of the work of art that is beautifully put togetr just as we get pleasure from listening to music or looking at a painting, but our lives are narrow in some ways. we can only go down certain paths. the real tragedy of life. we would like to b many things. i would like to be a mississippi riverboat gambler. i would like to be james bond. i would like to be an opera singer. i can't be all of those things, but through readingan get some sense of what it is like to be those this. i can experience something of those lights. i can enrich my own and s what they are like. i can live more lives than one through books. and you know, if it is a fiction, tells a good story, it is exciting, ed fentress. ..

it's not quite as sex as that, i know but iove the tale of

gengy which is the same period as the japanese classic early novel, and explori other literature than the western is someing that interests me. the story of the stone, the end of the red chamber, all of these sorts of chine, japanese comedy classics haveecome more interesting to me as i've grown older and a lot of th tend to be spiritual books a i have read off and on earlier but it's become more meaningful as i have grown older. i think the important thing is to keep exploring, keep trying new books. that said as you get older you also come to the time you want to go back and read books. i was kid and i read and the koran, what did i know about marrge and @esire and infidelity or any of these things? these are things you will be

experienced if you experience them at all when you are an adult. so you not gone through a certain amount of living you can go back and read these books and see much to you didn't the first time through. some people have said yocan't understand henry james until you pass 40. his books are l aboutegret, paths not taken, things i should have done it didn't dm it the sort of feelings as we get older and older and start to know our time is running out. >> host: the book is "classics for pleasure," the publisher is hard core andhe autr is michael dirda. >> guest: thank you.

illustrated account of the effect of hurricane katrina on the citizens of new orleans. mr. newfeld looks how seven citizens and toward the storm. domy books in houston hostshis event. it's 25 minutes. [applause] >> tnks, everybody. i will try to speak up. so, basicall the thank, buckey and speed books for hosting me in houston. and finally to have thi book out and available. i have a little visual presentation which will tell you a little bit about how the project came to be and something about the characters in "a.d." and their stories so let's get stard& so i come from aradition of on fiction comic books. so of my influens you may know include harvey pekar, who wres "american splendor,"

which is a long-running biographical comics, some fans out there, about his life, everydayife. and another influence is someone i am sure everyo has heard of, art spiegelman who wrote and drew "mouse," the story of his father's survival holocaust. another big influence, marjan, the author of -- growing up in the turmoil of the revolution. and most the largest influence for me has been joe saaco, maltese bourn but american citizen who is a comic bk artist all wrapped into one and he's done a number o works of comics, journalism about areas of conflict li the middle east in his book palestine, and the former yugoslavia, which this is from a safe area.

and actually, i am e of the parti pekar's editors for "american splendor" which i've been doing about 15 years and this is a sample of a recent piece of art we did together where actually, you might notice that i am actually a character inhe story down there inhe lower right-hand corner so that was kind of quote i got to both be in american splendor and draw all in one. so, harvey's influence has been so important it led m to write and draw some stories about my own life including this book a few perfect hours which cannot five years ago and it is about the year and a half i spent backpacking around the world travelinin southeast asia living in the cze republic involve the misadventures my girlfriend and i had during that period. and anodher collaboration that i did while to the scope a while

back was a collection of true life stories of the business world, documenting the wacky characters of that arena. it was called quote code titans of finance ayou can see and was written by the current times columnist rob walker was an old buddy of mine and is actually owes a person who lived in what orleans d i went down to visit him before the hurricane, and he wrote areat book about living in new orleans called quote polk letters for new orleans." a little plug there. so that brings us to late august of 2005, about fourears ago. i live in new york, and when hurricane katrina hithe gulf coast and new orleans levees broke and the city flooded, i was at home watching on tv like millions of other people around the country, and aroun the world just watching in horror as the events unfolded especially the orleans with the people trapped on their roofs and highway overpasses and stuck at

the convention center in the superdome. so what ended up happening is i took some of that sadness and feeling of helplessness and in the up volunteering with american red cross first with my new yorkchapter and eventually i got trained to be a disaster response worker and i was deployed down to the look-see mississippi and i worked down thei after about six weeks after the hurricane and i worked about a month basically just delivering hot foo lunch and dinner to folks trying to move back into their homes still being repaired and they didn' have the ability to ck for themselves or provide mealso we were there to help themut. and the main reason i am telling you that is just to show that m experience even though they were nothing related to people actually surviving the hurricane gave me context for what happened later when i came to

