Oriente Medio News – Dear Farideh, thank you very much for talking to The Middle East News. Tell us a little about your family’s history and your professional activity.
In 2016 you published the book Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile (Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters) in which you recount the exile of your family from Iran to Israel in the seventies of the twentieth century. What was the experience, both personal and family, of the dislocation, the estrangement of the Iranian homeland and life in another country?
Farideh Dayanim Goldin – My parents and four siblings left Iran on the last El Al flights from Tehran’s Mehrabad airport to Ben Gurion in Israel on February 4, 1979. I had left Iran on July 4th, 1975, wanting to leave, yearning to live in a different place. My father, however, had imagined himself and his family living in Iran and had never contemplated leaving the country he loved.
As the title of my second book indicates, my exodus was voluntary, a migration. His was an exile and remained a traumatic displacement for the rest of his life.
My father lost most of his assets. He had worked hard from a very young age to support himself, his mother and his siblings. They had been terribly poor and lived in the Jewish Quarter of the city, the mahaleh.
During the last decade of his life in Iran, my father became prosperous, owning a nice house, a car, a poultry farm and orchards. He became attached to the land and his business that gave him prestige among the larger community.
He lost most of that after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
The prospect of being poor again was frightening to him, and he returned to Iran a year later to save his assets and to bring the family back to his homeland. However, he was detained at the Turkish border as an Israeli spy and was forbidden to leave the country. Fearing friends and foes in Iran, he lived a reclusive life and was in a state of limbo for many years.
When he was finally allowed to leave, after he gave a huge sum to the government, he found out that the financial loss was just one part of this unwanted exile. He had lost his home, his language, his culture, and his prestige as well.
My father had been a leader of the Jewish community in our hometown, Shiraz. He was called upon by the agricultural school at our local university to share his expertise. After the revolution, he felt that he was nothing.
He was still our father and had our love and respect. He was still the man who had raised his siblings and protected them. But, in his own eyes, he was a broken man with no purpose or influence.
He clung to his Judaism and the Persian-speaking, Mizrahi synagogue in his neighborhood in Holon. Religion was the only familiar comfort he could find.
His father, a Dayan and well-respected leader of the community, had established a synagogue in Shiraz. My after had his own seat there and services didn’t start until he arrived.
No one at his new synagogue in Holon would wait for him. He bought his own seat and put his name on it. He tried to pretend that he was somebody there, but, in humility, he avoided involvement. In Iran, he would have been asked to honor the congregation. In Israel, the invitation never came. It was all a cultural misunderstanding.
The rest of us suffered along with our father as well. He couldn’t accept the culture in Israel or the United States. What he would often find offensive, the rest of us had accepted as normal.
Persian Jew in Shiraz Synagogue (Wikipedia)
You may read the book for examples of this cultural miscommunication. I’ll share one. It is impolite and disrespectful for a woman, for a daughter, for me to speak with authority, to give advice, or not to speak in a hushed voice.
I would eventually learn to defer to my father for his ideas: “You know better Baba! You are wiser,” I said whenever he asked for my opinion. I learned to speak softly, all against the cultural norms of the American culture I had adopted.
Still, we butted heads often. He would finally tell me in his later years that our conflict, his and mine, was the result of miscommunication. Although we both spoke in Persian, my Persian was infused with the culture of my adopted country; his was the language of the restrictive country he had left behind. A language, we both realized, was more than its vocabulary and grammar.
Even with this realization, we never managed to translate our cultures through Persian.
OM – Food, memory and identity form a very interesting identity triad and in the case of the Iranian/Jewish diaspora presents a fascinating and little-studied case in Latin America. Tell us a little about this triad present in your blog «Food and Memory: a blog for your stories and recipes”
FG – My book, especially my first, Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman, are often spiced with the memory of Persian food. Whenever I read from my books, people in the audience often approached me with their own stories and recollection of memories of people and places that were somehow connected to food. I encouraged them to write their stories, but most told me that they didn’t know how to write.
I created my blog to help these very people record their stories. One of the first entries in my blog is about Gondi, an Iranian meatball, made of ground chicken, roasted chickpeas and spiced with cumin. Gondi was made by Iranian Jews only, which is fascinating. It’s not cholent, which is a Jewish food for Shabbat. It is an everyday dish, which my family loves.
Through her research, my sister Nahid Gerstein, who works at the Library of Congress, came up with the theory that since many Iranian Jews were traveling-merchants and peddlers, it’s possible that in their business trips to India and through the silk road, they brought back the idea of mixing ground roasted chickpeas with meat or ground chicken as a filler to both infuse flavor to the dish and to make up for the scarcity and expense of kosher meat.
I included a video of my family gathering to make Gondi on my blog. I had asked my uncle Shemuel Sabbar, who was visiting us from Israel, to allow me to tape him as he prepared Gondi. The video was for a class project. Everyone knew that they had to be quiet during the recording. However, my mother, my sister and my daughter all gathered around Shemuel, trying to guide him toward their own specific twist on the recipe.
