Caspian Rain | Gina Nahai | Talks at Google

Good morning, everyone. Thanks so much for coming today. We're really glad to see all of you here. I have the pleasure of introducing Gina Nahi. Her previous books include Sunday Silence, moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, and Cry of the Peacock. Gina also contributed to the Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt, which won the 2005 Jewish Book Award. Her latest book, which she'll be discussing today, is called Caspian Rain. In the starred review book list writes Nahi's story of a haunted Jewish family in Tehran during the Shah's last years possesses the dark beauty and harsh lessons of a fairy tale. Nahi's poetic and cathartic. Excuse me. Cathartic drama speaks for all silenced women, for all who are tyrannized. Please join me in welcoming Gina Nehe.

Hi. Thank you guys for being here today. I know there's a million other things you could be doing, so it's nice to have you. I'll tell you a little bit about myself and about how the writing, what we hope is a career, what the writing started, how it came about, and about a little bit about my previous books and this one. And then I'll. I'll read a short passage and see if you like to. I can go on, or if you don't have time, we can have a conversation. I'm as interested in hearing you guys as I am in myself. Probably more interested in hearing you guys. So I'm Iranian. I'm Iranian Jewish. I was born in Iran. What we called, in retrospect, the glory days of Iran. The 1960s and 70s were sort of two decades that were extraordinary in a very long stretch of Iranian history, in the sense that with the Shah, there was a lot that was wrong at the time, a lot that was wrong with the Shah's reign. No question about that. But for women, for minorities, for children, for sort of the weak and unprotected segments of society, the 60s and 70s were kind of a miraculous time. Laws were introduced and sometimes enforced that protected women's rights, certainly minority, religious, ethnic minorities, people with different sexual orientations and so on. For the first time since the advent of Shiism in Iran, which was about 1400 years ago, there were legal protections for them. And there was a sense that sort of the future was rather limitless. President Carter came to Iran in, I think, 77 and called Iran an island of state in the Middle East. And that kind of showed a little bit about what his insight was. But, you know, if you were a woman, a member of a minority in Iran, you did feel like, well, you know, things are good and they're going to get better. I was born in a. Well, first, just a couple of words about Iranian Jews, because a lot of people don't know that there were Jews in Iran or, you know, the Iranian Jewish community is the oldest community in diaspora. It dates back to the time of the first Temple, the destruction of the first temple, where they were brought in from the area that was Palestine, then into the region that was Babylon at the time. They were brought in as slaves. And then with the advent of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, who is actually the person who issued the first human rights declaration ever, he freed the slaves, and some of the slaves went back and rebuilt the temple that was the second temple, and the rest stayed in Iran. And those are my ancestors, so to speak. That was about more than 2500 years ago. And things were pretty good for Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians. Baha' is came later. But religious minorities in Iran, under Islam, under the Ottoman Empire, until the advent of Shiism to Iran. Shi' ism is a bit of a more. I guess you could characterize it as hardcore version in some senses, and certainly in the sense that there is a principle in Shi' ism that declares people who believe in other religions, or even Sunnis, who are the other sect, the other large sect within Islam, declares them impure, untouchable. And so things got really bad for religious minorities and so on. I say this because at some point it becomes relevant to what's in the book, if you're just patient enough. But. And so I was in a. I was born in a family that was a little bit unusual on my father's side. I lived in a house with my father's father, my parents, my father's father and his two wives. And this was already unusual because at the time in the 60s and 70s, people did not have. Most people did not have more than one wife. One of the wives was a very religious kosher Jew from the city of Kashon, where all the beautiful rugs, many of the beautiful rugs come from. And she was the youngest of 18 children, the other 17 being boys. And just as a little aside, a couple of those boys are the people who immigrated to Canada and then to Minneapolis and built them all of the Americas and all of that. But these people came straight out of. They came out of extreme poverty, out of the ghettos of Kashan. So that was my Jewish grandmother. On the second floor was my Christian grandmother, who was a French Catholic, very French, very Catholic, staunch Catholic. And then we lived on the third floor, I and my two sisters and my parents. And so you'd go down one step. So there was a statue of Christ bleeding on the cross. And, you know, Jews killed Jesus and all that. And then you'd go down one more. And there was the two refrigerators, you know, the meat in one side and the milk in one side, and kind of a schizophrenic existence. And on my mother's side, she was the descendant of the first Lubavitcher rabbi who had come to Iran and set up sort of shop. And so they were very strict Jews. And now I'm going to skip a few hundred years. What happened as a result of. On both sides of the family. What happened was, as a result of all this schizophrenia, was that there were many women in my family. There were just many women, but many of them were very rebellious women on my mother's side. Lubavitcher's rabbis are very strict, very hard, hardcore Jews. And he had these daughters, many of whom ran away. And if any of you has read my first two novels, Cry of the Peacock or Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, those runaway women are my mother's aunts. These are people I grew up with. Roxana, Miriam, the Moon. They're all real people that I actually knew when I was. When I was growing up. In Cry of the Peacock, Peacock is my mother's grandmother, who had the distinction of being the first Jewish woman ever to have left her husband. She got married at age 9, and her husband was a big womanizer and so on. So she finally one day left her husband. And to this day, I'll go around New York and LA and other places with large Iranian communities. And there are people who remember her or have heard of her who come up and say, oh, I read the book, and I know this was your grandmother. So it was an interesting existence. And on my father's side, you know, there were always these questions of. Because of the French Catholic woman. My grandfather married her when she didn't speak a word of Farsi in Paris, brought her to Iran when we didn't have running water in most places, or electricity in most places. And here there was this woman who was the assistant to the head