My Prison, My Home

2. AN IRANIAN CHILDHOOD

I WAS BORN MARCH 3, 1940, in Tehran. My mother is Viennese and my father is from Kerman, in eastern Iran. Father came from an old established landed family, many of whose members also served in the government. My paternal great-grandfather, Vakil ol-Molk-e-Dovvom, was the governor of Kerman in the 1870s, and my grandfather Raf’at Dowleh was vice governor of the province before becoming a member of parliament. My paternal grandmother came from a clerical family; her brother was the highest-ranking cleric in Kerman. On the European side, my maternal grandfather, who died in World War I, owned a hotel in Marienbad, in Czechoslovakia, and my mother’s older brother was a cloth merchant in Prague.

For the first six years of my life I lived in Karaj, twenty-five miles from Tehran, where my father was a professor of botany at the College of Agriculture.

My father couldn’t have chosen a better place than Karaj to ease his Austrian bride into Iran, which in the 1930s remained traditional and offered few amenities. The college was a small, closed community, with a river and beautifully landscaped wooded areas. The faculty lived either in two-story houses or bungalows separated by hedges. In the summer, the gardeners sprinkled water over the college’s unpaved streets to help settle the dust and cool the air.

By the time I was born, Mother had spent two years in Iran. She had thrown herself wholeheartedly into the culture and customs of her adopted country. But she ran a European household, and we spoke German at home and followed European customs. The stories she told were of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. I learned Persian stories from my nanny, who doubled as cook and housekeeper.

I loved the garden for its small streams, square ponds, flower beds, rose gardens and old trees, especially the catalpa, poplar, pine, and plane trees. With my nanny in tow, I would play hopscotch in the walkways of the garden and games of hide-and-seek with other children. This was paradise, I thought; but every time I said as much to my nanny, she would scold me, take me by the hand, and make me rinse my mouth to wash away my “blasphemous” words.

It didn’t take long for my outgoing mother to make friends with a number of the professors and their families. The members of the faculty were mostly European-educated and could converse with her in German or in French. Mother had an affinity for those who spoke her native language.

The Schricker family, headed by Hans Shricker, an Austrian forestry specialist, lived next door to us and their eldest son, Adalbert, married my father’s sister, Touran. Mother had lost both her parents at a relatively young age and was raised by her sisters in Vienna. The Schrickers became her surrogate parents. Mr. Schricker, a skilled carpenter, built a bassinet when my mother was pregnant with me, and once I was born, Mrs. Schricker showed Mother how to bathe a newborn, and how to diaper and dress me. Under Mrs. Schricker’s tutelage, Mother sewed and knitted clothes for me, since ready-made children’s clothing was a rarity in those days. Mrs. Schricker—warm, loving, practical, and down-to-earth—eased the pain of living away from home.

Unlike traditional Persian homes, our garden didn’t have a wall around it, but pine trees served to shield it from the street. We had a large living room and a dining room, several bedrooms, and a bathroom with a bathtub and a Persian-style toilet, basically a basin sunk in the floor.

In the evenings Mother and Father would sit in the living room and listen to the radio, while I would play in a corner with my toys. My parents’ friends, especially the Schrickers, would come over to listen to the European news broadcasts. Hitler had invaded Russia in June 1941, and one flank of the German’s three-pronged attack was aimed at the oilfields of the Caucasus on Iran’s border. In Karaj they all worried that the German army would overrun the Caucasus and advance into Iran.

The Allies were already concerned about German influence in Iran. Once Hitler invaded Russia, they desperately needed Iran’s overland routes to supply the hard-pressed Russian army. Unable to persuade a proud and stubborn Reza Shah—the military officer who seized power in 1921, sent the Qajar dynasty packing, and founded a new dynasty in 1925—to abandon Iran’s state of neutrality and join the Allied cause, Russia and Britain invaded Iran in August 1941, the Russians from the north, the British from the south. When Russian troops appeared at Karaj, Father remained at his teaching post in the College of Agriculture, but he sent Mother and me to Tehran, to my grandparents’ house. I was happy to be reunited with my older stepbrother, Siamack, who was going to school in Tehran and already living with my grandmother.

MY GRANDPARENTS

By the time I was born, my grandparents were living near the University of Tehran. They had moved to Tehran from Kerman when my grandfather was elected to parliament.

