Do You Understand Aramaic?

Ariel Sabar is author of “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq,” due out next month. Here's a piece of beautiful Jewish family life in the Katamonim:


Evening in Jerusalem

I was her eldest grandson and her first grandchild to marry, but when I went to Jerusalem in August 2001, it had been 14 years since I last saw my grandmother...

...The night of our first visit, we climbed the faintly lighted steps and found her on the couch, alone with her thoughts. I leaned over to kiss her forehead and slipped my arms around her brittle frame. She looked up at me, her eyes flickering with warm light. Then came that strange music: Aramaic. She was among the last native speakers of this ancient language, now on the verge of extinction. “Is she blessing us?” I asked my father. I had never understood her incantations, daisy chains of mystical-sounding words I always imagined scrawled in hieroglyphics. “She says she can’t believe you’re really here,” he said. “When she saw you walk in, she said it was like the coming of the Messiah.” I swallowed hard.

...“I don’t think you should go,” Savta said, flapping her hand as if shooing demons. “It’s not safe.” We didn’t understand her stridency. I supposed it was just a grandmother’s nature to worry. But when we got up to say our goodbyes, something possessed her: She pulled herself up by her walker and followed us out the door, into the hallway and all the way to the stairs. It was a journey that by rights she did not have the strength to make.

Blessings tumbled from her lips as the walker’s aluminum legs scraped against the stone floor. “May God watch over you,” she said. And then, to my wife and me: “May you have a son in nine months.” We were in the street and could still hear this determined woman calling out to us, and to God.

The next morning, the phone rang early. I heard my father speaking softly in the other room. Then came a knock on the bedroom door. “Savta died last night,” he said. “A neighbor found her on the couch this morning.”

Our interest made her feel loved, admired, even. For a few short days she was the center of a family, and then we said we were leaving. We’d be gone just a day, we told her. But that’s what people always said, wasn’t it? Very soon, she knew, it would be for longer. Very soon we’d be back in America, where old grandmothers and their stories tend to melt into thin air.