of a cigarette factory and lived on her own and was very sort of independent and all of that. And if any of you wants to know, ask me, why did she marry him? And I'll tell you in the question and answer period. But. And so there were many, many stories that came out of that environment every time we got together, you know, for a glass of tea with anybody in the family, you'd hear seven stories, usually about bad husbands and tyrannical fathers. And that's why all the male characters in my books are rather established, skewed. When the editor who bought my first book called and said, yeah, I love this book and I want to buy it, but you have to promise me that you're going to rewrite the male character a little more sympathetic. I said, sure, sure. Because then I was 25 then I thought I could do things that I now know I can't. So I rewrote it and, oh, no, it was the same. And then I rew. And finally we gave up. We said, oh, you know, this guy is just going to be an ass for the rest of his life. I can't change. So, long story short, I went to boarding school when I was 13 years old in Switzerland. My family, I think largely because of the fact that of all the sort of the sense of rebellion and the defiance and the fact that so many of them were unable to put up with all the restrictions and limitations that were imposed on anybody, but mostly on minorities in Iran, they had decided they're going to leave Iran long before the revolution. They actually did leave Iran a long time before the revolution. And so my sister and I went to boarding school, and then I came to Los Angeles to go to school. That was 1977. Two years later, the revolution happened. And for us, it was a great thing. Well, I think for anybody who got out of Iran when the revolution happened, the revolution was a great thing. But for my family, it was a great thing because we used to be just one of very few Iranian families anywhere in California. And I was going to ucla, and I had to answer questions from very intelligent people who weren't being sarcastic about, do you guys have cars or do you have roads or do you ride camels to school or how do you get to school? School. You know, that's how unknown Iran was within the consciousness of this country. And so I was studying at UCLA and studying history and political science, and I realized that, really to my astonishment, that after 2,500 years of existing in a country, there was absolute, absolutely no record of the existence of Iranian Jews. None. No language, nothing. And I also realized by then the revolution had happened. And the question was, why is this? How could people exist for this long and just keep no trace and nobody else, nothing, Right? So there were references to them, like one sentence here and there in the travelogues usually of, like, these Very adventurous women in the 1700s and 1800s who were traveling on a caravan through the Middle east and so on, just referring to them, but that was it. There was nothing else. And I also realized that with the revolution, there's a good chance that none of this history will get recorded. So I went around for seven years interviewing any Iranians that I could get my hand on. At the time, I was also working at the RAND Corporation for the Department of Defense on a project called the Iranian Military under the Islamic Republic. And for that, I had to interview anybody who had been in the Shah's army or who had been a revolutionary. And after that, sort of turned against the government of Iran and left. And so there was all of these stories that are recorded and that many of which later went into Cry of the Peacock. And after that, many of them went into More light on the Avenue of Faith. And my third novel, Sunday Silence. Now I'm going to get, like, a bit of a chuckle, because I always do when I say this takes place in Appalachia among Christian fundamentalists, in the Cumberland Gap in Kentucky and Tennessee. It's a story of a Kurdish Iranian Jew living in Tennessee and passing as a Christian fundamentalist. And really, it's a story of fundamentalism and how similar we are in the east and the west, even though in the west people think they're so different from those guys, and why are those guys that way? And so on, Right? And so here's the thing. I teach writing at usc, and I always tell my students, every novel starts with a question. And the whole process of writing the novel is a writer's attempt to figure out the answer to that question. You're not necessarily trying to figure out your own life issues, but there has to be a question, otherwise a good novel won't be an exploration. It's not something that's worth the reader's time. Right? And so as I. I've lived in this country now 30 years. I came the night Elvis died. And so August was our anniversary. And as I've gotten older, I've learned many, many things about the west and how to act like a Westerner. The one thing that I've never learned is how to deal with loss the way people deal with loss in the West. And, you know, you guys are all young, but as you get older, you kind of. It becomes a big issue. You have to have a philosophy about these things, and if you're not particularly religious, it's difficult. In the Middle east and in most traditional societies, loss is something that first of all often becomes a stigma, but certainly becomes part of a person's identity and is passed on from generation to generation. We have these things in Iran. Many people still have them in this country. They brought them called tear jars, and they were like little genie bottles, not very little either. Glass all decorated with beads and painting and colored inside. And these were left in people's homes for times of great sorrow. First of all, the fact that you always had it out and ready tells you something about the mentality of expecting tragedy. But at times of great disaster, sorrow, people would cry into these tear jars or your friends would come over and cry into these tear jars. And we would gather these tears and just keep them. And when a girl got married, she got the tear jar from her mother to take to her own house, right? So that is the. That's how, you know, how do you deal with the death? How do you deal with having a physical handicap, having a child who's ill with a setback, with a divorce? Right. For us, it was and still is. It's something often to be ashamed of. If not, it's something to be mourned for a long, long time and something that not only you will remember, but everybody around you or who has even heard of you remember. Members. The fact that I have all these characters in all these novels, many, many of them, and each one of them has a whole life story is a result of sort of the network of the history keeping right for every one person, you hear a whole background and a whole life story. And often the story is a sad one. I do think the character in this story book in Caspian reign at some point says, maybe in the east we mourn more because we have more to mourn. I think that Americans. Oh, no, let me just first get to the point. What I observed living in the United States is that Americans, especially Westerners in general, you know, making lemonade out of lemon philosophy