 The San Francisco Public Library is pleased to present Open Books, Alternative Voices, a monthly literary series. This show presents Iranian-American women authors, a panel of authors reading from and discussing their work. Welcome Khosham Adid and Salam to all the Iranians here and to those who are going to have an opportunity that's quite rare to hear for extraordinary writers, contemporary women who have written in great depth about the history and the culture of Iran. We also would like to identify a group who will be outside. It's called the Women's Interfaith Dialogue on the Middle East and they have joined us and supported this evening as well. They have a table and they are here to support dialogue, the Women's Interfaith Dialogue between Muslims, Jews and Christians. The first author who I would like to introduce is Roxanne Farman-Farmayan. Roxanne Farman-Farmayan is co-author with her father of Blood and Oil under the Shah's Iran Random House, 1997, which was shortlisted for a Penn West Award and released in March 1999 in paperback by Modern Library, a graduate of Princeton University. She lived in Iran during the Khomeini Revolution during which time she founded the Iranian, an independent weekly news magazine. She then moved to Moscow where she worked as a reporter and photographer documenting the collapse of the communist system. Since her return to the United States in 1983 she has written for the London Times, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. Roxanne Farman-Farmayan lives in West Marin and is currently West Coast editor of Publishers Weekly. She's a contributing critic on KCSM's nationally broadcast PBS show Authors and Critics and is a regular book reviewer on K-R-O-N, NBC's affiliate Daybreak. Roxanne recently appeared in an anthology entitled Half and Half, Writers on Growing Up by Racial and Bicultural. Please welcome Roxanne Farman-Farmayan. Thank you. And what a pleasure it is to see such a turnout. This is a most propitious time to be speaking about Iran. Last February the Islamic Republic of Iran celebrated its 20th anniversary. 20 years ago Ayatollah Khomeini arrived in Tehran from Paris to a cheering crowd of 3 million, thought to be the largest gathering of people for one event in all of recorded history. Khomeini's arrival also marked the real beginning of the West's realization that Islamic fundamentalism was a powerful political force in the Middle East. Although of course it had been around for a long time, Saudi Arabia being a very good case in point. However when the Persians adopted Islamic fundamentalism as a form of constitutional government, it gave a legitimacy to the movement that has helped it speed and spread as a potent political force from Morocco to Pakistan and Turkey to Yemen. Strangely this very same spring marks another anniversary. Ten years ago the ailing Ayatollah Khomeini who was to die only a few months later issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book, Satanic Verses. A fatwa which still stands and which today carries a bounty of 2.8 million dollars. However the government of President Mohammed Khotami has today distanced itself from that fatwa and has established its own credibility to the point that just a few months ago the British government finally opened an embassy in Tehran. Even as we speak today, members of the Persian intellectual and academic communities are meeting in Cyprus along with Western thinkers to discuss what life should be like in the new millennium. Several have spoken publicly of the need to better balance religion and government and to more equitably engage different members of society, most particularly women as well as men. Today all of us are gathered here to speak about Iran as a mother country even as we make our homes and lives in the United States. We are here as five women to look at Iran's history as well as its fictions. We represent women of Iran even though we live lives that are Western. In our own ways we have interpreted the experience of being from two cultures of seeing each from two sides and of always being from somewhere else as well as from here. In blood and oil inside the Shah's Iran, which I wrote with my father Manu Chair, we had several goals. Perhaps the most important was to clarify for Americans why Iran has become the country it is today, why it has a government of Ayatollahs, why it has in the past so vehemently hated the West. We wanted to lift the veil from its mysteries, mysteries that have made Iran very inaccessible until very recently. Today Iran is open to the West much more so than it was in its recent past. Americans visit it. SF MoMA has taken several trips on tours to Iran. Friends of mine just got back from visiting it on their own and blessed their hearts they even brought me a memento of some of its dirt from its deserts. One of my main goals as I begin to work with my father was to fill in the gaps for my generation of Persians, not just for Americans, but for us who have left the country and do not really know it anymore. I had the chance to tap my father's memories, his knowledge of the culture and its habits, his pictures of the countryside that he carries around in his head. This became my gift to my new son who has never seen the Iran that I know, let alone the country that my father grew up in. In the midst of this, I came to terms with my place as a Persian-American. I never thought of myself as a real Persian. I speak the language badly, I didn't grow up there, I only spent vacations there, danced at its discos, lay on its beaches and so for a long time I thought of myself as an imposter. Even after spending the revolution in Tehran and starting up a news magazine that reported on the country as it went through its upheavals. But now with the finality of blood and oil, I feel I know some of the secrets of its past. I know about places that belong to certain people and phrases and verses that only a Persian can know and I feel that by knowing my father's life, it gave me an aspect of life of my own. Blood and oil is a thousand and one nights for today. I wrote it all in tales, which like the stories of Shahar-e-Zad follow the lives of clashing royal families and of scheming court ministers. It dabbles in romance and mystery and an underhanded multinational intrigue. Most significantly, blood and oil knits the simple cordon of love that ties together a man to his family. This is a chronicle about my father, a rake and an adventurer in his day, as well as of his family. When we think of Iran before the Ayatollahs, we think of the Shahs, Muhammad Reza Shah and his father Reza Shah-Pahlavi. But those two, which composed the Pahlavi dynasty, were on the throne in fact for only 50 years. Prior to that, the dynasty that preceded them was the Gajar dynasty, which was the dynasty of my father's family. And it ruled Iran since the 1770s, having unified the country basically about the same time that this country was undergoing its own revolution and becoming unified as well. The Gajars ruled for 125 years, and then was replaced by the Pahlavis. Reza Shah in fact was at the time a foot soldier in my grandfather's army. My grandfather, whose title was Farman Farma, had a harem with eight wives and 36 children. My father was his 13th child from his third wife. A Kurdish girl also of royal blood. My grandmother was the ficiest and best educated of his wives. When Reza Shah-Pahlavi banned the veil, she was so delighted that she insisted on getting a picture taken with her husband and forced my grandfather Farman Farma to buy a tie for the occasion. Farman Farma ran his harem with an iron hand. And one reason was that it was very vast. It had over 700 members in the household. But he also kept a tight reign on it because the Pahlavis now sat on the throne. Family connections, social status, even property he was concerned would no longer be legacies that he could really pass on to his children. Only