Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai, MacAdam Cage, 290 pages, $25
The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer, Ecco Press, 352 pages, $25
Before us are two beautifully written novels that drop the reader into the lives of Jewish-Iranian families at a time long before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived on the scene to declare that Israel should be wiped off the map.
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One, "Caspian Rain," by Gina B. Nahai, is set in the pre-Islamic Revolution days of 1960s Tehran, and gives us a glimpse into a period when, one senses, the biggest worry for most Iranian Jews was how to survive the cruel machinations of their own status-obsessed community. The other, Dalia Sofer's "The Septembers of Shiraz," traces the trajectory of suffering endured by an Iranian-Jewish family following the 1979 upheaval.
While not political novels per se, both help us picture a richer landscape of the Iranian reality, and they pull us through their narratives by presenting us with characters we yearn to know more intimately in their struggles to survive in the face of the crushing societal and socioeconomic forces around them.
If that doesn't sound like light bedside reading, then appropriately so. Though both Nahai, in her third novel, and Sofer, publishing her first full work of fiction, might seem, from first glance at their feminine-looking jacket covers, to be fashioning for themselves a new brand of Persian-style "chick lit," in fact, both authors strike a deeper and often disturbing tone. Each book lies like a mosaic, in which the many pieces of brokenness add up to a worthwhile portrait. And perhaps like the new aspiring Jewish-American writers of the past, who, having come from homes in which Yiddish, Russian or German was spoken, grew up to be so able to evoke a sense of the immigrant experience, Nahai and Sofer - both children of Jewish families that fled Iran - open the doors to a Farsi-flavored milieu with which most readers have yet to familiarize themselves.
Nahai's writing has an ethereal, dreamlike quality to it, though many of its images ultimately morph into nightmares. Amid remarkably sparse language, Nahai creates the world of a family so laden with ill luck that one almost wishes someone would take pity on them and perform an exorcism on their house. At the center of it all is Bahar, a pretty-enough Jewish girl from a working-class family who hopes that through marrying up, she can propel herself into the more moneyed circles of Tehran Jewry. We can suspect that this is a poorly engineered choice from the moment she meets the man whom she will marry, a despicable, if at times flat, character who will humiliate her with his public philandering and drain her with his lovelessness.
All of this is witnessed through the eyes of their only child, Yaas, a curious girl who has the odd job of retelling her parents' story in present tense. It is hard at times to swallow the concept of a young narrator with such an eerie prescience, that of a child who can walk us through the unfolding pain of her parents' frigid, doomed marriage with so much clarity and insight. Indeed, on many occasions, the language and imagery feel too sophisticated for what is meant to be an extraordinarily young storyteller, a peculiar kid who refers to her parents only by their first names. The reader may find it difficult to imagine that little Yaas, upon having her red hair cut for the start of the second grade, would be able to think of her mother as "so very brave for enduring her life of disappointments as she does on her own, with anger as her only weapon, without abandoning me in the process."
Ultimately, Yaas is defined by a sense of close-up rejection from her mother, and cosmic rejection from an increasingly absent father. The narrator's isolation only grows, as a genetic defect - a secret that Bahar's family has been trying to hide in some feckless attempt not to further depress their collective stock in the Tehran marriage market - begins to reveal itself through her. Yaas' physical imperfection only seems to push her mother away from her and drive her parents further apart from one another.
Lightening up this gray outlook are a gaggle of somewhat freakish side characters, some funny and some tragic. And the reader is pulled along in the tale in part because we become curious to learn more about the virtual caste system that rules over Jewish-Iranian society, which, despite being insular, despite its place as a tolerated but unloved minority in the larger Iranian social fabric, shows a desperately assimilationalist vein in it. Here, the definition of moving up in the world is getting out of the Jewish neighborhood. Bahar's life, it is worth noting, is made miserable mostly because she's from the lower parts of Tehran, economically and geographically, and her brutally snobbish in-laws insist on keeping her there and never accepting her into their midst.
Yaas' physical abandonment by her father, who runs off with his mistress, and emotional abandonment by her mother, who becomes increasingly distant because of her daughter's encroaching deafness, seem to be a metaphor for the lost love for the idealized Mother Iran of yesteryear. Yaas? realization of her parents' faults, of the ways in which they will continue to let her down by not loving and accepting her - or each other - nearly enough, seem to parallel the experience of many Iranian Jews who still ache for the pre-revolutionary Iran they knew and loved. This swelling sense of loss is palpable throughout, and while sometimes poignant, it often leaves the reader thirsty for some relief or redemption. But perhaps by not giving it to us, Nahai - who teaches fiction writing at UCLA - has simply refused to bow to Hollywood-style pressures to tie up loose ends and present her audience with a sanguine conclusion. Rather, the dwellers in "Caspian Rain" must contend with a never-ending drizzle over their heads, a semi-permanent spitting down from on high.