or the Special Olympics philosophy, or, you know, oh, well, this didn't work out. I'm going to, like, leave San Francisco and go live in New York and start over. And right, nothing, no tragedy is final for them. No loss is unsurmountable for them. There is a mentality that, well, it's a setback, but, right, it's not a mentality of, well, this is a setback. And as in, it's just gonna destroy me. And so the whole central question of Caspian Reign is how do you deal with the loss for someone like me or like the narrator in the story, who is not completely Iranian and certainly not completely Western. How do you deal with a loss that you can't deny or accept or just leave behind? As in, you know, I'll go across the country and start a new life. It was also writing Caspian Rain, my own way of trying to explore a lot of complexities within the Iranian society. That society, the Iranian society of the 60s and 70s, are the same people who now live in the west, that if you guys, I don't know if you have a lot of Iranian neighbors depending on where you live. Right. But if you do, those are the people who came out here, both the younger generation and the older generation. And it was a particular. It's a very. There are many contradictions within our culture. And for instance, how is it that a country where the first Declaration of human rights ever was issued, how can that country at the same time embrace Islam the way it has the sort of the intolerant version of Islam? We are those same people. How can a country where Iranians, anybody would tell you this, are the friendliest, most hospitable, most giving, when you go to their house or their country people in the world, among. Right. How can those same people show this face that Ahmadinejad and, you know, his followers show? Or how is it that in a country where what you hear now for the last 10, 15 years is that the young people are so disenfranchised, so disenchanted with the government that there is this brewing of a pro democracy movement at any time now, with a little bit of pressure, the government of the mullahs could topple. Right? Well, how come these same people, when it came to the last presidential elections in Iran, they had a choice, it was a very awful choice between bad and worse. They had a choice between a bit of a less fanatic and a bigger fanatic. And how come they chose the bigger fanatic? Right? I mean, they did vote, even though the candidates were, you know, the choice of candidates were limited anyway. So it's the whole. And how is it that the west and our fascination with the west and the influence of the west that certainly has penetrated every facet of life in Iran, how is it that we see all of this? We see the way Americans live, we see the way Westerners live, and in many ways we love it. Right, but what does that mean? Does that mean that we are going to embrace the west given the opportunity? So the narrator in the book is a 12 year old Iranian Jewish girl who's losing her hearing and she has to not only save herself, but also save her family, her Family's falling apart, and they live in this context of Iran being Westernized. It's certainly in the 70s. And her whole narrative, there's a lot of this. Well, in America, people would do it this way. In Iran, people would, you know, this is the way we do it. But Americans would do it that way. And that duality, just one example that always made me laugh, when I was a kid, we used to sit and watch American movies. Movies and just think, how do these people go to funerals? Like in the movies, you guys go to funerals, you're all dressed up and you all look all composed and, you know, everybody behaves themselves. And like, family of, like two families don't start fighting right over the grave and. Right. And in the Middle east, if you go to a funeral and if you look good, people think, oh, she's happy the person died. If you, like, dress up. And certainly if you don't cry and wail for a week at a time, if we can't cross, cry enough. People used to hire professional mourners whose job it was to go cry at particular funerals to show the guests and the visitors that this person was really missed. And then the next hour they'd go cry another funeral. These people that they don't know. Right. So, I mean, that's the question that she asks in there. How is it that Americans behave this way at funerals and so on. So I'm going to read a couple of pages from the opening of the book. It's the. The girl who's talking. She's 12 years old when she's telling this story. And after that, I don't know, we'll do something. One of the reviews. Oh, I have to tell you guys, you know, Julie Burton is here and I don't know. You don't know me and you don't know her, but she's the most fabulous publicist ever. And she's been getting me all these reviews and she gets any glory, if I ever get any glory. So thank you, Julie. But one of the reviews that Julie got said, this book is not for the faint of heart. I'm trying to think that that's a compliment, but hopefully you read it and tell me what you think. She's 16 years old, a young woman in a city with blue mountains. She's walking to school with her books in her arms. She has on a faded gray uniform, a pale lipstick that she's had to hide from her parents and put on only after she's left the house. It's a golden spring morning, the light as clear as polished glass, the air imbued with the scent of poet's jasmine that blooms on slender vines everywhere in the city. The sun is just rising behind the tall maple trees that line both sides of the Avenue of the Departed, creating a gallery of light and shadows where the girl's image is by turns eclipsed and illuminated and eclipsed again until she turns the corner onto the square of the Pearl Cannon and emerges into a sea of brightness. As she steps off the edge of the sidewalk, she feels a breeze, looks up in time to see a cloud of cherry blossoms rain down on her like a blessing. She lets out a cry of joy, opens her arms, and turns full circle amid the flowers. Her books fall to the ground and her papers fly into moving traffic, but she's laughing because she knows this is a good omen, a sign from the heavens that her luck has turned for the better. Any moment now, she thinks, Providence will sweep toward her with a flap of its giant wings, land on her shoulder and transform her life once upon a time in a land of miracles. When she looks down again, she's inches away from the shiny bumper of a car. A dark, angry man in a chauffeur's cap and uniform is leaning out the window and yelling that she should look where she's going, get herself killed under someone else's car if she wants. Just don't mess up his tires. He doesn't frighten the girl at all. From where she's standing, she can see her own image reflected in the tinted black windshield, see the flowers that have been caught in her hair, in the folds of her skirts, on top of her books that lie around her feet. The driver is still livid. Hurry up and get off the road. You're holding up the boss. People have work to do. But instead of moving out of the way, the girl leans closer to the car, peers through the glass at the passenger in the back seat. She's bought the entire lane now, and cars are honking from every direction, but she takes her time picking up her books. God damn it, girl, you're just a kid. You have no business causing a nuisance for people bigger than yourself. Don't you know how to behave and sit with civilized society? The driver yells again, but the answer is obvious. This is what my father sees as my mother stands before him that early spring morning in the city of my dreams. He sees a girl of limited means and abundant spirit. Of all the stories I will tell about my mother, this is the one I cherish most I like to see her at the point of inception, the moment that would set the course for all our lives and all the stories that followed. And though I always know the end, even before I have said the first word, I like the possibility, the promise inherent in each new telling of a different finish. So this is the opening. Do we have time to read more or should we take questions? You guys vote? I'd like more. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you. That's nice. All right. So the Iranian Jews used to all be poor, incredibly poor. Everybody lived in ghettos. We weren't allowed to leave the ghetto on rainy days because the rain would wash the impurity off of our bodies and onto Muslims. We weren't allowed to go to school and learn any language outside of Hebrew because we were told that we're not Iranians. And we've been there 2,500 years. And there were massacres and pogroms where entire communities were wiped out. There's a city, Isfahan, in Iran, where there is the ghetto and then there is an underground ghetto. There were these caves that people had built, and they used to live in these caves when there was an attack from the outside. These attacks were always directed by the clergy, by the local mullahs and Jews. You know, right now, sort of for Ahmadinejad, it's America and Israel that are the scapegoats. Back then, they had smaller targets. So it was just like the Jews or the Zoroastrians, the entire Zoroastrian, Almost the entire Zoroastrian population of Iran. And Zoroastrianism was the first religion in Iran, first local religion. The entire population had to escape to India because of the massacres. And they are the people that now, the Indians that are called Parsi, those are Iranian. Iranian Zoroastrians or the children of those guys, at any rate. So for 1400 years, we were all sort of. It was equal opportunity, poverty and illiteracy and so on. And then an amazing thing happened. The shah and his father gave the Jews equal rights and allowed us to live anywhere outside the ghettos, allowed us to go to school. And if you know any Iranians in this country or, you know, like the guy who started ebay, you know, I mean, the Iranians, he's not Jewish, actually, but many of us, it's incredible how much we accomplished given how little time we had to actually become educated and integrated into mainstream of society. But that was sort of the good news. The bad news was that with those opportunities, there were a lot of class divisions among the Jewish community. And so the girl in the mother in the book, the girl on the street, is straight out of the ghetto still, and her parents are terribly poor. Poor. And she has aspirations because this is Iran, when women are allowed to go to school and when women, we used to think, have a future. And so this is the best that it ever got for women in Iran and, you know, just like Afghanistan and Pakistan and so on. And so she thinks that now that she's met this guy who's very wealthy, this Iranian Jew who's very wealthy, that many doors will open to her if she marries him. And she marries him thinking she's 16 years old, thinking she's going to finish high school and actually have what she thinks of is going to be a career. And the part that I'll read here, which is, I think three pages, is this is right after the wedding. His family has been very unhappy with the fact that he picked this girl so beneath himself, so to speak. And as punishment, they've given him a house in sort of the slums of the house that was built before the war when that area was not a slum, but now has become part of the slums of southern Tehran. The irony of it is that she doesn't know that this is, for her. It's still a step up. And so she's celebrating this. From the street, all you can see is the red brick wall that surrounds the garden, a giant mulberry and persimmon tree, the giant mulberry and persimmon trees, and the top floor of the house, which rises higher than the wall. Inside are three bedrooms, a living room with a gold leaf painted ceiling, a dining room with a round balcony that overlooks the yard. There are porcelain tubs in the bathrooms, a fireplace in the kitchen, sunlight everywhere you look. All the doors, even the one leading into the kitchen, are made of etched and and mirrored glass. They reflect not only the inside of each room and the light from the windows, but also the images cast in the other doors, creating an endless echo of shapes and colors that go on for as far as the eye can see. Bahar walks through the house with her arms stretched out like wings, makes pirouettes under the skylight in the hallway, puts flowers on the mantelpiece and on the side tables next to her. And Omid's bed. She walks with Ruby, the maid who's married to Hassan Agha, the chauffeur, and who gives him more grief than any one person should have to endure to drugstore the newly opened market on Persepolis Avenue, where you can find the latest in imported American goods. She buys Revlon nail polish and a subscription to a pirated translation of Les Miserables, which will be delivered to June street in weekly installments by a young man with light blue eyes and a Turkish accent. She sets a table with new china and lace, wears high heels and a short dress, sits down with Omid for the first home cooked meal. They've been married a week. She tells him she can't wait to see her family members faces when they come to the house to visit, can't wait to tell her friends about her new life. Life when she goes back to school next fall, she says she's going to study hard and be a good wife. She's confident she'll get admitted to university, even though the entrance exam is designed to keep out all but the smartest and most hard working students. She says she'll make Omid proud. I don't know what you mean, he interrupts. I mean I'll do my best in every area, she explains enthusiastically. Basically I'll be a good wife, so our families will be proud of us. And I'll be a good student as well, she continues. He interrupts her again. He says there's no question of her going back to school or going to university. She's going to be his wife, stay at home, tend to her responsibilities, and do whatever it is that wives are supposed to do. He tells her he really has no intention of having her people come come to their house. They serve no purpose, he says, bring no social or economic ties that could be of use. The ghetto folk, that's all, and best left there. She's still smiling when he says this because she hasn't had time to interpret the hardness in his eyes. She hasn't seen what has been obvious from the start, and now she's stunned by what she hears, by the