Be forewarned: You will lose sleep over this book. Journalist Ariel Sabar's story about his father, Yona Beh Sabagha (later Sabar), an Iraqi Jew who grew up speaking Jesus' lingua franca, Aramaic, mesmerizes from the very first sentences: "I am the keeper of my family's stories. I am the guardian of its honor. I am the defender of its traditions. As the first-born son of a Kurdish father, these, they tell me, are my duties."

But Sabar wasn't always the good son, the keeper of stories and honor and tradition. He grew up rebellious, born in the la-la land of make-believe, Los Angeles. "Ours was a clash of civilizations, writ small. He was ancient Kurdistan. I was 1980's L.A."

When Sabar experienced the birth of his own son, suddenly he needed to know his father's story. He quit his job at a well-respected newspaper and started researching and writing "My Father's Paradise." It took him three years and included two trips to war-torn Iraq.

In the tradition of the famed storytellers of Zakho, his ancestral village, Sabar narrates a saga so touching, so amazing, so miraculous that the reader will feel awe for the resiliency of the human spirit. And also awareness of what immigrants to strange lands sacrifice in their exile, whether exile is self-imposed or forced upon them.

Beginning with the mud hut where his father was born to illiterate parents, Ariel Sabar recaptures the sense of Iraqi Jewish life in the shadows of looming mountains close to the Turkish border. From there the action moves to Israel, where phenomenal challenges faced his young father, one of the 120,000 Iraqi Jews airlifted out of Iraq to Israel in 1950. That little-known diaspora brought them to the Promised Land, but the bigotry and intolerance of European-born Jews toward the Kurds soured their experience.

By the quirkiest of fates, young Yona earned his Ph.D. at Yale University and became one of the world's most renowned and respected linguists of Aramaic at UCLA. In the end, the action moves back to post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, where Sabar and his father searched for Yona's older sister Rifqa, kidnapped by a wet nurse hired in the 1930s when Ariel's grandmother couldn't feed her.

Juxtaposed with Yona's story are vignettes and informational passages about Kurdistan, Muslims, Jews, Christians, language, women, love, marriage and history. Sabar also reveals the poignant story of how he came to understand and appreciate his strange immigrant father, a man who wore plaid suits better suited to 1960s golf courses than 1980s Los Angeles -- "he was a bad dresser in a fashionable city."

All this is the stuff of both Hollywoodish high drama and profound lessons about life. Unlike many memoirs flooding the book market these days, "My Father's Paradise" is both unique and universal. Unique because of the isolation of the Zakho Kurds and the archaic language they spoke. And universal because it's not just Yona Sabar's story -- it's everyone's. "My Father's Paradise" is ultimately about the struggle to find a place in the world to call home.