draw "a." and i talked to people and salles with the hurricane had done and gave me some idea of the project i was about to embark on and these are just a couple of shots. which i am sure everyone here is familiar with. and i did get to visit new orleans during that time and shortly after the flood waters had finally receded and the four people ere let back into the city proper and this was an image that strk me at a gas station, just one of those random this. one of the things that stuck in my mind obviously were the water lines on all of the buildings that were so gh off the ground and made you think about what it was really like and the markings on the side of the building left by the search teams which had gone through and checking to make sure there were no dead bodies and animals or what have

you. so, about a year after the hurricane, i was invited to do a comic book treatment of the katrina sto on the storytelling website "smith magazine." and here is a screen shot of the first, when it first appeared. i was, as you can imagine i was excited and petried to tell a storof this sort of epic length and comic book form, and i took about four or five months discussing with the editor larry smith thinkingow we wanted to tell this story and how we wanted to frame it and go about trying to make this into a sea realized what comic. and eventually what we decided to do is we chose to tell the story through the voices of six neorleans people that had survived the hurricane. folks froacross the demographic spectrum a with

experience from everything from those people trapped in the flood waters ort the convention center to people who lost everything in the storm to those who left home and still haven't been able to return and even one person partially affected at all. and again, these were rl people who agreed to have their stories ld in this comic book form in "a.d." and allowed m to intrude in every detail of their lives while i was reahing the story and i am eternally grateful to them so my first task was to take them from their realelves and turn them into a comic book characters,nd as you can see likenesses are t my strong suit but i feel like i captured some quality of them. so the most important thing when ias going forward with the book was to get to the humanity of my subject and show them as more than just victims so when of the things we decided to do is show them before the hurrane how they dealt with

the storas ait and during the flooding and the direct aftermath anwhere they ended up if they he accurate and then continue story forward from there and not just focus on the defense of the storm -- event of the storm. so "a.d." treen until last summer and then all through last fall i said to work writing new material and expanding the whole thing for the book edition which is now ou and altogether there is about5% new material it's inhe book that wasn't on the web. so let's meet sweeten's characters. here is kwame a high school student preacher's son. i read about kwame in my college alumni magazine. he was a current student there and th had written an article about him in the hurricane katrina experiences and the editor and i both wanted to have a youngerson as part of the

mix and since katrina struck while kwame was goingo be a senior in high schoole was perfect and he agreed to be part of it. leo and michelle are twentysomething made of new orleans living in mid city an they were volved in the underground music and publishing scene. and leo came to me because if blog i kept while i was a volunteer at the red cross which got publicized and a lot of people were reading it, and he heard of me because i was a cartoonist and he's auge comic book fans and he came across my og and got in touch with me and head also kept a blog about his experiences during katrina sthat combined with his connection of the comic world made him a natural fit. then there is abbas and his family stayed behind to look

ter the market. abbas came to me and a friend of mine back in brooklyn, her cousin is abbas's wife and when i heard his story i got in touch and aske him to be part of the project as well. abbas waborn in iran buwent to college and were lean and lived there many years and is raising a family there and everything. then we have the doctor who is a real-life southern d-nd who lives in the french quarter. veryell known figure and the orleans. he's a former heal commissioner of new orleans and frequent customer at belvoir restaurant, and i have him here with one of his favorite waiters and finally we have denise. when the book starts she is a soci worker living with her mother, her niece in an apartment in the city and a research and "a.d. i found denise through a radio show where i heard her interviewed and she talked about her

experiences at the new orleans convention center and what she d to say about her experiences were counter to what a lot of people heard about there being l of this violence going on with rape and gang members shoong each other and stuff and she actually was talking about how when she was there t gang members were acting as a common force and had agreed to have a truce and were protecting the women and children making sure everyone had enough fo and water so it was important to me i thoug to have that voice to counter what others perceptions might be what gone on during the aftermatho she became part of the project, to act. now that we have met the main characters let me tell you about each of their stories. "a.d." opens, kwame's the family decides to evacuate to tallahassee florida where one of his brothers is going t

college. they figured the will only be called a couple of days at most t just in case kwame fills the bathtub with water in case there is no running water when they come back. when kwame and his family get to tallahassee is right on the cusp of katrina hitting n oeans and all they can do is watch and wait and see whatappens. as the fury of the storm is unleashed, like everyone else they watch the coverage on tv. and it isn't good. as the scope of the disaster becomes more and more clear, kwame begins to realize he isn't going to be returni home any time soon. and in fac is about to begin on of the yearlong ossey that