stern expression with which she utters those words. Words I'm going to say it once and only once. Open your ears and learn quickly. He goes back to eating his rice. She draws a breath from somewhere far away and mumbles, to her astonishment, I'm going to be a teacher. He keeps eating as if he hasn't heard her at all or heard something that doesn't merit an answer. I've always wanted to be a teacher. Just a It occurs to him that she may not be the kind of girl who's easily trained, who surrenders a fight. He thinks about the day he saw her on the street, how she had stood impervious before the driver and his barrage of insults. You're going to be my wife, he answers and hopes she'll understand the definition. She doesn't. I have to see my family. He frowns now and puts his fork down on his plate, wipes his lips with the napkin on his lap, and pushes his chair away from the table. You're my wife, he says. You'll make your own family. The finality in his voice makes her shudder. We're a modern couple, she says. We can do things differently. He looks at his watch and wonders how much longer this dinner should go on, when it will be proper for him to get up and go read the afternoon paper. In his study, he tells Bahar he has never thought about being part of a couple and isn't about to consider it now, or he wouldn't have selected a girl so different from himself in upbringing and background. He sees the devastation that his words have brought to Bahar and is surprised to find that he's moved by this. He wants to tell her it's going to be all right, things will work out one way or another, but he knows that would be a lie. She's in for a rude awakening, this girl who has never left south Tehran but who dreams of Caspian rain. For now he decides not to engage her in any more conversation, tells himself, what's the difference? He's already married her. She'll just have to learn the ways of civilized folk and become a person he can take with him to parties. But she won't give up. I thought I'd finish school, she says, and her obstinacy makes him shudder. I promised myself I'd become somebody. He glares at her. As moved as he is by her vulnerability, Omid can also feel his own helplessness grow larger. I want to become someone, she says again, and it is more than he's going to put up with. You've done that, he says. I? By marrying me. She sits at the table with her red painted nails and her dark eyelashes. She's staring at the roses she has cut that afternoon, thinking about the meaning of what has just happened, and already you can see the light fading in her eyes. I think this is something that we miss. Even when it looks like things are going well for women in more traditional societies, even under the best of circumstances, there are limitations imposed on them that are pretty inconceivable in this day and age in the West. That part is more or less understandable. The part that is not is that the men, too, in many ways are prisoner to those same limitations. This marriage is not going to work out. And the family is not going to be a happy family, not only because she's unhappy, but also because he feels like he has to enforce certain rules. These are the rules. This is what you do. And just. It's really ironic. I came in this morning, and on the way from Oakland Airport into la, my cab driver was an Afghani who's been here for 27 years. He came as a police political refugee. And so he heard me talk on the phone. Farsi, and they speak Farsi. So he started talking to me, and I said to him, well, did anybody like the Taliban in Afghanistan? And he says the strangest thing. I mean, his daughters have been raised here and all of that. He says, you know what it is? It's not that you don't like him, but like what they did with the women, you know, sending him to stay inside and not go to school and not go to the doctor and all of that. That was the only option there was because the people who were running the country before that were all raping the women. All these young girls were getting raped or kidnapped and taken into, like, prostitution gangs and so on. And so this was really the better option. And so I said, yeah, but couldn't they protect the women without imposing all the burqa and all of that on them? And he who's been here for 27 years then says, but, you know, that's what's supposed to be done. Nobody's happy about it, but that's how we have to do it. Because it's a Muslim country, right? So men, too, in many ways are trapped. I think that often, often lives become spoiled because we feel we have to play into or live up to certain expectations, certain responsibilities, just like he does in this. It's not that he particularly cares if his wife goes to school or not, but that's not done, and so he'll never let her do that. Anyway, there's my little philosophy of life lesson, and thank you so much. And if you want to talk about stuff, please do. I'd love to talk to you. Oh, thanks. I was wondering if there was a sense of an Iranian diaspora, the same way that we have a feeling of a Jewish diaspora. It's very interesting. There is a sense of an Iranian diaspora, but it's very divided. Iranian Muslims feel very abandoned by their own. By their own people. For the Iranian Jews who came here and Iranian Christians, mostly Armenians, we quickly banded together, and there was quickly all kinds of social organizations and religious organizations, and we've developed this whole identity in Many different parts of the country that is particularly Iranian Jewish. Right. But Muslims have done extremely well and adapted very well, but not necessarily as a group. And so you talk about diaspora as a more or less unified entity, or do you mean just like exiles altogether? I don't know. A sense of identity, I guess. Yeah, that sense of identity, yes. I mean, I think a manifestation of that is the countless radio and television, Farsi language radio and television stations that are active in this country that broadcast 247 entirely in Farsi. And you know, here's the thing that I'm particularly thrilled about. The mullahs came in and outlawed any kind of Western music, anything other than traditional Iranian music, which is kind of like older version of elevation music, and any kind of films that had anybody in it that, you know, if you weren't married to each other, nobody could touch on all of that. And that in Iran, it kind of killed the arts, any kind of writing. Right. There were all these limitations. And you thought, well, the arts are going to suffocate in Iran. But what happened is that all the exiles out here started producing Iranian music, but the way we wanted to and create films. And there are all these books and journals and magazines, all of them in Farsi, that get exported back to Iran from the United States. And the mullahs have done tried very hard to stop it, and they haven't been able to. And now with the websites, there's 10,000 Iranian websites and it's kind of like a free for all. You can do anything you want on it and you keep blocking once something else pops up. So, yeah, in that sense, there is an identity. And I think we definitely have won that battle. Thank you. Yeah, I don't know if I need a microscope.