education would protect them for the future, he thought. And so he sent every single one of his children, girls as well as boys, abroad for their educations. And protect those children it did. When they returned to Iran, they were the best educated clan in the country. One brother headed up the central bank. Another started the Chamber of Commerce. Another an architect built the Shah's Palace and the airport. Covering all bases, I even had an aunt that married the head of the Communist Party. My father went into the oil business. He served as the government's negotiator for oil against the powerful Anglo-Iranian oil company. And until his cousin, Mohamed Mossadegh, nationalized oil in 1951, at which time my father was forced to flee and went into exile in the United States. Luckily for me because that's when he met my mother at Columbia University. After Mossadegh was overthrown in a CIA coup, my father returned to Iran and served on the board of the National Iranian Oil Company. In 1959, he undertook what was perhaps one of the most important roles of his life and in the history of oil. While attending a conference in Cairo, he joined forces with the Venezuelan delegate and created OPEC. My father was a director of Iran's most powerful company and its greatest generator of income during the Shah's heyday. He attended the biggest party in the world, gathering at Persepolis to mark 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. He witnessed the uprisings that first put Khomeini's name on the streets of Tehran in 1963. And he knew such people as Nixon, De Gaulle, and Getty through his career. When the Shah fell, my father, along with the rest of his family, was forced to flee. The farm-on-farmayans were the only family that, as a group, were blacklisted by the Khomeini regime. And so, with a light suitcase in hand, he walked across the Kurdish border into Turkey in the dead of winter. And then, unlike so many who had gone before him and showed up like clockwork at the Istanbul airport, he disappeared. His escape is where the book begins. As a final note, I want to address the tumultuous relationship between my father and myself as we encountered the effort of trying to write a book together. When we began, we were not friends. He was the patriarch, the Persian aristocrat. I was the ambitious, career-oriented Western woman. And we clashed. We approached the work extremely gingerly. And yet, little by little, with the family always in the background supporting and encouraging us, we grew to respect each other, work together. It was hard. He didn't like my professionalism. He didn't like me pushing him to remember things. And he certainly didn't like telling me various details of his liaisons. But as time went on, I came to see a man who looked back honestly on his life and shared with me, his daughter, what he had gone through and experienced. We began to laugh together. And I responded to him because though the family had lived a great and flamboyant past, lived glamourously and met famous people, in the end, my father revealed what made him most human. The disappointments, the pleasures, the foibles that every person shares no matter what their background and nationality. And so today he and I share not just a book, but a friendship. Thank you. Thank you, Roxane. Gina Nahai. Gina Nahai was born in Iran and raised in Switzerland and Los Angeles. Her first novel, Cry of the Peacock, was published by Crown in 1991. It chronicled for the first time in any Western language the 3,000-year-old story of the Jewish people of Iran. Translated into six foreign languages, it received international critical acclaim and won the Los Angeles Arts Council Award for Fiction, nominated by Crown publishers for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It became a bestseller in a number of foreign countries. Gina's second work, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, has been a Los Angeles Times bestseller, including two weeks at number one, since it was released on March 20 by Harcourt Brace. It tells the story of an Iranian girl looking for her magical missing mother in Iran and in America. It has been selected by Barnes & Noble for their Discover series and by Borders for their original voices program. It is being translated into nine foreign languages. Gina has a BA and a master's in international relations. She's taught creative writing at the University of Southern California and has studied the politics of Iran for the United States Department of Defense. She lives in Los Angeles with her family, Gina Nahay. Thank you. Thank you guys for being here tonight. What I'd like to do is to tell you a little bit about the book first and how and why I wrote it, and then to read to you for exactly three minutes from the beginning of the book just to give you a flavor of what the story is like and what the rhythm of the book is like. Moonlight is a book of memories. I did many, many interviews to write for my first book, Cry of the Peacock. And then again for this one with people with Iranian emigres, mostly Jewish who had left Iran either before or after the revolution. And in writing this book as well as the first one, I heard people's voices and I tried to recreate their voices or at least to stay true to the emotions and the feelings that they evoked in me at the time that they were speaking with me and to really render that onto the page. Which doesn't mean that it's an autobiographical book. The main character, Roxanna, is a woman that... they're all based on real people. Is a woman who was born in the Jewish ghetto in Tehran and when she was five years old was pushed off the roof by her mother because she was believed to be a bad luck child. And the mother was so afraid of this that she, of the bad luck, the bad omen that this child was going to bring into the family that she actually took this incredibly drastic step. And from there on, Roxanna's story evolves first in the ghetto in Iran and then into Tehran in the city and then into Turkey and finally in America. What happened was that I was doing a lot of interviews for Cry of the Peacock. And through it I was hearing incredible escape stories just like Roxanna's father and many others of how people had left Iran and why. And the questions at some point began to surface about what are we doing in this country as Iranians. I myself left before the revolution. Didn't leave because of the revolution. But still I faced the same sorts of questions that many other immigrants to this country face. How much do we lose and gain when we go into a new place? How much do we try to hold on to our past? And specifically I think in the case of someone like myself who until I wrote about Iranian Jews there was nothing written about Iranian Jews in any western language. And for me the work was a process of discovery first finding out that much of the history of Iran that I had learned was fiction of the country itself because I had learned it in Iran and every Shah who came to power rewrote the history as they liked it. And also to find out that I really didn't know that much about my own background and my own people. After the book got published I realized that other Jews didn't know about their background and their people either. And so that was a process of revelation and from there hearing people's stories why they left Iran and how they came to America it occurred to me that perhaps what I am writing about in my own life is why did we leave after all? I mean Iran is an ancient country and Jews have been there for 3,000 years and endured many ups and downs in the history this is the first time that we have left the country in such a massive scale. Today there are more Jews just in Los Angeles than there are Iranian Jews than there are in all of Iran after 3,000 years. The answer that I came up with and I'm sure other Iranians will have their own individual answers is that for the first