Gondi
In the end, the video showed more than just the steps for making Gondi. We spoke in a mix of languages, Persian, Hebrew and English, showing our wanderings as Jews.
My family traces its Persian roots to the destruction of the First Temple and our Babylonian exile. Proudly, we repeated the story of Cyrus the Great freeing our ancestors and allowing them to move to Persia.
My maternal grandparents, Shemuel’s parents, moved from Hamedan, the burial site of Esther and Mordechai, to Tehran in order to escape intense anti-semitism; and when they found their new home inhospitable as well, they immigrated to Israel. Shemuel was just 12 when he left for Israel.
My sister was just three years old when my family escaped to Israel in 1979, as the Revolution created chaos and uncertainty for Iranian Jews and others. She grew up in Israel, but like Shemuel spent a few years in the United States as well. They both speak all three languages.
My mother is fluent in Hebrew and Persian and knows just a few words in English.
I speak Persian and English and know a few words in Hebrew.
My daughter who grew up in Virginia, speaks English and a few words of Persian and Hebrew.
Lacking fluency in all three languages, we often find it difficult to converse in one language alone. The video shows this linguistic joggling.
OM – You wrote the article “Overcoming Gender: The Impact of the Persian Language on Iranian Women’s Confessional Literature” for the book Familiar and Foreign: Identity in Iranian Film and Literature, edited by Manijeh Mannani and Veronica Thompson. Could you tell us a little about the book and your article?
FG – When I was a graduate student at Old Dominion University, I had a great teacher, Janet Bing, who taught a course, “Language, Gender and Power.” I was going to write a short paper for her, contradicting, even challenging her assumption that the English language discriminates against women because of its lack of gender-neutral pronouns (he/she) and because so many words gave weight to the importance of male views and position, for example, policeman, chairman.
Persian is a gender-neutral language, yet it has found ways to denigrate women. One method is to use the words man (mard) and woman (zan) when Persian couldn’t differentiate between the genders. Another method was by importing Arabic words that were discriminatory in their feminine form.
This should have been enough for a paper, but I had an epiphany as I was doing my research. I had read from a vast library of books at Pahlavi University when I lived in Iran. Why had I not come across any novels by an Iranian woman? I asked myself. I went looking for these stories I had missed, and I read them all because at the time there were so few of them. Why? I wanted to know.
I had started writing my own life narrative as well. I wondered if any Iranian women had written memoirs in Persian. Shockingly, I came to realize that writing one’s life narrative was risky especially for Iranian women because they had to reveal themselves in a culture that women were—traditionally—to be kept hidden.
Additionally, I realized, that since Persian is an indirect language, it was harder to write frankly about one’s life. Most memoirs by Iranian women would be written later on in exile and in languages other than Persian, mostly in English.
The twelve-page was becoming a book chapter! Professor Bing encouraged me to continue.
I presented the paper at an Iranian conference. The panel concentrated on Iranian women. Manijeh Mannani, the editor of Familiar and Foreign: Identity in Iranian Film and Literature was on the panel, and she asked if she could publish it in her book.
After I had finished my paper, I became obsessed with another notion: had Iranian Jewish women written anything at all. That would become a separate article, “The Ghosts of Our Mothers: From Oral Tradition to Written Words—A History and Critique of Jewish Women Writers of Iranian Heritage.” This was eventually published in Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues.
OM – What remains of your family, identity and history in contemporary Iran? What are the ways in which you keep in touch with your Iranian homeland from the diaspora?
FG – I have not returned to Iran since the summer of 1976. Sometimes I wonder if I can still call myself Iranian. Yet, the memories of my Iran, the Iran I knew, is strong, never fading. My accent, my love for Persian food, won’t let me forget that I am still a foreigner in the United States. I am not in touch with few cousins left in Iran. Attending the Iranian conferences was my way of keeping in touch, especially since I don’t live in an area with a large Iranian community.
Ironically, Israel has been my biggest connection to Iran. Tel Aviv University has a robust Iranian Studies program. I follow them. My mother, who lives in Israel, speaks Persian to me. I often watch Iranian shows on her TV. And it seems that I constantly run to shopkeepers who are from Iran. I speak more Persian in Israel than anywhere else!
OM – The United States and Israel were two of the top destinations for Iranian Jews fleeing the Islamic Republic How have Iranian Jews in those two countries reconstructed their community lives? What are the processes of memory and transmission of intergenerational identity in the case of Iranian Jews?
FG – There has been an intense desire to study Iranian Jewish culture in both countries. Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History, which was founded by Home Sarshar and is continuing its efforts through Human Sarshar, was one of the initial catalysts for reclaiming Persian Jewish culture in the United States.
Numerous authors have emerged in both countries, writing about Iranian Jews in both fiction and nonfiction.