So you were talking earlier on about mourning and Westerners mourning. And I'm just curious, in the Iranian Jewish community, how is it different? Because I know in the Jewish community you sit shiva for one week and that's supposed to be it. That's supposed to be your mourning period. And you're not supposed to, from what I understand, continue mourning. So can you explain a little bit about. About that difference and how it is.

Well, you know, what happened even for non Muslims in Iran is that we took on so many Muslim practices. And so the way, I mean, I'm not a Muslim scholar, so I can't tell you that this is in the Quran or not. But what we used to do was, first of all, you wore black for a year, you basically sat shiva for a year. You didn't even now, I mean, there are people in LA who do that. You didn't go anywhere where there was any kind of music or merriment or anything for at least a year. If it was your husband who died, you basically stayed in black, like the Greek Orthodox used to do or still do. And then the anniversary of that death is a huge thing that you observe, but, you know, the best manifestation of the tradition of mourning. And I think right now, I think this is the week. There's a whole month of Ramadan where Muslims fast every day, right? And fast all day. They eat before sun up, and then they eat after sundown for the whole month. And then within it, there is a week of what I've called in the book assassination days. These, you know, there was a big battle of Karbala, this is 2000 years ago, where the Sunnis basically massacred the Shiites. At the time, the division between Sunnis and Shiites started right after the death of the Prophet. And the war has always been over succession. The Shiites backed one person, the Sunnis backed another. In this battle, the Sunnis overwhelmed the Shiites. And the Shiites were very heroic and so on, but they lost. Okay? To this day, that entire week, the whole country shuts down. There are all these processions, people dressed entirely in black. And they have chains. Not just one. They're like heavy, heavy chains or these things that are like machetes, but round, right? And they walk through the streets. Christian Amanpour actually showed that on CNN a couple of weeks ago. It's the first time I've seen it on tv. They walk through the streets and they beat themselves up with these chains for hours at a time until they either pass out or they bleed too much every single year. And then they start. And then they. With their children, too. It's only boys, right? But their children, too. This is their morning death. That was thousands, centuries ago. And they bring their children and they beat the children up with these chains. If the child is too young and not strong and enough to beat himself up. And God help you if on that day, if you're a woman and you step a toe outside of the house, that's it. I mean, you'll be in pieces. And I remember being a child in Tehran, where, you know, we were the most protected anywhere in the country because the Shah was there, the army was there, the military, police, and so on. And it was. People stayed in their home. We'd close the doors and we'd close the curtains. It was scary because the passion that they had. Could kind of spill over into any riots anytime. And that is sort of like the practice of mourning. It's pretty extreme. Yeah.