takes him all over the country before he can return home to new orleans. and actually as of this day he still has not been able to return home. leota and michelle the day before the hurricane strikes and after debating the issue like some of the other people is it going to come, is it going to turn off to the east they decide they are going to evaate to a friend's place in houston. and like thousands of otrs, they think about facing bill loss of their possessions including leo's huge comibook collection and i think he had close to 15,000 comic books in his apartment. but in the and he only takes a couple of bags and i think one comic book outf theouse before they leave. and in houston a couple of days later, leo is awakened by a phone call from hisher who

tells him about the breaching of the levees and flooding of t city. and he has a sort of about losing his comics and everything else tt he owns. leader as they continue their journey from new orleans trying to rendezvous with his parents in s louis, he reacts angrily to outsiders jging the city and its people in the storm's aftermath. abbas and darnell having decided stay behind to protect the store from looters get themlves prepared and settled in and thinkhey are ready for anything. talking about how it's going to beust like a survivor.

and actually after weathering the storm isn't too bad they think they are in the clear and they start to celebrate. everything is fine, right? but then the flood waters start to rise. and why is. they try to make the best of it however always thinng of the water is going to recede any minute, and th even go around the neighborhood delivering cases of bottled water to strand neighbors and people who didn't evacua like themselves who are stuck in their homes. at one point, a boat comes by offering to ke them to an

evacuation point. as you see the water is still getting higher. but abbas turns down the offer optimistic he has things under control and is worried lou terse will come to the store so he says no. and then that might they have to spend the night on the roof of his toolshed and they are eaten by mosquitos. so the dr, he is secure in his french quarter home and actually invites friends over to the shelter and throwa hurricane party. he's not worried. but the next day on aware much of the city is starting to flood because the french quarter didn't flood and a lot of people in other parts of the city didn't even kw the main parts of the city were flooding the doctor goes to some of the local bars to see if anyone needs help

and he tends to some cuts and bruises and tells everyone to be sure to drink plenty of water and there were a couple of bars as is well-known the state opened the entireime didn't close. this one is johnny blight and they are proud of the fact they don't even have locks on the doors so they can't close so they are open a matter what. and as the days pass the doctor swings into action and he working with a group of emt is to came from all over the country sets up an impromptu street clinic called the new orleans health department and exile and takes all comer for three. soow want to denise. when denise and her niece and grand niece and arrive at a hospital whe they were going to state is already packed with people sheltering and there are no private rooms for denise and her family. so she angrily decides to go back to her apartment to weather

e storm by herself. which is a decision she soon comes t regret. when the hurricane hits. she does survived the hurricane, barely, and ends up rendezvousing with her family back at the hospital a then they end up getting evacuat to the convention ceer which is almost worse than anywhere else and there you and up being stuck there for days in the heat and all ofhe other people trapped wiout running water or medical supplies or any evacuation buses or anything and including national guard soldiers coming by with guns pointed at people. and they are just asking for

water. that iwhen denise realizes the thousands of people there as well as heelf are basically been abandoned to their fate. so that is where will le off with the stories of characters. you can read more obviously i the book. the rest of the book traces their lives. they did all survivethank god, and hopefully the book reminds people how important new orleans as and how it has struggled to rebuild and as a lot of people in houston know so manyeople were never able to return to the orleans and in the up selling here. "a.d." has beea for your journethese characters stories are just a few of the thousands coming out of the hurricane and michael of doing the book is is a worthwhile addition to the ongoing story of katrina and the people of new orleans and city itself.

so i am just going to end this little presentation with silent movie style preview of the opening scenes of the book which is like a bird's eye view of the storm as it builds a sweeps into the gulf coast and hits both new orleans and the look-see mississippi, the two places i focus on. and so i will just taket from here.

[inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] thank you. that's it. [applause] if there is anybody that has

questions i would be happy to answer them if you do, ey've asked meo ask you to stand underneath the boom microphone so anybody, feel free. no questions? >> before this bk you had done some joualistic work but it must have been a tremendous learning expernce at that type of thing. could you -- is there any one thing you did doi that sort of work during that time? >> h hard it is a job being a journali i would s. just before realizing the responsibility you have when you were telling people stories to geing to the truth of their

experience and making sure your facts are right and you do the diligence and background research you need to do and you really need to do a town not research and interviews with ople and get a lot of information that you need to than coalesce a small part th wi actually make it into the story. so, eve and just taking notes and being able to keep u with someone when they are talking and not knowing shorthand or any speed typing skills those were the challenges. fortunately at t beginning, larry smith, who was the editor at the magazine, she comes from the journalism background and ca with me when we first went to the orleans to interview people the first time and took a lot of notes which werhelpful and also being able to have the blogs and the journals of a couple of characters themselves helped in my research, just again, to make sure i got

everything right. rt of falling along on that, one of the things i ended up doing with a couple of the characters, denise and leo there were certain scenes that were critical that i felt needed to be done exactly right and not get any details wrong so i ran the ript as by then first and let them take a look at that. it isn something i normally do as a cartoonist and i don'tven think aot of journalis do that but i wanted to make sure sense of was not trying to in some way expos something about these characters the world didn't know i was trying to do thei story donner and make sure they have full approval of the script that felt like i got their dialogue right that whatever special dialect issues might come up or accent issues, wherev i would get those right, shat i sort of a vy long winded response to your

question. anybody else? all right well, thanks a lot. [applause] [inaudible conversations] josh neufeld is the thor of katrina came calling. he spent three weeks following braking katrina as a volunteer for the american red cross in mississippi. for more information, visit joshcomix.com. next, a porti of book tv's monthly three our live program, "in depth." on the first sunday of each

month, we invite one ahor to discuss their entire body of rk and take your calls. "idepth" also includes a visit with the author to see where and how they write their books. that is what you are about to see. we visited author and request john mhorter and his home in jersey city w jersey. >> a typical day for me is i generally have a right terse schedule so ienerally get up about 930 and put on t coffee. read "thnew york times," then online go rough other sourc i like to go to. generally i start writing something at around 11:30 or

newland. i don't eat breakfast. if i eat lunch it tends to lieve and it depends because i do a weekly column for the new york sun and writing day is usually tuesday or wednesd so ift is one of those days i g working on that. it generally takes about one out re for me to do a column. usually i will have done some sort of a broad outline the night befor if i am writing a boothan it is a matter of working on a kind of east which usually for me is a 60 page outline festooned with first draft text samples and then making them into a book as a matter of taking the part of the outline that will correspond to that chapter and flhing it out into something and that is a matter especially with word-processing technology tha is a matter. d't know wt my process uld have been 20 years ago when there was a matter of

longhand and typewriters. but now 's a matter of taking the word processing document and massaging it on till it's right. but actually, i think of myself primarily as a writer. it's what i'd really like to do. i think ton extent there is a public perception that i think of myself as a quote on quote commentator that if someone sees me on tv they thinkhat really excited me, no offense about this, but that is the thing i am seeking whereas for me i am the most comfortable sitting precisely in this chair at the computer and puttingy thoughts into written formhich is cleaner than the mess or the oral language and human interaction. , what i reallym is a writer. that's what i do we and i am very lucky i have managed to put food on the table doing that.

>> if it is a book you are riding on how long in a day, how many days of work well as you work on it and how long will work today be? >> when i am doing a book which is most of the time. righnow i am not writing a book and think it is the but the first time in ten years i haven' been either writing one or about to write one that generally i work on a book seven days a week following irregularities. if there's family business or i am on a trip or a big day or something then i won't but especially now that you can take your compute everywhere im a bit of a workaholic so it would be every day. i tend to writend long concentrated stcs so i will sit and plugged away at this for let's say three hours at a time. as time goes by i find that the wee hours are good for me and bad for me because i don't get

enough sleep but i find en the world is quite, when there is no possibility of phone calls or having to deal with something i get my best work done and the mo work done because i hava disorder. i don't kn what it is. i can't work unless i have complete concentration. as soon as my wife and i have a child i will probably not write anything again because i need unbroken concentration and with that can get quite a bit on but the way other people seem to write with a light 20 minutes then get up and take care of something than wri another 15 nutes i couldn't create a throw line that way and when i have to work under conditions like those i don't do what i consider my best work so there is definitely the wee hours tendency and never the less i force myself to get up at 9:30 a.m. yway so i guess i am getting used to the sleeplessness which i hear will

