Cry of the Peacock: A Novel (43 page)

I owe no less to my husband, Hamid, who came to

meet me for the first time on the grounds of the UCLA campus in the fall of 1980, and told me that I must give new life to the voices of all the men and women I had carried with me from the house on Shah Reza Street. He was young and handsome and brilliant. Like my mother peeking through the curtain on the day of her courtship, I saw Hamid and thought it was he or no one. From the moment I wrote the first word till the day I stopped working, he alone has made me endure. Among his many contributions to the book is its title.

I am also grateful to my teacher, John Rechy, who first saw the book in outline form, and has since worked with me on every line. He demanded structure where there was chaos, refinement where there was mediocrity, patience where there was despair. "In writing, as in life," he said, "you must try to achieve if only a moment of greatness."

I wish also to recognize the invaluable contribution of the late Dr. Habib Levy, Iran's foremost Jewish historian, whose life's work,
History of the Jews in Iran,
has served as a source for much of the actual history recorded in
Peacock.

But above all, my thanks go to the people, whose lives have become the stories in this book. I began with my own memories, and then asked questions. I spoke to hundreds of Iranians, Jews and Muslims, old and young. Through years of interviews and volumes of books, I became familiar with a history—albeit recent—that had been buried by the last of the "ghetto generation" as if to wipe away three thousand years of suffering. I learned that Iran is a nation of paradoxes and contradictions, that its people—Jew and Muslim alike—are victims most of all to the violence of nature, the cruelties of their gods, and the ruse of their own ignorance. But above all, I learned that the children of Iran are brave and strong—capable, each of them, of achieving "if only a moment of greatness."

In this, I believe, she will find her salvation.