Please refer to my article, “The Ghosts of Our Mothers: From Oral Tradition to Written Words—A History and Critique of Jewish Women Writers of Iranian Heritage” for more information.
In many ways, this exile, as painful and traumatic as it has been for many, especially people of my father’s generation, has created a remarkable renaissance in Iranian Jewish studies. Many scholars and many young people are rushing to record and analyze our history—the good and the bad.
OM – Persian Judaism has very particular cultural and identity patterns, could you explain a little about these particularisms of Persian Judaism?
FG – As scholars of Iranian Jewish history have discovered, there is a strong influence of Zoroastrianism, King Cyrus’ religion, on Judaism, including the customs of mourning and sitting shiva, for example.
Nowruz table
Persian Jews celebrate Passover with many spring rites, a few very similar to the Zoroastrian holiday of Nowrooz, the Iranian New Year. Nowrooz is a celebration of spring, of the land returning to life. Passover, too, is a spring holiday, a second new year for Jews.
We adopted many symbols of spring in our celebration. It was customary to have fruits and vegetables that were new to the season on our Sofreh, the cloth we spread on the floor that we sat around for our meals. For example, fava beans, kangar (thistle-like wild vegetable, a spring delicacy) and rhubarb were always on the Sofreh. Most Jewish families, in imitation of Nowrooz customs, grew a tray of greens to decorate the sofreh.
During dayenou, we chase family members around the room and hit each other playfully with spring onions. Yes, the custom is a reminder of the lashing the Egyptians gave the Israelites, but it is always another sign of spring. As we chant dayenou and hit each other, we also wake up everyone who might have become tired and drowsy. This custom is by far the most fun part of the Iranian seder, one that has been adopted by many Ashkenazi families as well.
We eat beans and rice during Passover. By tradition, a wife follows a husband’s customs, but my Ashkenazi husband announced that he was converting to Mizrahi, in part to eat kitniot during Passover, and partly because he loves Iranian Jewish traditions and food.
OM – Your book Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman (2004) tells your childhood memories, your places of memory and the development of Jewish life in a mostly Muslim country. What motivated you to write this work from the perspective of your memories as a child?
You asked me about my relationship with Iran and my Persian heritage. I have to admit that when I left Iran, I had decided to leave everything behind, including my language and culture. I didn’t teach my daughters Persian, and now they are mad at me, and I wish I had.
My mother was a child-bride that was sent from Hamedan to Shiraz to marry my dad, a man she or her parents had never met before he showed up at their home asking to marry my mother.
Her loneliness and desperation had a huge impact on me and my siblings. All through my Iranian life, I wished to distance myself from her and avoid a similar fate.
So, when I managed to get out of Iran, I wanted to leave it all behind. And, of course, that’s impossible. Forgetting your culture is like cutting off your limbs. I was unhappy and didn’t quite know why.
I started to write down a few stories, including my mother’s recollection of her separation from all she had known at age 13. Once I started writing, I couldn’t stop; a dam had broken, forcing memories, stories out of their captivity. Through writing these stories, I came to know myself, my Iranian culture and my family better. Also, I was no longer embarrassed by them.
I used to write stories when I lived in Iran. I never thought my English was good enough to allow me to write in English. I returned to school and studies Women’s Studies, Women’s Literature, World Literature and Creative Writing. I was happy. English gave me the freedom to write easily. The act of writing freed me from suppressed memories. Remembering the women in my life and recording their stories was a privilege. I knew that I had a duty to bring my mother and grandmothers’ stories to life.
Both my grandmothers were illiterate, having never had a chance to learn to write even their own names. My mother had elementary education. I was in the unique and privileged position of being able to study literature, learn a new language, travel, and choose my own destiny as much as possible. Yet, I had seen, I knew the lives these women had lived. I didn’t have to fictionalize these stories; I could write them down as history— their history.
OM – Why is the history, culture and identity of Persian/Iranian Jews still quite unknown? In Latin America we know very little about this important part of Jewish history.
FG – A great question! I am not sure about Latin America. Maybe they have not had a chance to be exposed to our history and culture. I know a bit about Latin American Jewish culture through literature. I led a Jewish writers’ book club and taught Jewish writers at Old Dominion University. I always included world literature. The Chilean poet, Marjorie Agosin was a favorite of my students. We invited her to read her poetry and to tell her story during our Literary Festival shortly after 9/11. She told our students about another 9/11 in Chile. It was quite moving.
In contrast, in the United States and Israel, there has been a feverish attempt to rediscover, record, and promote Iranian Jewish culture and history. There is a huge interest. For example, Jewish Women’s Theater, or The Braid, had an entire show devoted to Iranian women’s stories, all written by Iranian Jewish women. The show has traveled to New York (standing room only at the 92nd st Y), to Norfolk, Virginia, where they performed at Old Dominion University and of course in Los Angeles.