Persian Girls: A Memoir

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

Praise for
Persian Girls

“[A] lyrical and disturbing memoir.”
—Publishers Weekly

 

“[A] poignant, beautifully written memoir . . . a fine, profound book . . . Each scene has the shapely aura of a memory, hauled back from the deep by one telling detail. . . . [A] haunting and moving story.”
—
JOHN FREEMAN,
Times Union,
Albany, New York

 

“Iran again looms large on the world stage. Rhetoric conjures fear of radical Islam and flashbacks to the Ayatollah Khomeini—images that obscure Iran’s rich cultural history as Persia and ignore ordinary people torn between old and new, secular and sacred. Nahid Rachlin fills in the blanks.”

—KATHLEEN McCLAIN,
The Charlotte Observer

 

 

“Through the touching, tragic story of two sisters,
Persian Girls
unfolds the entire drama of modern Iran. It’s a beautiful, harrowing memoir of the cruelty of men toward women, and it paints the exotic scents and traditions of Tehran with the delicacy of a great novel. If you want to understand Iran, read Nahid Rachlin.”

—Matt BEYNON Rees, author of
The Collaborator of Bethlehem
and contributing editor,
Time

 

 

“In elegant, beguiling, supple prose, Nahid Rachlin has chronicled the traumas and triumphs of a Persian girl, fashioning for herself a persona that is at once global and quintessentially Persian.”

—Abbas MILANI, director, Hamid & Christina Moghadam Program
in Iranian Studies, Stanford University

 

 

“In
Persian Girls,
Nahid Rachlin tells her own story with sincerity—speaking for countless lives in many lands where survival is as exceptional as being buried under the dead weight of tradition is not.”

—SALAR ABDOH, author of
Opium
and
The Poet Game

“Riveting and beautifully observed,
Persian Girls
recounts Nahid Rachlin’s family epic with the same quietly mesmerizing power that makes her novels and short stories linger in the mind years after we’ve read the last page.”

—DONA MUNKER, coauthor of
Daughter of Persia

 

 

“Rachlin’s remarkable memoir sheds light on an intimate world that is at the center of the world’s stage. With a deft hand, she writes of a life so honestly that it has all the facets of a great novel.”—PATTY DANN, author of
Mermaids
and
The Baby Boat

NOVELS

 

 

 

 

 

SHORT STORIES

 

 

 

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First trade paperback edition 2007

Copyright © 2006 by Nahid Rachlin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned,
or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do
not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation
of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada

 

All photographs are courtesy of the author.

 

Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-00770-9

1. Rachlin, Nahid. 2. Iranian American authors--Biography. 3. Iranian American
women--Biography. 4. Women--Iran--Social conditions--20th century.
5. Iran--Politics and government--1941-1979. I. Title.
PS3568.A244Z
813’.54--dc22
[B]

 

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

I want to express my gratitude to Ashley Shelby, whose astute comments and amazing insights into this memoir made a great difference to the outcome. I thank Gary Morris for believing in the memoir. I thank Kat Kimball and Laura Ingman at Penguin for all their help and enthusiasm. I am grateful to my family and all my friends for allowing me to be open in writing it. Special thanks to my brother, Parviz, who was of great help at crucial times of my life.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a book of my memories, as I recall them, and what I was told when I was old enough to understand. I haven’t interviewed family members and friends to get their impressions of certain incidents in our lives. I have changed the names of a few people, institutions, and places for the sake of privacy. I have also made minor changes and compressed certain events and dates, whenever doing so did not compromise the essence of the truth of what happened. In order to tell the story as economically as possible, I have left out or glossed over some people whom I love, their kindness, their importance in my life. My apologies to all of them.

I
have images of Maryam doing her nightly rituals in her room adjacent to mine, the door open. She kneels by her prayer rug to touch her forehead to the
mohr.
The scent of rose water she sprayed on the prayer rug and on her chador fills the air. A large, illuminated Koran stands on a wooden table on one side of the living room. She combs her hair and weaves it into a thick braid. Then she extinguishes the burgundy paraffin lamp on the mantel and comes into my room. She lies next to me and sings a lullaby, in her soft, melodious voice.

On summer nights we sleep under a mosquito net on the roof and she tells me stories while I look at the bright stars and the moon above. In one story a golden ladder descends from the sky and you can climb on it and go to the moon. I wait for that to happen. Every night I expect it. When nothing happens she says, “Maybe at least you will dream about it.” Then I dream about it, more than once. In the dreams, I climb up the ladder until I reach the moon, touch it, then I wake.