Like many Iranians of the time, the governor declared that Jews were “najeh,” or ritually impure, capable of contaminating anything, whether it was a container of water or human flesh. I believed that I had sex. The excruciating pain finally leads the Governor to demand Yaran wash his hands with a bowl of permanganate. Yaran knows he could be killed because he chose alcohol disinfection. In fact, he knows he could easily lose his head if he didn’t stop his pain. The situation becomes even more dangerous because administering novocaine to an opiate addict can be fatal. But for the anti-Semitic Governor, known as the “Land Eater” to his hateful locals, Jewish lives matter to the tens of thousands of flower buds in the poppy fields and opium factories that adjoin his ominous mansion. is less important than his one.
Mosanen’s latest novel, a fascinating piece of historical fiction, Harem (2002), Oiran (2005), the last romanov (2012), When the scent of butterflies (2014) shed a critical light on two aspects of Iranian history that are relatively unknown to many. First, it highlights the discriminatory and inhumane Najasat (ceremonial impurity) practices inflicted on Iranian Jews, the worst of which lasted from his 16th-century Safavid rule to his 1900s. I’m here. As part of these practices, Jews were not allowed to walk outside during rain or snow so as not to contaminate the general public, and to force their Muslim neighbors to bow when leaving their homes. In addition, it was compulsory to make the doorways especially low.
The novel’s second major contribution is its emphasis on Iran’s role in the emerging Middle East theater during World War II. At that time, Adolf Hitler, whom German propaganda called “the savior of the Shiites” on Iranian radio, was nudging closer to the country’s borders. Airstrikes from the Anglo-Soviet occupation ravaged the skies, and British, American and Russian forces angered millions of Iranians. And meanwhile, Iran, the same country whose supreme leader today uses Twitter to deny the Holocaust, gave shelter to about 1,000 Jewish children from Poland. Many of them were orphans.
Mosanen’s story begins in 1941 when the West exiled Iranian leader Reza Shah, who overthrew the Qajar dynasty in 1925. The West favored his son Mohammad his Reza his Pahlavi, who served as king of Iran from 1941 to his 1979. Like his Turkish contemporaries Mustafa his Kemal his Ataturk, Reza Shah created a historic campaign of modernization and secularization. Today, the regime’s demonstrators demanding secular Iran mourn him in the streets, chanting his name. But more than 80 years before him, the West feared that Rezacher was becoming increasingly susceptible to the lure of Nazi power. Britain also feared losing Iran’s oil fields, and the Allies understood the potential disaster of the all-important Trans-Iranian Railway falling into German hands.
Against this chaotic backdrop, Mosanen presents another world, the small ecosystem of Tehran’s Jewish quarters (most of Iran’s big cities have Jewish quarters, and are “polluted”). restricted the spread of Jews into the general population). In this cramped hustle and bustle, Mosanen introduces us to Dr. Yaran, his larger-than-life wife Ruby, and her extraordinary daughter, a toddler with the expressive language skills of adolescence. This is Neda. Other key characters include Jacob, who is desperate to secure the necessary paperwork to allow Polish Jewish child refugees to move permanently to the then-mandated Palestine, and the former Including Aunt Shamsi, which Mosanen deploys as a warning against the cruelty of the world’s superstitions. Weaponized to hold accountable for death and tragedy.
Even Quarter Fool has his rightful place among the memorable cast of characters that bring Tehran’s old Jewish quarter to life, and readers who may know little about Jewish life in Iran will find it hard to believe. Get a glimpse of this once vibrant community. More than 100,000 Jews lived in the country before his 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and turned Iran into a fanatical theocracy. Today, approximately 8,000 to 10,000 Jews remain in Iran, making up the Middle East’s largest Jewish population after Israel. Their fate was fragile in his 1940s and remains fragile today.
Compared to her other work, Yaran is Mosanen’s first male protagonist, a Jewish dentist longing for a wise and rebellious young woman named Velvet, the Muslim wife of the governor. Because the plot weaves a complex story of forbidden love. Like her previous novels, Mosanen is a master at developing female characters that surprise readers almost every time. But she also exhibits a remarkable intuition about the psychology of gender in 1940s Iran. During this period, a woman was effectively treated as the property of her husband. (Iranian demonstrators are now fighting such misogynistic practices that the theocratic regime has upheld for 45 years since the start of the Iranian revolution.)
