Review by New York Times Review
In Per Petterson's novel, a woman remembers the bold, reckless, politically committed boy who taught her how to live. IT would be inaccurate, and not a little rude, to suggest that the Norwegian writer Per Petterson burst out of nowhere last year with the stateside success of his novel "Out Stealing Horses"-Norway, after all, isn't nowhere - but American readers could be forgiven for feeling that way. "Out Stealing Horses," Petterson's fifth novel but just his second to be published in the United States, struck like a comet, sending readers and critics into fits of justifiable swooning. The novel, in which a hermitic 67-year-old widower peels back memories of a childhood disarranged through abandonment by his father and a terrible shotgun accident, landed on numerous best-books-of-the-year lists (including the one in this publication) and clambered up several best-seller lists. This was a righteous coup for Graywolf Press, the nonprofit publisher in St. Paul that picked up "Out Stealing Horses" after many New York houses had rejected it. With a gust of momentum at its back, Graywolf has now released Petterson's third novel, "To Siberia," which was first published in Norway in 1996 and translated into English, by-Anne Born, two years later. In its best, most lucent moments, "To Siberia" evokes the same reflective grandeur that made "Out Stealing Horses" burn so brightly, with the memories this time coming from a 60-year-old woman whose present situation - unlike that of Trond Sander, the narrator of "Out Stealing Horses," whose accounts of household doddering acted as a pressure valve on the crush of his remembrances - is never revealed. Even her name goes unmentioned. Unlike Trond, then, she is nothing but the past: an otherwise empty vessel filled with memories of her World War II-era childhood in what is surely Frederikshavn, a Danish port town on the Jutland peninsula; of her grandfather, a vinegary farmer from nearby Vrangbaek who hangs himself in a cowshed; of her mother, a devout Christian whose sanctified brooding is leavened only by her hymn-singing at the piano, and her father, whose disappointment at being shut out of the family farm (shades of Lars from "Out Stealing Horses") results in a string of botched occupations and less sanctified bouts of brooding. But mostly - at times oppressively, perhaps even obsessively she focuses her remembering on her older brother, Jesper. Jesper is bold, reckless, handsome, whip smart, politically committed, Romantically doomed - the Frederikshavn version of a young John Reed. He gets into a bar fight at 14; he decorates his seaside fort with a portrait of Lenin; for mischievous sport, he trails the town lamplighter to extinguish each lamp just after it is lit, or catcalls the local baron; he attempts, dangerously, to skate across the frozen sea to a distant lighthouse; he runs outside during thunderstorms to dance in earthy joy; and when the Nazis invade, he throws himself into the resistance. Local girls "lie in bed at night and think of him," claims his sister, whom he affectionately calls "Sistermine," and he can even squeeze a "blush and giggle" out of their dour mother. He is, in short, "mad, bad and dangerous to know," as Lady Caroline Lamb described Lord Byron. Dangerous to be the sister of, for certain. The sheer force of his personality acts like a black hole on Sistermine's life - heating it and irradiating it, but, in some sense, obliterating it as well. "To Siberia" is divided into three sections, but really there are two: memories of life with Jesper, and of life without. Petterson stitches all these recollections together to form a kind of episodic quilt, sliding from past tense to present tense (occasionally in the same sentence: "You could touch the air, like glass, and everything seems very close") as each memory is sewn to the next. As in Sistermine's life, the novel's warmth and vitality are contained within the "with Jesper" sections, which are rife with beautifully incantatory moments: when Jesper shows Sistermine how to sweet-talk a cow into letting her sleep on its back for heat, or when the pair make a blood-oath to someday escape their drab Danish existence. Jesper has his sights set on Morocco ("Marrakech, Fez, Meknes, Kasba," goes his doxology), while Sistermine yearns to replant herself in Siberia ("Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk," goes hers). "There were the great plains with unbroken lines, and a sky and a light as from the dawn of the world," she imagines, "and timbered houses and flocks of birds like a thousand flamingoes that changed into seagulls when they took off and flew and filled the world before they dissolved and were gone." As geographical idylls go, hers is worth a raised eyebrow, but Jesper does nothing but nurture it When a German pen pal informs Sistermine that Siberia equals prison camps, Jesper reassures her. "Nazi propaganda," he snorts. BUT then he is gone - to Morocco, naturally; Jesper's drive, like his personality (and his fate) is superheated - and Sistermine, along with the reader, must contend with the suck of his absence. She drifts to Copenhagen, to Stockholm, to Oslo. She works as a telephone operator and as a waitress in a cafe, and turns to grim promiscuity to eke her way through the cold nights. Even a great-uncle's soused advances go unrefused, and when a woman makes a pass at her, she admits she is "not like that, but if I allow her to kiss me I am sure she will let me sit in this chair as long as I like." It's here, in the "without Jesper" section, that the novel slackens, along with Sistermine's life: "He has gone to Morocco, and I have come to this town at the very end of the fjord where everything was gray and green on the way in on the boat, and then nothing but gray for days and weeks." Make that years. A J. M. Coetzeelike chilliness blows through these pages, but the overall effect is of a slow gray fade - the black-and-white bleakness of Kansas after the Oz of Jesper's company. "The days go by," she says, "and I go with them." Or as a young poet calling himself John Cougar once wrote: "Oh yeah, life goes on/long after the thrill/of living is gone." It spoils nothing to reveal that Sistermine never makes it to Siberia Except that in a way, she does: "Sometimes when I think of Jesper all I can see is his dark back on the way across the white sea to Hirsholmene," she says, referring to Jesper's skate across the sea to the lighthouse. "It gets smaller and smaller and I stand at the edge of the ice feeling empty." This is not the Siberia of her dreams, where "the houses are built of timber that gives off the good smell of tar and warmth in summer," but Siberia nonetheless: icy, barren and windswept, where a prison camp holds fast a sister's cracked and frozen heart. Jonathan Miles, who contributes the "Shaken and Stirred" column to the Sunday Styles section of The Times, is the author of a novel, "Dear American Airlines."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