time in our history that vision, an ambition, a belief that there was something beyond Iran beyond what we had always known in our history that was worth pursuing and that's what's brought us here and that's what keeps us here. The section that I'm going to read is narrated by an 18 year old girl her name is Lily she has lived in the States since she was 6 years old she's been sent abroad to a Catholic boarding school in Pasadena and after the revolution the rest of her family has come out here and Lily hasn't seen all of these people for over a decade and all of a sudden she's faced with the same questions that I was faced with when I started researching this book. As I watch her now 393 pounds and gaining by the day her frame so vast she has not been able to pull it upright in more than two months or to fit through any doorway without first having to take the door off its hinges her breasts so stormy it makes the dogs bark all the way up and down the street where she now lives with her sister in Los Angeles and sets the piano in the neighbor's house playing mad tunes at odd hours of the night it is impossible to believe that my mother, Roxanna the angel was once a young woman with water color eyes and translucent skin that she could stop the world with her laughter and compel men my father among them would follow her across an entire city without knowing why they chased her or what they would do if ever she stopped and answered their calls that she had been so light and delicate so undisturbed by the rules of gravity and the drudgery of human existence she had grown wings one night when the darkness was the color of her dreams and flown into the star studded night of Iran that claimed her back then the entire city of Tehran had shaken with surprise at Roxanna's act my father who had loved her at the expense of all others went into life long morning and never emerged I who had been there behind her as she vanished into the sky spent the rest of my childhood waiting for Roxanna to come back legends abounded about her whereabouts and fate my friends who suspected her did and buried in the yard of our house on the avenue of faith blamed my father and his parents for her demise Roxanna's oldest sister, Miriam the moon who had raised her from childhood made it her mission in life to find her even against Roxanna's will Roxanna the angel had kept flying never once bothered by the pull of the earth or the sound of her loved ones calling her never stopping to look behind at the devastation she would cause through 13 years of absence traveling from one city to another till she had crossed Iran and all of Turkey living in unmarked houses and no-name streets where she was nothing more than an indigent woman with striking eyes and a languid slowly vanishing beauty and she would not have stopped or let any one of us find her were it not for the mysterious fluid that months earlier started to fill her body like a poisonous presence that oozed out of the corners of her eyes swelled her arms and legs till she had no more use of them and turned her once magical voice into a gurgling whisper and that in the end forced her to stop I was five years old when my mother left me 18 when she returned my aunt Miriam the moon tells me I must understand Roxana's departure as the fulfillment of a destiny she could never control that abandoning me was not Roxana's idea but the result of forces that had been set in motion for centuries before I was born she says that Roxana had been a runaway before she ever became a wife or a mother before she came into existence or was even conceived that is how the world really functions Miriam tells me in the east as well as the west human beings are nothing more than the instruments of a callous fate free will and conscious decisions are mere inventions of minds too feeble to accept the reality of our absurd existence and so she says I must forgive Roxana forgive the fact that she left me without a word of farewell that she heard me call her and never answered I must forgive her because leaving me and my father was harder on her than it could ever have been on the rest of us and I must do this Miriam insists purely on faith because even though she is back now lying here in Miriam the moon's spare bedroom on veteran avenue in west Los Angeles even though she looks at me with her tear filled eyes second with the knowledge of her own imminent death Roxana the angel refuses to utter a single word of explanation to me Miriam the moon tells me my mother's story Thank you Gina What a beautiful story Merci much again Suzanne Parry Suzanne was born in the United States in 1957 to an Iranian father and an American mother of Protestant and Jewish background she was six months old when her parents first took her to Tehran where they lived in the aristocratic household of her grandparents Suzanne's grandfather was a businessman and a devout Muslim during the boom decades under the Pahlavi monarchy before the 1979 revolution Suzanne's grandfather and his sons became wealthy and well known industrialists her parents continued to divide their time between Tehran and New York Suzanne has truly led a multicultural life she was raised in Iran and America with Islam and Judaism alongside the working class families of her maternal grandparents and the aristocratic life of Iran she developed a resilience to move between and among the cultures and to see them from the inside and the outside at the same time creating stories about such a rich world was irresistible as the daughter of an Iranian industrialist Suzanne was pampered and innocent forbidden to contemplate a career and expected to follow the strict rules of Persian womanhood while living the life of a Westerner it's a dichotomy not easily digested by a child the Islamic revolution changed everything in August of 1978 Suzanne saw Tehran for the last time within two years by 1981 Suzanne's extended family was forced to flee the Islamic regime and join the Iranian diaspora where they still remain all their properties were confiscated by the government their companies and factories nationalized in 1985 Suzanne married an Iranian man whom she met on that first trip to Tehran when she was six months old they have been best friends all their lives they live with their son in Northern California Suzanne has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master of science in print journalism she has been published in the Christian Science Monitor she worked for a year and the Boston Globe she began writing fiction in 1989 after attending the Squaw Valley Community Writers Conference in Northern California she has belonged to the San Francisco Writers Group originally headed by teacher Molly Giles and founded by authors Amy Tan and Audrey Ferber since 1989 Suzanne's Paris life since the revolution has not lacked variety or struggle and while she admits the road to adjust to a vastly different life has been arduous she has followed her chosen career the writing of The Fortune Catcher which took seven years is a key part of this odyssey of self-realization and maturation but most important it is the chance to remember, to dream and to tell the story of bringing together the many worlds of her life Suzanne Paris well after that introduction I may not have to say anything I can just read from the book but I will say something because I tend to talk a lot when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s I was two different people I had an Iranian father and an American mother we lived in Tena Fly, New Jersey and we went back and forth from there to Tehran and I was really two different people I was an Iranian girl when I was in Iran and when I was at home and a very American girl when I was at school and with my friends riding my bike around the neighborhood people didn't know anything about Iran people, if I mentioned Iran they didn't know what I was talking about if I said Persia then they sort