I'm actually from Minneapolis, and I didn't.

Oh, I'm going to Minneapolis next week.

And I didn't know about the history of America and the immigrants from the. So I'm just curious about any repercussions from, you know, like, consumerism is basically an icon of consumerism, you know.

Say that again. I didn't understand your question.

Just because the Mall of America represents.

Oh, the Mall of the Americas. Yeah. Oh, is there a backlash from the American community? They actually sold that and now are building a bigger one across the street. But. Okay. Has there been a backlash, you mean? You know, these guys are really interesting. The family, the founder, my grandmother's brother, was broke and hiding from his creditors in our house for many months because we had bankruptcy prisons, but we didn't have like, you know, chapter 11 kind of things. So if you didn't pay people, you'd go to jail. And it was hard hiding. And then he borrowed, this is like 40 years ago, 600American dollars back then, which is a lot of money, but not much from my father, and escapes Iran and went to Edmonton, Canada, because it was so cold. He figured none of the creditors are gonna chase him all the way over there. And from that he's built this. So you have to. To reckon with them. They're smart people, but one way that they've done all this is by staying very low, under the radar and very much to themselves. So that Fortune magazine once did an article with them, and the reporter was saying that to this day, in their business meetings, they only speak the language of the ghetto Jews of Kashan. Not even the ghettos each had their own dialect, and that's how they speak still to this day. So most people don't know that these guys are Iranian. Sort of your average person from Minneapolis doesn't know that the owners are Iranian. The company and everything sounds. I mean, is sort of like fronted by an American. And so I don't think they've had any sort of animosity or coldness from the American population.