become a normal part of fleiss once there is the pittard patter of little feet. my cat is near my feet ght now. >> when you are working on a book the research part of it, how do you incorporate that into your work, where you do your research and how do you organize it? >> mauney research for linguistic oriented issues is a matter of keeping up with rtain journals of course and reading books that come out. here in my return w york life i e the columbia universy library and also the new york public library for that sort of thing and then on by what i can. for race research i suppose the main source of it is i try to read as much about race as possible. i think it could be said by

either read or skim one book on race every week i tried to read the books by people ion't agree with amuch as the ones who i do. and i gue the research comes from doing that. when you are in the positn i am and you get sent an awful lot of books a asked to read you a lot of books so that's something that works for me so there's that research process and in the fact is that in 2008 a lot of research is on line ands reading her blogs and references you get from their. i have all sorts of sites i regularly go to and learn all sorts of things and so research is something that happens in many ways but for me is a matter of being a free to haul it so i need my text. i feel deprived if i don't engage with text to a certain amount every day so that is how

one does research. >> due to separate the and research from the writing? i know a lot of writers do that or don't do tt. do you do research and then write or incorporate both? >> i think they are incorporated because forxample if i am doing research will fly durham i will put int my he stout line of what the book is comi up or whatever academic article i am about to write on linguistics or something. it is pretty holistic. especially because you can carry your typewriter so to speak around with you all the time and so is all pretty cumulative fo me. >> the books you have in this room, are there certain standards you go to? why are these books here? >> no one has ever asked me my proceqs. no one seems to think there is one. this study is my playp

basically. and yes tre is an organization in here. i don't know how much the camera can move but ts is my most imrtant linguistic sources so large dictionaries and the referencbooks, and i need them right here inasi'm writin something on language and i want to know a word in german i can grab this book and also it smells good. african encyclopedia if i need a quick fact on something that someone has asked me about or a date i can't remember. when you go up, those are all of the books i have written. i would never have them like that living room or something like that but i do like to hav them there just so i can grab them. i don have those in my books upstairs. but then they are up here and going across. those are m dinosaur books and i love languages and re but i

also am a dinosaur fanatic. i never got over that kind of miss the affection for dinosaurs that a lot of kids have when they are seven. i still buy every book i can and i love the subject so much want the better boo that is as close to me as possible. then down here is linguistic descriptionsf languages for linguistso the ones i use most ten are there so i just have to come get them and over here is various academic linguistics volumes and so if i needo get one of those i can reach over there. behind the camera right now is the race shelf and so everything i would need about race i reachable right there. then over here is my academic linguistic shelf which is now groaning and i need another one but that is all of those. so yes, there ian organization

in this om and in my file cabinets are over there. it's becoming antique. a cabinet full of actual paper articles 1 and xerox and i used to nee that. i am gradually realizing i don't put anything new into the cabinet is now it is all here but still i can't throw them away. one book i am reading. they do thes beautiful books and this is about the human body and another one of my childhood interests was in anatomy. i gotig kick out of knowing about themall intestine and stuff like tt so there are these fantastic pictures in this book like mright knee is beginning to bother me and i learned why by looking at pretty pictures in this book and so i read two or three pages out of this, or here is my table where this week i am ading alex ross the rest is malaise about classical music and that made

centur i take the paper cover off because it slips while you're reading it. it's always good to keep in practice with your hebrew fergus i rommend to everybody so that is what is on my tablright now. so this is mike miki poster. i am @ huge cartoon villain. cartoons make meappy. i've got them on dvd and actually if we can pan downward from ricky tiki toffee, thais a mongoose, chuck jones tv show from the 70's. frankly never liked the special that much buthrough connection i did get this so that is an original drawing, and this actually on this wall, this is me when i guess i am probably three and i have a little typewriter. i actually liked ridingven then. i don't know what i would have

been riding but i was doing it and obviously that wasn't staged and that is a picture that my father took. so, -- >> what about the other things on the wall? >> this is the instrumen of this and symony orchtra which is a poster i originally got from one of the smithsonian bo shops. th is the fourth version i've had. had one in college but gottfried. i've had one in various apartments. so ts might put a cheap frame it wouldn't get free. this one is dinosaurs from the national geographic, dinosrs of north america and i thought thatas so pretty that i hadn't cheaply back with film so it would kind of up. that is what that is, and over here in t corner, this is i don't usually share this, but for a few days the book that kind of put me on the map, losing the race was actually number one on amazon.