For almost 3,000 years, a tiny Jewish enclave existed in what is now the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The Jews and their Christian and Muslim neighbors spoke the ancient tongue of Aramaic, which had once been the lingua franca of the Middle East and was spoken by Jesus. Sabar's father, Yona, was born in that enclave but immigrated to the U.S. when the creation of the state of Israel created hostile conditions for Iraqi Jews in the 1950s. Yona, however, maintained strong emotional ties to his native language and culture even as he ascended to a prominent academic position at UCLA. Meanwhile, Sabar showed virtually no interest in his father's background; however, after the birth of his own son, he felt a desire to reconnect with his father and their shared cultural heritage. Their joint visit to their ancestral town of Zakho rekindles memories of the ancient community while strengthening the ties between father and son. An involving memoir that works as both a family saga and an examination of a lost but treasured community.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. For his first 31 years Sabar considered his father, Yona, an embarrassing anachronism. Ours was a clash of civilizations, writ small. He was ancient Kurdistan. I was 1980s L.A. Yona was a UCLA professor whose passion was his native language, Aramaic. Ariel was an aspiring rock-and-roll drummer. The birth of Sabar's own son in 2002 was a turning point, prompting Sabar to try to understand his father on his own terms. Readers can only be grateful to him for unearthing the history of a family, a people and a very different image of Iraq. Sabar vividly depicts daily life in the remote village of Zahko, where Muslims, Jews and Christians banded together to ensure prosperity and survival, and in Israel (after the Jews' 1951 expulsion from Iraq), where Kurdish Jews were stereotyped as backward and simple. Sabar's career as an investigative reporter at the Baltimore Sun and elsewhere serves him well, particularly in his attempt to track down his father's oldest sister, who was kidnapped as an infant. Sabar offers something rare and precious--a tale of hope and continuity that can be passed on for generations. Photos. (Sept. 16) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Sabar, a former political reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, grew up as a typical California kid. His father, a Kurdish Jew, is the foremost scholar of Aramaic, the language of Jesus, which most people think is extinct. The disconnect between his present and his past launched Sabar on a quest to understand the history of Kurdish Jews, who spent 2000 years in northern Iraq until the 1950s, when most of them emigrated to Israel. Interweaving the community's history with his family's stories, Sabar tells of his visits to Iraq and Israel to trace his father's journey from an isolated Kurdish village to UCLA, where at one point he provides Aramaic dialog for The X-Files. Although Sabar ultimately fails to discover the fate of his father's sister, who was kidnapped from their village in the 1930s, he does begin to understand his responsibility to his ancestry. Throughout the narrative, he focuses on identity and community and this central question: "When we carry our languages and stories from one generation to the next, from one country to another, what exactly do we gain?" Written with a reporter's flair for people and places, this is recommended for public libraries.--Diane Harvey, Univ. of Maryland Libs., College Park (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In a filial salute and show of contrition, D.C.-based journalist Sabar recounts his family's unusual history, reaching back to times before the Bible. The author's remarkable father, Yona, was born in remote Zakho, a dusty, isolated village not far from Mosul. The Jews of Kurdish Iraq, believed to be descended from one of the lost tribes of the Babylonian exile, were the last people to speak a form of Aramaic, the language of Jesus and lingua franca of much of the ancient world. In the 1950s, they emigrated en masse to Israel, where Yona and his family, with their strange costumes, customs and language, found themselves at the bottom of the ethnic and economic hierarchy. Unfolding the tale of their assimilation with the novelistic skill of a Levantine storyteller, Sabar traces his father's journey from poverty to professorship. Yona's diaspora story began with the end of Iraq Jewry, continued through scholarship in Jerusalem to a teaching post at Yale and reached fulfillment in a distinguished academic career at UCLA and the compilation of an Aramaic dictionary. A generational and cultural gap divided the immigrant father from the cool son who cared little for his heritage. Then, prompted by the birth of his own son, Sabar began to investigate his family's past. Eventually he and Yona visited a vastly altered Zakho, a town without Jews that now boasts a cybercaf. Describing their pilgrimage and the history that preceded it, the author spins a colorful tale inhabited by wonderful characters in billowing trousers and turbans. The distance between father and son is bridged as Sabar explores the conflicting demands of love and tradition, the burdens and blessings of an ancient culture encountering the 21st century. A well-researched text falling somewhere between journalism and memoir, sustained by Mesopotamian imagination. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