My grandmother’s home was another world, utterly different from our European household, where we spoke German, followed strict rules, sat around the table to have our meals, and ate Austrian food—schnitzel, boiled meat, soup, roast potatoes, and creamed spinach. Grandmother—Khanum Jan as we called her—ran a traditional Persian household. While my grandfather, who passed away just four years later, when I was five, was no longer the wealthy man he had been (his extensive land holdings had been seized under the previous reign), there was a great deal of coming and going, with visitors from their hometown constantly bringing the best dates and Kerman’s distinctive sweets and pastries. At any given time, the cook would prepare meals for ten or more people. My favorite place was the kitchen, which was dark and smoky from the woodstove, and where the cook would often slip me a spoonful of white rice from the cooking pot. I loved the rice, the aash, a thick soup made of greens; the white cheese and walnuts, yogurt, and the fresh sangak flat bread from the corner bakery that came with every meal.

At home, Mother had been so worried we would get typhoid she insisted on cooking all the fruits and vegetables. At my grandparents’, I was free from all the don’ts I heard at home. We ate sitting crossedlegged around a rectangular tablecloth spread on the floor. Mother sat on a chair at a small table set up just for her.

The house had a large garden with a pond where the household, including my grandmother, made their ablutions before each of the five daily prayers. The garden was divided into four large triangular flower beds. In each, a persimmon tree or a pomegranate tree stood among the flowers, rosebushes, and forsythias. The walls of the garden were thick with grapevines. In the fall, Grandmother would have a servant climb up a ladder and put a small sack around each cluster of grapes so that they would keep, even as the cold weather set in. Before the first frost she would have the sacks removed and the grapes picked. That way, she always had grapes to serve out of season.

The servants’ rooms and the outhouse were at the far end of the garden. There were two toilets in the house, but Grandmother was too old fashioned to let anyone use them. Peddlers came to my grandmother’s door every morning with donkey loads of melons, string beans, cucumbers, and fruit. Then there was the itinerant purveyor of shahr-e farang, or “the wonders of Europe,” which consisted of a copper viewing box on four legs topped with minarets and bells. For a few rials, we could look into the darkened box and view moving images of exotic places and people. The shahr-e farang man offered a running commentary as the pictures galloped across the tiny screen. “Oh, see the queen of England majestically sitting on her throne, her crown on her head,” he would say in a singsong voice and in rhyming couplets. “Now see the fierce tiger of Africa and the lion, king of the jungle.”

In the winter, Grandmother would set up a traditional Persian korsi in her sitting room, which consisted of a low wooden table, measuring about four feet by four feet, placed over a charcoal brazier and covered with a large square quilt. Narrow mattresses were arranged around the quilt, and cushions were placed along the walls to lean against. On winter evenings, the family practically lived around the korsi, snuggling under the quilt to keep warm, eat, read, chat, play word games, recite poetry, and occasionally sleep. Grandmother always retired to her bed, but sometimes allowed the grandchildren to sleep under the korsi as a special treat. The servants had their own korsi, but it was off limits to the children.

Every Monday a mullah would come to the house and conduct a rowzeh-khani, a recital of religious martyrs’ tales. This was the only time we children were not allowed into the sitting room, when adult family members joined the mullah and the servants sat cross-legged by the entrance as he somberly recited the heart-rending tale of the martyrdom of brave Hossein, the Prophet’s grandson and the third Shi’ite imam, on the plains of Karbala in the seventh century.

My time with Khanum Jan helped shape my Iranian-Islamic identity. She read the Quran and explained religion to me as best she could. However, like many in my own and even in my father’s generation, I remained a secular Muslim. Father came of age during the reign of Reza Shah. The king regarded religion and the clergy as obstacles to his furious modernizing. He saw to it that the school curriculum glorified Iran’s pre-Islamic past, not its Islamic heritage. For my father and other Iranians like him, education abroad took care of the rest.

Khanum Jan, whom I loved dearly and who was the most important woman in my early life next to Mutti, was extremely tolerant, despite her religious upbringing. Generally speaking, she was broad-minded and receptive to modern changes—with one striking exception. When the veil was banned by government order in 1936, she stayed home for five years rather than go out into the street unveiled, a reaction not uncommon among women of her generation. The ban was another of Reza Shah’s Westernizing measures. He wanted to bring women into the public space, schools, and the workplace. But the abolition of the veil was a highly radical measure, shocking to traditional society and bitterly opposed by the clergy. One of the first steps taken by the Islamic Republic after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979 was to reimpose hijab, or Islamic dress, on women. But by then, the situation was reversed. Middle-class women now fought the imposition of the veil rather than its removal.

Despite my grandmother’s own protest, her progressive mind-set was evident in the fact that she let her daughters, my aunts, go to school and did not object that they went unveiled. And when I married Shaul in 1965, when marriages between Muslims and Jews were highly unusual, she gave me her blessing, along with a beautiful pair of pearl earrings.