of understood and thought of Errol Flynn and they wondered if I had been born in a tent and if my father drove a camel so that was the extent of it and I wished so much for people to understand what that other part of me was but I knew that also I was risking a lot by having them know about that part of me because it was so odd and my father had such a thick accent and swore at the skin and we had Sunday school on Sundays in my parents bed which was so we could learn about the Islamic laws and the five pillars of Islam and then in 1978-79 actually when the revolution occurred and the hostages were taken in 80 I got what I wished for and everybody knew about Iran but of course not the things I wanted them to know and at the time I was deciding on whether I would study journalism or not and of course it was very as my bio says very pampered and not expecting to have really much of a career because my father was against it I wanted to be a singer and my parents told me I would be disowned if I became a singer so I thought maybe writing might be a good idea so I became of course because of the revolution and because of what it did to my family I became very interested in politics I began to mature as a political person and also to mature as an emotional person and as a woman and not only as an Iranian woman but as an American woman because after the revolution as far as my father was concerned I should work so it's interesting how history gets rewritten that was of course we lost everything not entirely everything as many people have like Tara's family did as you'll hear but it was a very large emotional blow and I can only explain it by saying imagine if it were to happen to you and I think everybody can imagine that it happened in this country 200 years ago we had a civil war revolution a lot of people were displaced and if you want to know about the Iranian Revolution sometimes I say just read Gone with the Wind because it's the same thing only the accents are different so I wanted to write about my experiences as I grew older I wanted to write more and more I first thought journalism would be the best way to explain and be able to let people know what was happening in Iran and how it wasn't all about Islamic fundamentalism and that people were really trying and looking for democracy and freedom and many of the things that we all hope for but journalism was not really well I should be honest and say I really wasn't a very good journalist probably because I couldn't stick to the facts and if you can't stick to the facts you could probably work for some magazines but not for most so I realized that I wanted to tell history from a fiction point of view and I feel when I was writing this book The Fortune Catcher I felt very very tied to this rule that everything that I wrote about would be historically authentic but that the story and the characters would be able to allow people to understand more of the deep emotional and cultural aspects of this situation in Iran and so I wrote a book about the revolution it's also a love story it's also my love story to a great extent it's also about torture and about public stonings and about Israeli spies selling arms to the Iranian government during the Iran-Iraq war it is about the Iran-Iraq war if you read The Fortune Catcher you will read a story but you will read the story of many people escaping from Iran how they escaped but you will also get a sense of culture because I think no matter what happens politically Iranians have a strong, beautiful culture and now that I'm older and everybody knows about Iran I can be an Iranian-American which was not a term that we used back then and I can be not two people but one full person who just has so many multi-cultural things including my mother's side of family which is a whole other story but I'll save that for another time I'm going to read just a small section of the book it occurs later in the book when the main character Leila has escaped Iran and she has stopped in the south of France to visit her father and she's pregnant with her husband's child and her husband is presumably dead he was sent to fight in the Iran-Iraq war and she has escaped in a very unusual way but you'll have to read the book to find that out and these are some of her observations she is sitting on the wall on the Quazette which is the main drag in Khan south of France I looked down a long sidewalk at two elderly men strolling toward me I could tell by their hand gestures that they were Iranian no doubt discussing politics I pulled my collar up higher to hide most of my face and stared out to the sea until they passed back in August while Daria stayed behind one night I strolled along this very same area on the Quazette with some 20 of us who just had dinner at a small Italian bistro down the way we strolled in groups of two and three dressed in silk and suits inhaling the warm sea breeze telling jokes Auntie Vida's arm hooked on mine my father's cherry pipe tobacco drifting back to me and the children in our group playing tag around our skirts this is 1981 by the way next thing I knew someone had discovered a row of folding chairs propped up against the seawall perhaps left over from a hotel event and they began handing them out setting them up soon our group was seated in a wide circle as wide as the sidewalk the women sat with their legs delicately crossed their Chanel purses resting on their silk laps their diamond-studded earrings alert to kind ears sorry alert to kind and cruel gossip and the men fingered their ties patting their smooth hair lightly and laughing deeply at jokes about mollus it was proof that the Persian social circle could go anywhere that it could move over continents and oceans and countries from tent palaces to desert high rises to a European sidewalk and all the nuances of Persian etiquette were right there in that circle the over-prolitness the age hierarchy the sport of rivalry a whole culture its properties of parochialism imperiousness pride its endurance resourcefulness and heart all in a circle that could easily easily have been picked up and transported from an Iranian living room or garden flown across the earth and sat down there on the French Riviera pedestrians had to step into the street to walk around our circle and some threw us angry looks or shook their heads disapprovingly as they continued down the promenade it seemed I was the only one who noticed this I wasn't sitting I'd receded to the shadows near the seawall uncomfortable I couldn't help myself I was embarrassed this wasn't right I couldn't just pull chairs up street side and have an ethnic get-together it was tacky now suddenly sitting on that wall three months later I knew that what had really made me feel uncomfortable then was a striking glimpse of the Persian tomorrow as if the future were a whole pie and I'd been presented with a small slice on a plate in front of me there was the ethnic circle no longer vacationers jetsetting globetrotters doing something travelers don't do especially not travelers from the third world who know the importance of conforming in the civilized first world they were behaving as they would at home they couldn't help it they missed it they hated the exile and it felt good to be themselves but these were people who would never go back to Iran people whose lives had vaporized with the raising of a revolutionary fist they were going to have to start over even if it was the last thing they wanted to do yet for years to come I knew their voices would carry the near panic and denial of this truth that they'd become not just visitors but immigrants even as I heard about them so many of them moving their lives to Los Angeles where the weather is more like Tehran where the odor of smog is familiar and the dust of the desert feels not too far off and where already the elders complained that their children have forgotten the farsi words and that they didn't roll