i think it was today's so i printed out because i wanted to be able to see that so that is sitting there. this is marie dressler and lionel barrymore in the mgm movie of 1933 dinner at eight. one of my favorites. i forget why i have this still but it's been around so long i figured i wou put it into a jeep frame. that is my ph.d. diploma. this is a lamp. this is an autogph from the last surviving participants and the radio show. i have a pretty big old radio collection, and the builders leave shows one of my favorites so i wt to an old radio convention becse i heard that rely mitchell would be there. she played sheeler and sen. the will be one person out there that knows i am talking about. but i got an autographed from a

perplexed surely mitchell and it sits here in a frame by the window. >> alongith cartoons and dinosaurs yoare a musician. >> i gue you couldall it that. i like music a lot. i'd like in particular i am a big fan of musical theater music d so is my wife. both sides of her family so i looked into that, and i am a jazzan. i like classical music. a lot of claims. i try to keep my fourier on hip-hop as much as can for all kind of reasons. i did a book on it this summ so i think i practically blew out omy eardrums. now we are in the living room and that is where the music stuff is. this is a piano, and i played. i guess i shall play. >> how often do you play? sometimes i do that into the wee

hours kind of cocktail piano. i used to play for rich people's partiein the palo balto area when i was a graduate student at stanford and it usedo give me poet money, and i have tried to keep it up isn't it romantic, which is by rhard rodgers and lorenz hart in932 for the movie musical love me tonight. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ i have never been taken to doing this before. i have a weird feeling. i am usedto just talking but that is kind of the way i play. and i enjoy doing that more than almost anything. there are some of fyns.

there is of course the thing i can't mention, and i do love my reading and writing about in terms of i think the pleasure most people get outf moving their body in conjunction with competition over spherical objects and things like that which i do not do. i get out of play. the endorphins peoe talk about getting through running and things like that, i get that through having a good play. so that is what this is. >> it might not be fair to ask you at you said you like to sing. is their anything that you play and sing? >> i don't do those things at the same time so for it sable a moh ago i did my fourth cabaret show in manhattan where i basicallyig up really obscure theater and film music the things you only know if you are a crazed s burger syndrome boff of this stuff and the ones

that are obscure and still good and i will put together about 15 of those, one of my friends is a pianist and i will do them for an hour interlaced with witty patterns and so there is that. i used to do occasional performing onstage as a hobby. when losing the race came out and i started having to careers gradually i stopped having the time to do it and the trutof the matter is i don't really have an acting bug and i started realize i don't really enjoy being on stage that much. i don't really get along with actors. i thought of think of all of the social experiences i've had backstage and started realizing this is not for me. the last time i made an exception iound up in manhattan doing in off off broadway produion of arcadia and a couple of my friends were

producers and i let them talk me into play a pompous college professor because they said the character fit me and i understand where they were coming from, but for one thing this character had an english accent, and i had never done 194 and it is not easier for a linguist to master an accent than anyone else and so i didn't evenave it to even a decent degree on till more or less the first performance if that, and of course the other 11 people were professional new york actors so they were impatient and a couple of them were some of the most reprehensible of human beings i had ever met in 42 years and of course of the theater was this big and to have to spe time with them and you couldn't get away from them. it was just aightmare. worst experience of that is probably my song to being performer but the cabaret sho

where it is just me and i don't have to use an accentr a great joand it's nice to get up in front of people and instead of being tking about the glom topic of race and face down the inevitable audience member who thinks i am a terble person etc. i can get up there and have fun and smile. i quickly noticed if you are the controversy list about race and even if you are making since you're not allowed to joke around because the it seems you're not taking these things seriously and because i have an inherently salty demeter if i get up there and laugh it's li they think am better than people so you have to be this guam person and that is the way it has to be so i think a lot of people out there think of me as humorless person that runs around in sport coats and things like that when in fact i do not wear sports coats and realife and a pretty goofy person and with the cabaret shows i get to come out and pick up the microphone and i don't have to

say anything about affirmative tion or barack obama. i can sing songs, but jokes come talk about dinosaurs, jell-o. it is something i donce a year and it is a wonderful relea as a is this instrument. light and gay. ♪ ♪