I don’t recall ever seeing Khanum Jan in a black chador. Her personality was mirrored in the light colors she loved, and she often donned white, flowery chadors, allowing a bit of her hair to show beneath her headscarf. She was kind and welcoming to both her foreign-born daughter-in-law and son-in-law, and with her death in 1973, a piece of the cherished Iran of my childhood vanished along with her.

EUROPE

In December 1945, when I was almost six years old, Mother took me to Europe. She had not returned to Vienna since coming to Iran—Europe had been at war—and she had been longing to go back. Her youngest brother had died in the war and her two older sisters had moved to the United States. Her older brother, my uncle Max, was a successful merchant in Prague and she was eager to see him and her beloved Vienna again.

Father arranged for us to fly to Moscow on a plane that was taking Iran’s new ambassador to the USSR. From Moscow we were to take the train to Prague. For a child who had seen only Karaj and Tehran, taking an airplane, staying in a hotel, and traveling by train was a sensational experience. Yet all I remember of Moscow are the dreary, dark afternoons and the large, cavernous hotel. In the evening, Mother would take me downstairs to the near-deserted restaurant for dinner. There were always one or two couples on the dance floor, but they looked forlorn in the empty dining room. We would rush through dinner and hurry back to our room.

On the day of our departure for Prague, the Iranian ambassador arranged for his car to drive us from the hotel to the train station. A woman from the Russian Intourist Agency, who had made our arrangements, put us in a first-class compartment and gave us food for the long journey. There was none to be bought on the train. The conductor who checked our tickets told Mutti to keep the door of our compartment locked at all times. We were also given a small cooking lamp, which Mutti could use to warm our meals. I can’t remember how long the trip to Prague took, but I was glued to the window. Images from the journey remain etched in my memory: a desolate, gray landscape; burnt and demolished towns and villages; people lying huddled in the snow along the railway tracks; signs of hunger and illness evident even to a young child. At each stop, a mass of people rushed onto the train and banged on doors. I huddled against Mutti, crying in fear. At the Czech border, the conductor carried our suitcases to the crossing as we walked beside him in the snow. We were among the first passengers crossing here since 1940.

Prague, to my eyes, was a miracle of a city. My uncle Max picked us up at the train station. He was a tall, handsome, and very elegant man. He wore his hat tilted to one side, unlike my father, who wore his hat flat on his head. Uncle Max’s wife, Inka, was a beauty. They lived in an apartment of large rooms and high ceilings: there were Persian rugs on the floors, antique furniture, walls covered with paintings, closets full of very fine china. A plump maid in a neat black dress and white apron came every day. Mother, who did not believe in idleness, immediately enrolled me in the neighborhood school, where I learned to speak Czech. (I promptly forgot it once we returned to Tehran.)

Uncle Max took Mutti and me to the biggest toy store in Prague and bought me a fair, blue-eyed doll. I was bedazzled. I had never seen so many toys. After two hours Mutti and Uncle Max had to drag me out kicking and screaming.

The food in Prague was also a revelation. There was ham and salami and sausages for breakfast and fat-laced meat and different sauces for lunch and dinner. I loved the dumplings and the black bread covered with lard. Uncle Max even took us to Spiendelmuehl, a very posh winter resort in the mountains. I had never seen so much snow! A carriage drawn by two horses would take us from the hotel to the ski slopes. I learned how to sled, and Mother, elated to be back in Europe, skied the whole day.

Mutti was impatient to get to Vienna. Uncle Max tried to dissuade her or, at least, to prepare her for the devastation the city had endured from bombing during the war. But she was adamant. She wanted to visit her mother’s grave and look up some of her old friends. Finally, he bought us first-class train tickets and packed two suitcases full of food to take with us. Food was scarce in Vienna, and people could not be expected to share their meager rations with visitors or strangers.

The train departed in the evening. At first, Mutti and I were the sole occupants of the first-class compartment. Uncle Max warned Mutti not to accept any packages from strangers and not to engage in conversation with other passengers. A lot of counterfeit money, false documents, and contraband were being smuggled from Czechoslovakia into Austria.

We had been on the train for more than an hour when the door opened and a tall, well-dressed woman entered the cabin. She was wearing a mink coat and hat and leather boots; she carried a large leather bag. She sat across from us without exchanging a word. Mother continued to tell me stories in a very low voice. As we neared the Austrian border, the woman closed the curtain and turned off the lights. She needed to sleep, she told my mother. Suddenly the door of the compartment opened and three or four Austrian and Czech officers flipped on the light and asked to see our passports and our bags. They didn’t bother much with us, but they went through the woman’s suitcase and handbag, item by item. I started crying and clung to Mother, wishing again we had stayed in Uncle Max’s beautiful apartment; the woman scolded the officers for frightening a child.