So why did your grandmother, who was half.

Oh, you asked me the question in Paris, decide to marry your grandfather and move to Iran? She'd lived by herself since she was six years old in the First World War. Her father had gone off to war and never come back. And then the mother had been drafted to work in an ammunitions factory, and she had been left with the Neighbors to live with the neighbors. And the mother came back, and she didn't want to live with the neighbors. So basically she lived in the apartment where her parents had lived by herself, and the neighbors kind of just fed her. And so she said to us later on, because at some point, I and the other grandchildren said to her, well, you knew he has another wife. You knew he's not going to divorce this wife. You didn't speak for. You knew what kind of country Iran is. Why did you do this? So first thing she said was, well, I thought it's one hell of a way to see the Orient. But the longer answer was that she. She says when the bombings came in during the war, she'd be really scared. And she'd go to her father's study, and her father had had these maps of all these exotic places, and to make herself not be too scared, she used to look at these maps and kind of trace their borders and, well, this is, you know, this exotic country, and that's that. And kind of make herself forget her fear. And she thought that in spite of the fact that there are all these obstacles, that finally going to those places, that I kind of saved her when she was a child would be worth the risk that she's taken. Very shortly after she came to Iran, she realized that it was a big mistake and wanted to leave. But Iranian men do have this did, and not as much now, but I think still the very serious ones have this thing that if you don't want your wife, the woman who has sort of slept with you, to sleep with any other man, and so you can't divorce her, you can't let her go, because who knows what. What she's going to do. And then you lose your honor if your woman has given herself to another man. And so they wouldn't let her. They wouldn't let her leave. And women in Iran don't have their own passport. Didn't, and still don't. Your passport is a page within a husband, a father, a male relative's passport. And so without that, at the time, you couldn't even go from city to city without permission. So there was no way she could have left. She couldn't even leave Tehran. Yeah.

Thank you so much for sharing your personal history and reading from the book. I was wondering if you could talk about how you sort of supplement your memories and those of your family, because so much of your story is set in the 60s and 70s, and I imagine that your memories, you know, have changed over the years, you know, through the Decades of removal by being in the US or being in Switzerland. So how do you sort of supplement those memories by, do you read other, you know, historical interpretations to sort of.

Build up the era?

So it's not just, you know, romantic.

You know, it's a really strange thing to me. I think more than anyone, everything that's in that book, almost all of it in Caspian Reign, comes straight out of my own memories. There are scenes in there that I was actually present and watching that scene when I was. I was born in 1960, so. And I left Iran in 73, right? And since the book has come out, so many Iranians who were, you know, are 20 years, 30 years older than me have lived in Iran for the larger portion of their life who've read the book, ask me, it's exactly as it was. How did you remember it? Because they say, we don't remember. And then we realize, oh, my God, this is exactly how it was. The scene, the place, the way people talked and so on. And it's strange to me because if you ask me right now, what do you remember about Iran? Right? Not much. Not much at all. A lot of times, my sisters or my old friends will say, oh, don't you remember this person or that thing? No. Clueless. I have no idea, right? And then I sit down to write, and all of a sudden, only while I'm writing, it's crystal clear. I can see these places so very clearly. And I've thought for a long time that it's possible that, you know, in cooking how you do, like, a reduction, so you kind of boil the juices until just right, a thing is left. I thought maybe that's what it is. Maybe it's not the whole picture, but just like some pieces of that picture that I put together, and it looks whole on the page. But especially with this book, because the time period is more current, people tell me, like, such. Like, Sorrento Cafe, there's a thing in there where these people meet, right? And I was on an Iranian radio show last Wednesday night when the thing. The guys, the producer was Iranian, the host was Iranian, everybody was Iranian. And after the interview, the guy caught up with me and said, you know, I left Iran only four years ago, and I go back every year, and I want to tell you that Sorrento Cafe still looks exactly 30 years later as you describe it. The park across the street is still exactly as you describe it. I don't know how it happens, but I think your subconscious is so filled in your childhood that afterward, for years and years you can draw from. From it.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you, guys.