their Rs as easily as they used to even as I heard about this I knew that they still trusted that we would all go back and everything would be as it once was I couldn't be part of that I wanted to go home to America thank you thank you Susan for remembering the spirit of the people it was a beautiful passage Tara Bahrampur you can pronounce it for me Bahrampur? Bahrampur thank you at the height of the 1979 Islamic Revolution 11-year-old Tara flew out of Iran with her family and five suitcases after 15 years in America she became the first member of her family to return to Iran to see and to see again the title of her book traces three generations of an Iranian family from her grandfather a feudal lord with two wives to her father a free-spirited architect who marries an American pop singer to Bahrampur herself who grows up balanced precariously between two cultures and comes of age watching them clash on the nightly news Tara describes the exit of Iran of her childhood the exotic excuse me the exotic Iran of her childhood leading up to the revolution during which her family attends mass demonstrations and takes cover from gunshots echoing over their garden wall afterwards shell-shocked they struggle to rebuild their lives in the United States returning to post-revolution Iran Bahrampur attends secret cocktail parties where young Tehranese play out modern courtships she's detained by police for talking to foreigners and she visits her grandfather's lost feudal empire where traces of her family history survive in the crumbling fortresses and jagged mountains of central Iran a compelling and intimate portrait of a closed world on the verge of transformation the book to see and see again explores the complexity of bicultural immigrant experience as Bahrampur discovers new ways to look at her past and her present Tara Bahrampur was the fourth generation of her family to attend UC Berkeley a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism she has written for the New York Times magazine The Wall Street Journal The New Republic and Travel and Leisure she lives in New York City please welcome Tara Bahrampur pronounce it again for us okay this she's gonna re-pronounce her name correctly it's so beautiful I don't want four generations of Bahrampur it's actually it was the other side of my family it's Bahrampur can everyone hear my parents met at Berkeley and my father was the first generation of his family to go to college and my mother was the third in her family to go to Berkeley my mother's from LA and my father is from a small town in Iran where they really lived a feudal life until the 60s when my father had already left for the United States and at that point his father lost his empire in the land reforms and so it's a kind of similar story in a lot of ways to a lot of what we've been hearing but different in that my family was pretty apolitical and really meant to watch the revolution my parents were initially to stay and see what happened and whether the Shah stayed or not we were going to live there and we ended up after our schools had been closed for several months and the feeling in Iran became more menacing in the last months of the revolution we took a trip to LA and decided to wait out the revolution there and ended up staying so we growing up here I became very Americanized and I already spoke English I had gone to an international school in Iran I had an advantage over immigrants who were coming here and learning the language for the first time but it was also very difficult to leave Iran especially at the age that I was where it became this kind of dividing point of my childhood and magical, mythical, wonderful Iran and then junior high in America and everything so I grew up with this vision of this land that I couldn't go back to and the older I got it became more and more kind of dreamy and wonderful to the point where I really felt that I needed to go back and see if that was true so that not only just to reconnect with my life in Iran or if it was still a life in Iran or just memories but also to live in America and accept that and I think that for the 15 years that I was here I hadn't really accepted that I lived here and I had made all these promises to myself when I was 12 that well I won't live here any more years than I lived in Iran so that I'll still only be half and half depending to that part of my life so after a lot of apprehension and worrying I did go back to Iran five years ago and some of the apprehension was well founded I ended up going and having my American passport taken away immediately when I got to the airport and so my first few days in Iran I really didn't know if or how I was ever going to get out but after that the story becomes a lot less scary and a lot less like probably what a lot of Westerners had heard about Iran and becomes a lot more complex and the longer I was there the more I came to see Iran as a place where it's not a big scary place and yes there is an Islamic regime there that imposes restrictions and has been oppressive but it's so much more than that when I came back I started writing the book which is a memoir about growing up there coming here and then going back I've been back to Iran four times since the first time and each time I find more there and I find that it's becoming more and more open and more and more interesting and the more I kind of get to know it as a living place the better I like it and it's really helped me kind of come to terms with both places and with both sides of myself now that I have friends who live there and I go back and forth and they go back and forth and they work in interesting jobs and it's become more of a real land for me than it was when I was unable to go back so I think I should read a little bit from the book I don't want to leave some time for questions but I'll just read a short passage and let me can talk about other aspects of it I'm going to read a section from pretty near the end where I've been in Iran for a few months and I've been both in Tehran and also in the village where my family my father's family is from still has a farm there so this is the day that I'm leaving the village to go back to Tehran and then to leave Baba is my father and Ahrajan is my grandfather and there are other characters in here but I bent down and trailed my hand in the cold river letting my fingers sway like the roots of trees along the bank this was the river I had walked along as a child the river Baba had fished in the river Ahrajan's first wife had crossed on the Qajar Jeweled horse that carried her over the hill to her new life our own new lives Baba's and my own strayed far from this river but for those who stayed life retained a continuity that cannot be found anywhere else I can see it in their faces in the wonder-struck eyes of my great aunt when she finds the son of her childhood playmate in the pleased recognition in Ammi's eyes when she pins her Kurdish clothes on me in Layla's appreciative smile when she runs her hand up my thigh and tells me to marry Mehdi all this touching between women bothered Mama when she was in Iran she hated the way that after lunch the women would all go off and take naps together massaging each other's sore legs braiding each other's hair and smoothing on ointment afterwards she found those rituals intrusive especially when coupled with the sexual jokes and insinuations that passed between giggling married women jokes designed to be tantalizingly inscrutable to unmarried girls who might be listening but none of this bothers me I like the slightly body banter among the women in my family I like the touching it reminds me of the way I used to touch my friends and cousins before the sixth grader in America warned me not to once in America I forgot the pleasure of casually entwined fingers of arms linked together in friendship I strictly followed the rules of American adolescence and made it clear to my family that