The novel’s warnings about the similarities between women’s struggles in Iran in the 1940s and today are highly prescient given that the ongoing revolution in Iran will overthrow the regime and establish secular democracy. There seems to be. Although Mosanen began to write Love and War in the Jewish Quarter In 2016, allusions to the anger of the oppressed Iranian women who are sparking the revolution in today’s Iran fly off the pages of the book like red flags. Most notable among these are the lyrical words of Gamal Al-Molouk Vajri, a real-life classical singer known as the “Queen of Persian Music”. The nation is asleep. Iranian women rise up and revolt. Into this boiling kettle of Persian tea enters the tragic character of Tulip, a young eunuch who serves as an integral member of the governor’s household staff and is part of the story’s extraordinary ending. The fate of the Iranian Jews themselves seems to hang in this final chapter.
Born into an Iranian family in Israel and emigrated to Iran at the age of nine, Mosanen relies on a mix of fictional and real-life characters, such as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s first wife, Queen Forzia. She treats her toothache. But it is Yaran himself who straddles the fine line between fact and fiction. The character’s career trajectory is based on her Mossanen’s late grandfather, Habib Levy, who was born in Tehran’s Jewish ghetto in 1896 and wrote the first scholarly book dedicated to the Jews of Iran. A Comprehensive History of Iranian Jews: The Beginning of the Diaspora (1999). Educated in Paris, Levi was also the first Jewish officer in the Iranian army. But it was his role as Reza Shah’s personal dentist that Mossanen gave Dr. Yaran the most information.
At times, the extent of Mosanen’s research, revealing even the smallest details, is astonishing, and the reader really needs to know the exact name or exact item of a dilapidated street in Tehran’s Jewish Quarter. It raises the question of whether there is a soldier’s food bag. But details like that ultimately prove to be a gift rather than a distraction. As a result of Mosanen’s almost obsessive research, the author has earned and maintained the trust of his readers, allowing him to achieve the prized goal of a good historical novel. It is about temporarily escaping from the current reality and being able to move into the world. previously unknown.
In doing so, Mosanen, like tens of thousands of other Jews, left Iran in 1979 and settled in Los Angeles, where he now lives, but with love and service to the Iranian Jewish community around the world. is doing the act of Reading a novel is like taking a Google Earth tour of Iran’s former Jewish Quarter, a region long gone (and in some cases deliberately demolished), Mossanen’s work ensures that the dreams and nightmares of those who once occupied them are haunted. Space never dies. Ultimately, her work, though fictional, builds on her legendary grandfather’s contribution to documenting and bringing to life the Jewish experience of Iran over the centuries.
Her research is meticulous, but Mosanen’s prose is deeply appealing to the senses. Following the velvet, it’s a feast of languages where you can almost smell the divine scent of roses that almost drives Yaran insane. Dubbed the Persian Isabel Allende for the magical realism of her work, Mosanen has the power to make readers recoil in terror, whether it’s the macabre mushroom patch of a toddler or the power of her neighbor’s door. Her vivid descriptions take us to places such as the Governor’s looming mansion. All the surrounding mountains are solid stone, and they are all painted with a blanket of sorrow. ”
Those born after 1979 may view Iran through the narrow lens of fanatical ayatollahs, gender repression and state-sponsored terrorism. Iranians themselves tend to glorify the years preceding the 1979 revolution, but as Mosanen shows, Iran during World War II was also a miserable time for millions. . Those who read Mosanen’s novel for the express purpose of comparing and contrasting pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran miss the point. The novel’s most important achievement is not (it is not) that it glorifies pre-revolutionary Iran, Wrong than the image of the country we have seen in the last 40 years.
Given the themes of forbidden love, themes rich in blush-worthy husband hugs and defiance, and the characterization of government officials as corrupt opium addicts, Love and War in the Jewish Quarter It will never see the light of day in Iran under its current theocracy. But today, with the historic revolution underway in Iran, perhaps next year or the year after, Mosanen will be able to stand in front of Jews, Muslims and overwhelming numbers of newly emancipated women in a free and democratic Iran. , you might find yourself reading an excerpt from a novel. .
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Tabby Refael is an award-winning Los Angeles-based writer and weekly columnist. Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