A new world
Sofer's book propels us forward in time and in space. Here we enter the Iran of the post-1979 turning of tables that brought a Shi'ite Islamic theocracy to power, and we meet the Amin family, who had been living rather comfortably in the aforementioned, coveted upper rungs of Tehran Jewish society. But in a new world in which anyone who belongs to a different socioeconomic status is held suspect by young and newly emboldened religious fundamentalists trying to build a classless Islamic society, a Jewish family perched so high is doomed to fall.
This is a story told from many perspectives, giving us the chance to sit uncomfortably in the skin of each of the family members as they try to survive the earth-moving repercussions of the revolution. At the center of this nucleus we find the family patriarch, Isaac, sitting in jail, watching fellow political prisoners waste away or be wasted by sadistic and starry-eyed jailers. There, he stands accused of being a spy merely for having visited family in Israel, though he is made to wonder if he isn't really being subjected to this torturous existence for the simple reason that he is a Jew and a financially successful one at that.
Pining for him on the outside is his wife Farnaz, who is slowly shattered as she watches her husband's own staff turn on him in his absence and carry off his possessions and wealth in the light of day. Their 9-year-old daughter Shirin is busy stealing files from a friend's father in an effort to uncover the reason for her father's arrest, while their older son, Parviz, is trying to carve out a new life for himself in America, where his parents had sent him to study amid the foreignness of an Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox sect in Brooklyn.
Here, we get much more of a political backdrop woven into the narrative and an opportunity to learn about the stunning complexities of modern Iran in the process. The story brings out an important lesson that many of us either missed or forgot. And that is that the 1979 overthrow of the Shah was not promulgated just by a bunch of religious fanatics trying to install an Islamic regime, but was promoted by nearly everyone who had a bone to pick with the perceived decadence of the Shah. This included, incidentally, large numbers of communists, pro-democracy activists, and a whole sundry of political reformers and revolutionaries who didn't necessarily give a fig for Islam and had no intention of being the catalysts for a theocratic overhaul. Yes, they were agents for change, but they didn't expect the rule of ayatollahs in response.
At times, in fact, "The Septembers of Shiraz" (the title refers to a place where Isaac and Farnaz used to vacation as a young couple) is a novel that is as much about class struggle as it is about Iranian Jews. What we see is a somewhat Marxist reversal of fortunes, in which the masses seek to "take back" the means of wealth that they believe have been stolen from them by the pro-Shah ruling class, in which Jews feature prominently.
Among the moments when this is most affecting, we feel for Farnaz when she begins to realize that her lifelong, trusted housemaid, Habibeh, is coming to sympathize with the revolutionaries. When Farnaz suggests to Habibeh that she must not let the social chaos around them impact their friendship, Habibeh tells her to think again. "No, Khanoum," Habibeh says, using a Farsi honorific which is roughly equivalent to "Ma'am." "I don't think what we have is friendship. I believe it's tolerance, and habit. Like animals in a forest, we have learned to live with one another."
The experience of sudden powerlessness in such an animal kingdom becomes an overarching theme here, deftly set by Sofer in the specifics of time and place that only someone with an intimate knowledge of Iran could produce. Trying to avoid being smeared with the label of Western decadence, which has virtually overnight become an amorphous crime that is easy to pin on nearly anyone, Sofer's Farnaz goes about destroying photographs of the family's past life, from sunbathing holidays in southern France to winter vacations skiing and ice-skating. Isaac even feigns an interest in converting to Islam in his desperation to soften his captors.
What becomes increasingly apparent, as well as an important part of the book's narrative, is that little of what they do can hold back a rising tide of anti-Jewish sentiment. Isaac is reminded by his cellmates somewhat tauntingly that if he dies, the "blood money" owed his family by his jailers will be lower than that of a Muslim's. And Farnaz, who is eventually mortified when she is called a "dirty Jew" by Habibeh's adult son, is left recalling conversations with her father when she was a young girl. Things had been good for Persia's Jews for centuries, "until they were declared najes - impure," Farnaz recalls. They had to live in the mahaleh, a kind of ghetto. Although the ghetto is physically gone, what is so terrifying for the Amin family is that they see a metaphysical one being reconstructed around them. Farnaz asks, "Are the Jews still Iranians, Baba?" She doesn't get a satisfactory response.
Their story ultimately will end in deliverance, but only after the family is forced to make the painful choice that so many other Iranian Jews of their generation made: to pick up and move elsewhere. There is little left for them that is auspicious in a place where so many of their friends - not just Jews, but also Bahais, Zoroastrians, secularists, intellectuals and artists - are becoming unwilling martyrs to the revolution.
Ilene R. Prusher is Jerusalem bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor. She teaches creative writing at the Pardes Institute.
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