kissing me was no longer acceptable physicality became confined to romance and it was many years before I began to remember the comfort that comes with owning being owned by a large affectionate clan now back in it again I have the sense that it is not just me they are touching running her hand up my thigh Leila Hanum is also touching her own remembered self and that is part of her pleasure every girl is a version of the woman every woman a model for what the girl will someday be and at the end of the day when the sun has set and everyone has helped with the apple harvesting and the baking of the bread and the cooking of dinner the candlelight flickers over the faces and the differences are smoothed away if I were to stay here I would probably not be only partly satisfied I would always feel I belonged I would always feel glad to run into those old ladies who remembered the child my father was but being away from America I might also start to feel more trapped I might become impatient with the old ladies talk of marriages and deaths and old property squabbles and start missing the other kind of old lady the book reading, hiking and swimming old lady that I imagine my mother will be and that I want to be too an old lady who might live far from Iran but would bring her grandchildren back here to discover the places from their past that don't change no matter who comes or goes 50 years from now they would find the same cool river and the same smell of mountain grass they would find a row of white poplars glowing in the sunset and a husband and wife who laughed as they grabbed at each other under the cows and inside the house a fire in the grate a table laden with fresh cutlets and yogurt and a basket full of mint from a rained on garden thank you Tara that was beautiful we have a few minutes for questions and Daphne will help us to bring you the microphone if you would like to ask any of our author's questions you have an opportunity to instead of questions okay alright we have a few minutes amongst ourselves do we have anything to say can we talk about our hairdos well I have a question I have a question I'm sure some of you may know some of you may not know that the history of Iran and the history of the Jews is absolutely, sacredly intertwined and the fact that Gina Nahai has written about this 3000 year old history and the contribution obviously she's written fiction but I would love to hear from these two women about the Jewish tradition and contributions to the ancient Persian culture as I understand it the Jews from the first temple they came to Iran under King Nebuchadnezzar so they were in Babylon and then Cyrus the Great who issued a declaration to mend nations welcomed the Jews to either return and rebuild the second temple which eventually the next generation did I think under Nehemiah he made the request or they could stay and come to the Persian Empire where many went and made 3000 years of contributions to the deep culture and history of this ancient country Persia so if you'd speak maybe to the point of the contribution of the Jews Persian Jews particularly Iranian Jews did many things that one would not consider typical of Jews anywhere you don't think of Jews as great fighters or warriors necessarily but at the time of the Persian Empire the Jews were such strong warriors that they were actually posted on the borders to fight off invading armies and later on they went into farming Iranian Jews under the Persian Empire lived in freedom they were considered second class citizens but only in the sense that they had to pay special taxes as did all other minorities other than Zoroastrians and they could not hold official government posts but other than that even through the advent of Islam Iran was ruled by Islam for many many centuries before it became a Shiite country Islam is divided into two main sects Shiites and Sunnis and throughout the reign of the Arab Empire and the Ottoman Empire Iranian Jews lived in freedom and prospered there were many poets many writers artists and artisans who really did influence and helped shape the culture of the country overall with the advent of Islam the Jews were forced the advent of Shiism in Iran and the idea one of the basic tenets of Shiism is that anyone who is not a believer a Shiite is an infidel and becomes automatically untouchable and with the advent of Shiism the Jews were forced into ghettos and they followed 700 years of massive oppression until the rule of the Pahlavi's where they were once again allowed out of the ghettos, allowed to go to school to hold jobs to freely mingle with Muslims Iran is over 90% Shiites and the religious minorities are small pockets but in the case of the Jews these pockets were all over the country in pretty much all of the big cities and in many many other provinces one thing that's very interesting that most people really don't know about is sure you've all heard about Kurds there are tribes of Kurdish Jews all of these people are Jews they are really the forgotten people they have a language that is becoming extinct with this people of my age Kurds of my age is the last generation who speaks that language and so on and so forth maybe Susan can learn something new about that well I'm not Jewish on my Iranian side I'm Jewish on my American side my grandfather was a Polish Jew which technically my Jewish law doesn't make me Jewish and technically by Islamic law if your father grandfather is Muslim then you're Muslim so I must be doubly Muslim unfortunately would like to be a little bit Jewish too I did spend a great deal of my childhood with my the Jewish side of my family we were living in New York and so were they and so I spent a great deal of time with them and I grew up understanding a lot about Jewish culture one thing that I was told and this also happens to one of the main to the main character in my book when I was very young by my father that this was not something I would discuss with my Iranian side of the family and that his father and his mother and the rest of his brothers and the rest of the extended family had no idea that my mother was part Jewish and they accepted the fact that she had grown up perhaps Protestant because her mother was Scottish Protestant from Scotland and then she converted to Islam when she married my father she grew up in the Bronx this is so complicated and she grew up in the Bronx at a time when being multicultural was being really nothing at all I guess I think her situation as a multicultural person or a bicultural person or a bi-religious person was much more difficult than mine ever has been or that my children will ever be for our children and she really grew up hiding both sides of herself hiding her Jewishness from her Christian friends and hiding her Christianity or not really hiding the Jewish side knew that her mother was Protestant but they didn't approve and she felt really like an outsider all of her life and did not espouse to any religion so my father when he married my mother my mother was happy to say Muhammad and Rasulallah which makes you Muslim in the mosque so she said that she learned that and she said it and she thereby without knowing it entered into a very devout Muslim family and learned how to wear a Chador when she was in Iran actually in front of my grandfather but never revealed that she was Jewish on me and I never knew any Iranian Jews when I lived in Iran I didn't know about Iranian Jews until I came until after the revolution and I'm very interested in it and I think it's something that people don't talk about Muslims don't talk about it that much well now that we've healed two nations that no one realized were so plexily intertwined will continue the mending the scale of question the scale of economies Roxanne comes from the Gajar dynasty which as a kingly dynasty was tremendously wealthy and was also tremendous contributors historically to the literature the architecture the