Product Description

My Father's Rifle is a beautiful narrative about the life of boy named Azad and his coming-of-age in Iraq during the 1960s and 1970s. Azad is born into a vibrant village culture, to a family that is proud of its Kurdish past. He loves his mother's orchard, his cousin's stunt pigeons, his father's old Czech rifle, and his brother who is away fighting in the mountains. But before he is even of school age, Azad has experienced strafing and bombing, he watches as friends and neighbours are assassinated and he sees his father humiliated when he tried to get food for his starving family. Forced into a refugee camp in Iran for years, the family returns to find Saddam Hussein in power, and destroying the autonomy he had promised their people. In a burst of adolescent rebellion, Azad briefly runs away to the mountains to join his brother in the fight for Kurdish liberty. But Azad returns, sensing he must find his own way to advance the Kurdish cause. He realizes that in order to achieve his dreams of becoming a filmmaker, he must flee to Syria and leave behind the family and land he loves so much.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59206 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
'Saleem describes, without sentimentality and with stunning simplicity, daily life in a tormented country... An impressive book.' Livres Hebdo

About the Author
Hiner Saleem was born in Iraq and fled the country when he was seventeen years old. He is an acclaimed film director whose Vodka Lemon won the Venice Film Festival's San Marco Prize in 2002. He lives in Paris. My Father's Rifle has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Customer Reviews

Perceptive, poignant - Kurds' plight through a child's eyes
Perceptive, poignant - a story of the Kurds' plight through a child's eyes as he grows up in a world which swings between supposed stability and outright unrest, where his people are one minute fleeing their homes and being bombed, the next offered a 'truce', and a life compliant with mainstream party principles.

A moving, yet 'factual' insight - with a really sensitive balance of historical and personal narrative. Written with an honesty and perception which only a child would bring.

One of those small books you start to read ...and will not put down until you have finished it. Do read it - and share it with others.

Child-sized book with adult-sized power
This is a moving little book, not sentimental but convincing and poignant. It's brevity suits a child's perspective (and attention span!) but the underlying events (life for the Kurds during Saddam Hussein's rule) hit home with adult force. A small gem of a book, and an impressively authentic one.

Engaging and moving story about the struggle for freedom of the dispossessed Kurds
This novelette tells the story of Azad, A Kurdish boy living in Iraqi occupied Kurdistan, as the lands of the Kurds are seized and their culture destroyed.
In 1968, eight year old Azad lives in a small village in Iraqi occupied Kurdistan.
He climbs onto rooftops and watches his cousin's homing pigeons eating the juicy pomegranates in his mother's garden.
He swims naked with his friends and brothers in the streams near the village and enjoys the occasional treat of biscuits from the village store. He watches his uncle's television- the first in his village- but he wonders why there all the shows are in Arabic and their are no Kurds on TV.
Azad's tranquil village life is shattered after the Baathist coup of of 1968 which sweeps Ahmed Hassan Al Bakr and Saddam Hussein to power as the new regime begins a campaign of genocidal repression against the Kurds.
Azad's cousin Mamou is hunted down and killed by Iraqi troops and his family flee to a nearby cave where they are, among thousands of Kurds, bombarded by napalm from Iraqi planes.
The family returns home to find their home razed and their and their orchard destroyed.
Azad's father and brothers, with meager arms and supplies join the resistance but Azad and his family are captured and together with hundreds of thousands of Kurds swept into refugee camps.

Azad's small niece dies froma respiratory illness after being refused treatment by the Arab doctor at the local hospital.
Azad eventually leaves Kurdistan for exile in Europe. Many of the family he has left behind are to die in the poison gas attacks ordered by Saddam , or in Iraqi run concentration camps. This is an engaging and moving story about the struggle for freedom of the dispossessed Kurds.
It is a story of a people whose plight has been ignored by the media, and
opinion makers. The Kurds have not had courses taught about their plight and
history at universities. They are not backed by powerful lobbies and pressure groups across the world- as the "Palestinians" are- their have never been any international conferences to highlight their plight, and the opression and genocide of the Kurds by Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.
has never occupied any time at the United Nations.