ariel sabar, are there jews in iraq? >> i think the last count there are allf ight. "the new york times"id a story la year saying there are not enough now to evenold a religious service. there isn't enough and the remarkable thing is iraq used to ha the largest jewish pulation in the middle east, 135,000 strong and now they are down to the last seven or eight. >> host: where we they? >> guest: oliver iq. the largest concentration was baghdad. hard to believe and this was a striking figure when i first came acros but after world

war i, between world war i and were to one-third of bad debts population was jewish, one out of thr was jewish, so much of the population lived around baghdad and the area that we think of as babylon basically. buthere s other of far less known communi of jews who ved at number mountain kurdish regi and that is where my father was from. >> in your book is called quote polk my father's paradise is on search for his jewish past in kurdish aq." where exactly are your roots and what did your parents to encourage iraq? >> guest: my father grew up in a town literally 5 miles south of the turkish border so it is very far north. and the jews in iraq left pretty hardscrabble lives and had on usual jobs for jews. they were not primarily merchants and shopkeepers they were like wheat farmers and river rafts and black market

smugglers,nd these were taught jews. anmy grandfathers stard out as. he rode a doll key into the middle class owning a couple of stores that sold fabrics to ople who've made clothes were needed a fabric for blkets or shts. was the wha was your father's life? >> my father was the eldest male in the family. my grandmother had 12 pregnancies, but only six of her children survivedhildbirth so as to fit his status as the oldest male he lived a footloose life. he believed in angels and demons and he swam in the river and this is the same river that is mentioned in the bible. this is biblical land. and the only -- ki only sort of knows it as a child and one of my favorite images he shared while i was writing thisook is he could cross the entire town by leaping across the rooftops.

he actually knew t flat roof tops campeau's son of a little wicket hopscotch from one to t next and h had a view of the town, not very high, but he could look dow on the goings on so very much a carefe life. >> host: but h left kurdish iraq. >> guest: he did leave kurdish iraq as part of the mass exodus of the jews from iraq in the early 10's. some 120,000 jews, including the kurdish jews leave iraq as part of what was then onof the largest peacetime airlift in history. they got on these plans and it was a bogus airline that is actually run by allah mussad, the figure i think is the man who ran alaska airlines, but it was basically an israeli opion to evacuate the largest in the middle east to israel just after its founding. >> host: why? >> guest: this is one of the tragedies and one of the things i think that moved me about this book.

iraq was a place that for a long time jews did very well, even in the 1940's and that jews in the iraqi parliament, you have a jew in the iraqi parliament, the high court of appeals. andhen all of a sudden everything sort of fal apa. if you want to look for a turning point is the founding of the state of israel. iraq is one of the arab countries that goes to war aer israel declares independence. and once i iraqis start coming home in boxes, jews and muslims who lived together as neighbors and friends and business partners of tho years just can't look at each other quite the same way so a place that had been hospitable to jews for arly 3,000 years in fact, babylon is where was written promise of a great book of jewish law becomes please jewis life is no longer. >> host: nd was the reception in israel? >> guest: well it's intereing. i mean, you know, israewas an experiment, you know, and thousands of people converging on this ancient homeland.

so you have jews coming from every corner of the world. but once they got their they were not all treated the same. israel was largely founded by europeans and the early leaders said was largely european and of course the europeans went throughhe horrors of the holocaus and how it very well deserved status in israel, and jews who came from muslim land didn't quite get the same reception they were regarded in many cases as vages, hillbillies, primitives and moreover they can from countries that were sworn enemies of israel said they were tainted by th affiliationnd i think on a fairly sometimes >> host: you're father got to the states eventually. how did that happen and what was your life like? >> gue: my father when he got to rael he didn't have an easy life, he had to work during the day a a factory to support his family but he went to high school at night. he gets into the hebrew university in jerusalem and

because he careso deeply about his native language fay folks know from mel gibson's movie but it's the ancient language of jesus but the jews and christians to live iraq the kurdish part of iraq or so isolated theytill ske arabic. it w a miracle lead arabic survive that long but becau it was his native town and he cared passionately aboutt yale university with a graduate scholarship to formally document the mother tongue because this language was on the study by outsiders, it wasn't a language people view from inside mostly because most scholars have wrten off as dead so my father gets a scholarship to yale and it's a teaching job at ucla and i grew up as a l.a. kid who wanted nothing to do with his funny talking dad or wing nut at chongging to bcool and 1980's los angeles. >> host: when did that change