art and many of the principles of grandeur of Iran so we could say that she's the princess and since since my relatives were the Bakhtiar nomads we exceeded to the authorities of the princesses but I think it might be interesting to hear from you Roxanne because truly having come from such an aristocratic kingly family how you have found that to be accepted in contemporary times that's an interesting question and I want to also refer a little bit to something that Susan was saying about cultural bi-culturalism and I think the two questions are in fact intertwined I'm in effect almost an opposite mirror to what Tara was talking about my father being the kingly one and my mother was from an immigrant family although quite well educated she was born a Mormon so I think of myself as coming from the M&M's both the Muslim and the Mormons and in my essay in half and half the writing on bi-cultural and bi-racialism it's one of the things that I take up because it's so interesting how religion and culture intertwine and coming from Utah I kind of feel as though I'm coming from the Iran of the United States I mean strange things happen in Utah and the religion is not one that people really relate to if you say that you're from there and most Americans sort of raise their eyebrows and say well to themselves can we maybe talk about something else and worry that I'm going to suddenly try to convert them so it's a funny place to be from and yet oddly enough the two look exactly like Tehran and Salt Lake are mirror images of each other the skiing in both is great they both have salt lakes I mean I can't tell you it goes on and on so I sort of feel as though I have the two sides very contrasted and as a result my whole Persian family and there's so many of us I mean I always feel as though I'm on my own you're doomed to meet more that they're all the blue-blooded and you know there's this whole debate in the family well do we call ourselves Prince or Princess blah blah blah and you know this was a debate that goes right down to the cover of the book I mean my father it throughout the book is referred to as Prince Manu Chair and I'm referred to as Roxanne so you think what happened to the title generation to the next and I think that's you know part of all of the marvelous and yet constantly challenging roots that were from coming from two different cultures the values that people put at the various levels of society the values of education I mean here in my mother's generation the educated were in many cases the aristocrats I mean that's now it's become much more common in this country to be educated but it really wasn't at the time of before you know between the two wars and those that put themselves through university and got master's degrees really were the elite of this country in many ways and so it's always so interesting and it's so bring it's marvellously humiliating in some way to go back to one's roots and think how do they mesh and what do they teach you and let's not put on airs for all the wrong reasons of course there's never a good reason to put on airs but for the reasons that one thinks one has a right to and I think each one of these efforts that we make and Tara I think you probably have a lot to add to this too when you're writing something down is when you really have to come face to face with your own assumptions and your own demons and I in working with my father in our book I sort of think of it people ask us well how much is him and how much is you and I sort of say well it's his life and his story and my story and my pen in the sense that we sort of told the same story but it's really his his book but my soul is in it as well and I think that's really you know part of the coming to terms with what and I think fiction is the same any kind of writing you're coming to terms with who you are and saying okay what is the legacy I want to leave on the paper what is the legacy I want to leave to my own children in a way. Thank you Tara the legacy also of Iran is so much involved with its geography it's composed of the indomitable Zagros mountains which are dividing between Iran and Iraq it's primarily composed of five major tribes over the centuries since ancient times and since your family were land owners in central Iran it really places you in a very different geographic area and coming from a very different point of view of course ancient Iran is much Iran today looks much like it did during biblical times so in that sense how would you say that the landscape influenced perhaps the stories from your family your four generations well it's interesting what happened to my family because they really are villagers very close by like my grandmother and grandfather both were raised in a village that was very much like what the villages had been like for thousands of years and within their lifetimes everything got kind of turned on its head and they ended up partly through Reza Shah's we have the same story with my grandmother running out as soon as she heard that the veil had been abolished and ripping hers off and going for a walk in her European suit and having a picnic with her friend in the park and no man in the town had ever seen anybody do that she was not well educated but simply very eager to be fashionable and to be westernized and to be modern and so from some instinct there she was the one who brought the family to Tehran and who really just harassed my grandfather so much to move to the big city that he finally gave up and did and that's why I am here today um and so what happened was they came to the city when they were still landowners and they had money but they didn't have the education or the culture or the connections that most families did who sent their sons to the states in those days and so my father kind of skipped a couple generations and I think that the way that that influenced my book is that maybe my two sides are much more extremely separated from each other because my mother is from West LA and was a singer and went to Berkeley and kind of was in the baby boom generation of hippies and she hates me to say that but um and then um my father kind of went along into that himself he was 18 when he came here and very open minded not only for an Iranian man but I think in general so to have that on one side and then to have on the other side these very very old traditional values that the rest of my father's family still was very attached to to the point where I couldn't tell any of them that I had a boyfriend when I was growing up here even the ones who had moved here as a kid I used to hear stories about jins and thieves and demons who lived in corners of the house where and it was interesting to kind of think about well how did my parents deal with that and how did I deal with that because I remember very well knowing that my parents just didn't believe in that nonsense at all but also having all the other adults kind of half believing in it and warning about how you can't have you have to sleep with metal under your bed or the bird headed woman will come and steal your liver very well I think that's from the village and I think that a lot of Iran is surprisingly very traditional still and there's a big contrast still between Tehran where most of us come from and most of us go back to when we go and the rest of Iran which is very much rooted in these traditions that we think about Iran I think a lot of what's been presented here has been a kind of more radical Islam which doesn't really attach itself to either of those and I don't believe I think that the people in the village are much less political and much more kind of open in strange ways to different things that don't have much to do with the government now or the government that took over after the revolution and then there are also educated Iranians who have different points of view there are more liberal Iranians there and I think that now in the last couple