  In one poem we read “The neighbor’s poppies/have turned dusty… This evening we inhale/the dry skin of the desert,/bed down in the belly of the cloud.” 

In this place, the desert is both shelter, mood, and yardstick of what life can bring us.  In “No Coats in October” the poet’s “Aunt’s inquire about/the Sonaran lure” while the poet remembers her father taking her mother to her fourth asylum “like remembering/hayrides on autumn/evenings. Cornfields./ Switchgrass. Cows in Mud.   

The desert nurtures, but memory of other climates haunt the collection.  The voice of these poems finds stability out west, but is also irresistibly drawn to a colder, seasonal past.  This cycle of poems mirrors the cycles of seasons, of life, and of the human experience – with great success.  It demonstrates our constant negotiation between the lives we were born into, and those we choose to create. 

America's Forgotten Kingdom

James L. Haley’s Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii gives a hint of its overall emphasis in the title.  Hawaii was captured, primarily by American interests long before it became an American territory or state.

But Haley does not see all American influence as negative.  His Hawaii of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was a society under the rule of powerful, violent chiefs.  They battled each other for supremacy; there was a yawning gulf between have and have-nots.  This social structure was violently enforced by a system of religious taboos.  Human sacrifice was rampant.

According to Haley, American Christian missionaries came along just when this system was on the verge of collapse.  One chief consolidated power, and with the help of the missionaries, established the Hawaiian Kingdom.  

For Haley, this was the golden age of Hawaii.  Christianity as a state religion acted as a glue for Hawaiian culture.  Much like Constantine’s adoption of the same religion centuries before, it provided the islands a neutral structure for consolidation of government and rule by law.

Haley is highly critical of the sons and grandsons of those missionaries, who increasingly weakened the monarchy and native rule to the point of American annexation for imperial gain.

Imperial Japan Going Down

Joseph Wheelan’s Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal--The World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War is a detailed history of this vital campaign. Wheelan is skilled at marshaling the facts of the battle, and informing his readers of its great human cost.  Reading this book really brings home the reality of sacrifice necessary to fight a war against such a determined enemy.

Historically, Guadalcanal was another nail in the coffin of Imperial Japan’s fight against America.  After Pearl Harbor, Japan failed to deliver the US a knock out punch.  In the war of attrition that followed, from Midway to Guadalcanal and onward, Japan could not replace its losses, while America could; Japan had crested with Midway and Guadalcanal, while America was just revving up its war effort.

But this victory came at a great cost and suffering, and Wheelen will make you appreciate this element to a great degree.

A Torah Scroll Tradition.

Torah number 12, at Southern Methodist University

The Torah Scrolls of the Chinese Jews, by Michael Pollack, is the only full length study (that I am aware of) of the Torah scrolls of the community of Jews who lived in Kaifeng, China, for several centuries.  After a presence of at least 700 years (probably more) the community succumbed to the falling fortunes of their city and China in the nineteenth century.  By then, members of the community were selling their sacred books for food, including thirteen Torah scrolls.

Pollack examines the history of the Torah scrolls of the community, which were written in the mid-1600s.  He follows their travels and sales, and eventual homes in libraries and museums in the West.  He accounts missing scrolls up to the point of their final reference in various sources.  Finally, he examines some textual matters concerning the scrolls, how they were written, their historical precursors, and the patterns of their numerous errors.

The Great Mosque in Kaifeng, which has a similar design to the synagogue

Pollack is kind to the Kaifeng Jewish Torah tradition.   These Torahs have numerous errors, and would not be considered fit for use in a shul service.  But Pollack is quick to point out that this small community produced thirteen Torah scrolls after a damaging flood, without help from Jews from outside China. 

This was an amazing accomplishment, and proof of the incredible vibrancy of Chinese Judicial.  Pollack's gentle hand enables us to view a Kaifeng tradition of writing holy books with clarity, allowing such studies as The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China by Fook-Kong Wong and Dalia Yasharpour, who seek to understand the written heritage of the Kaifeng Jews, and not judge it.

Old Kaifeng

William Charles White’s Chinese Jews: A compilation of matters relating to the Jews of Kai-feng Fu was originally published in three parts in 1940.  Part One relates to historical matters of the Chinese Jews.  Most of the secondary sources White features are out of date, and in many cases, just plain racist in language and intent.

But White’s book is really key to any understanding of the Kaifeng Jews.  As an Anglican clergyman, he lived in Kaifeng for nearly twenty years, interacted with the descendants of the Kaifeng Jews, and took amazing photographs of their physical legacy.  He was the last westerner to have contact the Chinese Jews before the Japanese occupation, Communist rule and capitalist modernity swamped them and their city.

The Last Jews of Kerala: The Two Thousand Year History of India's Forgotten Jewish Community

The Last Jews of Kerala: The Two Thousand Year History of India's Forgotten Jewish Community by Edna Fernandes is a readable account of the history and semi-demise of the Indian communities of the southwest coast of India. She handles the historical split between the “white” and “black” Jewish communities of this area, and the influence of the caste and the colonial system on the formation of this division.

Fernandes meets the people involved from both communities, those few remaining in India, and the bulk who have moved to Israel. This is a somewhat sad tale of a vanishing way of life for a special Jewish group, but it is by no means unique. In the post-war period, Judaism has become overwhelmingly dichotomous. Of the 14 million Jewish people worldwide, 6 million live in Israel, while 6 million live in the United States. Jewish people are increasingly either Israelis or Americans.

Jewish groups have gone through tremendous demographic changes in the last hundred years; those changes continue, and this book chronicles one of them with respect and care. Much has been lost and gained.