of years they've started to have much more of a voice in Iran and it's become a really interesting place Well I'd like for all of us to hold hands here on the stage and you can too with us because we as sisters from villages and from kings palaces we will have some questions hope that you will have also seen that you can mend and heal cultures because we're all products of two different cultures the east and the west and we'd like to bring you the best of both and I think their books have done that so thank you we have some thank you we have some time for questions and Daphne will help us with the microphone you all really reflect the beauty of integration and have brought so much together and it's wonderful to see because that's the only way we're ever going to know peace I just wanted to ask you in terms of religion have you been able to blend the teachings of Islam with the Judeo-Christian tradition have those come together for you in a comfortable way can you be both since I'm the most opinionated I have an unpleasant feeling about organized religion and I think that happened when the revolution happened before that my mother is non-religious because of her own background and because of the racism she encountered growing up being both Christian and Jewish and my father my grandfather was a very devout Muslim he studied to be a Mullah and I grew up with Islam around me but my father was always very open-minded and we always discussed our doubts about religion and about God and for that I'm thankful because when the revolution happened I felt that organized religion was not for me either I feel it's important for my child my son to understand the Muslim religion to understand the Christian religion the Jewish religion, Buddhism everything that I can expose him to and if he chooses to believe in God and to believe in the kind of God that Islam offers him or Judaism offers him or Christianity then that's his choice but it's my job to expose him to all things but I haven't seen that organized religion has done much for us we might have other points of view I'm sure we should hand I have to agree about not feeling very pro-organized religion you see the crowds pouring into the streets and revolution tearing up a city and a country and it does make give one pause as to the power unleashed by personalities governing the choices of organized religion I also once again to talk about how my two parents somehow saw a similarity in perspective an answer when my mother first met my father in New York after some time he invited her to his house his apartment for tea and going into the powder room at one point she happened to see a rather large picture of Rigam Young in bed with his various wives on both sides and she gave a cry going my God what is the leader of the Latter-day Saints sitting on your wall and he said well it reminds me of my father and so in that sense let's say they started off with similar perspective although I don't think that either although my father has had of course formally divorcing them as he goes but several wives and I still think he runs them like a harem you know he keeps in touch with them all and they're great friends and that's sort of the way his perspective has operated neither of them are very religious and I think that comes from coming from very strong religions that perhaps did not give them the tools to deal with the cultures that they chose to start learning about and travelling in as they went through their lives my mother spent quite a bit of time in the Middle East before she met my father and my father spent a lot of time in the west and I don't think the very rigid religions they came from served them very well and they are governed by an inner spirituality that I think of as being one of the real definitions of God or you know that inner spirit but in terms of their upbringing of me certainly it's been what you aspire for your son and what I aspire for mine exposure to the point where I'm not very religious either thank you another question I had a question for Teran regarding other sides of sensuality and sexuality among Persian Americans there hasn't been much of a taboo about different modes or styles of heterosexual expression in Iran or here but among questions of homosexuality lesbianism, bisexuality San Francisco's one of the places where as early as 92 and 93 there was a women's circle which was a lesbian group a few men would go but I was wondering how you've seen in the last say 10 or 15 years a change in the opening of other kinds of sexualities among Persian Americans knowing that my friends who are lesbians go and drag when they go back to Iran do they really I hadn't heard anything so you mean people here or people in Iran especially here how you've seen worries opening up in the United States of diversity that way but also in Iran if you know that people have different techniques for maintaining the lifestyles they want to at the same time that they might have to hide it when they're back home I think that here it's probably like for any group a generational thing where kind of the later you're growing up the more you're going to have exposure and probably feel more comfortable I'm not really an expert on the subject but I can say that in Iran I have heard of homosexual men and that there is actually a park in Tehran where people kind of know that it's like a meeting place and it's also been a factor in Iranian society for a long time not a declared one so much but it has been there lesbianism I have never heard about in Iran discussed as such I think it's more kind of like what I was reading about there is a lot of sensuality between women and I think between men too which you know you probably have to talk to men about but I'm speaking for people who are heterosexual in the fact that they do marry which most people in Iran do and that's I think a very special structure in Iran that makes it very different than here where in Iran everybody is expected to marry and most people do so whether they're homosexual or not or whether they have sensual or sexual or any kind of relationship with someone of the same sex it's usually done within the structure of being married to someone of the opposite sex and I don't know if anyone has anything to add I have something to add to that but this earlier perhaps we haven't heard about lesbianism or so much homosexuality in Iran but it's existed forever and it's just the term was never there the harems were there sometimes 300 women in a harem and one man that they could sleep with even if he was active every night he would take a whole year for the rotation your number to come and so within the harems it's well documented not just in Iran but also in Turkey that women had sexual relations with one another and for the men there was homosexuality except that unfortunately again it wasn't termed that if you were let's say the dominant male then you weren't gay but if you were the that made you the homosexual and so the definitions were different and I think during the Shah's reign and with westernization a lot of homosexuals did actually come out and live openly not as many as you would see in San Francisco I would venture but many and now again I think what's happened is that they have gone back into the houses into the Andarun again into the inside of the house but it goes on and I think Gina reminded me of Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights has a lot of little incidents that point to that to what you're saying the other thing you have to remember is most of these women got married at age 9 and 10 and by 16 you were an old maid already so how much time did they have to actually decide which side of the closet they were on we're actually out of time for question and answers I appreciate you all coming Stacy's is outside waiting patiently to sell you books and all the authors will be outside to sign and talk with you further thank you all