The Scribe Of Shiraz
In her debut novel, Dalia Sofer writes with poetic beauty of a Jewish family
in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution.
Sandee Brawarsky
Special to the Jewish News
D
alia Sofer's The Septembers of
Shiraz (Ecco; $24.95) is a first
novel that doesn't at all have the
feeling of a novice's pen. She writes with
poetic beauty of a Jewish family just after
the Iranian Revolution, when the shards
of a glimmering life are broken and scat-
tered.
In alternating chapters, she shifts from
one family member's perspective to anoth-
er's, unfolding the stories of their unravel-
ing lives with sensitivity and urgency, as
terror and torture loom.
When the novel opens, Isaac Amin, a
rare-gem dealer, is arrested in his Tehran
office by Revolutionary Guards and
thrown into prison with powerful busi-
nessmen, communist rebels, those with
connections to the shah, bazaar vendors
and teenagers. He learns that he's accused
of being an Israeli spy.
One of his cellmates has swollen, bloody
feet that have been repeatedly lashed; he
encounters a noted violinist he once knew,
whose final audience is the firing squad.
Isaac's 18-year-old son Parviz escaped
earlier and is studying architecture in New
York, feeling isolated as he awaits word of his
father's fate. Isaac's wife, Farnaz,
tries unsuccessfully to find her
husband and seeks to maintain
a sense of normalcy for her 9-
year-old daughter, Shirin. Their
home is ripped up in a search,
former employees loot his office,
other relatives manage to flee,
and their longtime housekeeper
begins to sound like she's turn-
ing on them.
Shirin looks for clues in
the last moments she saw her
father; and after her private
school closes, she attends classes with a
daughter of a Revolutionary Guard mem-
ber, who befriends her.
The novel stretches from September
1981 to 1982, but it's an earlier sequence
of Septembers that the title alludes to, a
time when Isaac and Farnaz first met in
his student days in Shiraz, "a city of poets
and roses."
The author was born in Iran and fled
with her family in 1982, at the age of
10, first to Turkey, then Israel and New
York. Her own father was incarcerated in
Tehran's Even Prison in 1980.
While others, like Roya Hakakian in
Journey from the Land of No, have power-
fully documented the experience of their
final days in Iran in memoirs, Sofer chose
the path of fiction. The Septembers of
Shiraz is a family novel, a story of exile,
even a tale of fragile love.
As the author says in an interview,
her characters are composites of family
members and others. She spoke to her
father about his time in prison and also
read accounts by other prisoners, both
those sent to the same horrific place as
her father and to others to learn about the
methods of torture and the ambience of
prison life.
"I never wanted to write a memoir;'
she says. "For me, writing is a way to have
the illusion of control and the freedom to
create a world — I am the master of that
universe. A memoir is the opposite. You're
really trying to be obedient to the truth. I
would find it a restraint. Writing fiction is
liberating.
"The other thing is that I didn't want it
just to be about my own experience — so
many people have gone through similar
experiences, and not just in Iran. I wanted
to make it a bigger story.
"I have a fascination,
almost an obsession with
prison. The older I get,
the more I realize that it's
something I can't quite let
go of. That was the gen-
esis of the story — I just
wanted to get as close as
possible to the experience,
and writing was one way
to do it.
"So much of time in
prison is down time. Part
of the challenge in writing was to convey
the tedium, without boring the reader," she
notes, recalling that in the many drafts
she wrote over the seven years it took to
complete the book, Isaac was the character
most solid in her imaginings. Writing the
torture scenes were the most difficult.
Isaac, when asked in prison if he is a
religious man, realizes that if he had been
asked this while he was a free man, he
would have said he was not. "Now he is not
1 I •
Delia Sofer: Speaking at Book Fair.
sure;' she writes. "To deny belief terrifies
him. In order to hold onto hope, he must
believe in something. `I may be becoming
one he finally says."
Her images and the mood she creates
stay with the reader, as she captures inter-
rupted lives in the fetid prison cells as well
as amidst the jasmine-scented gardens,
elegant parlors furnished with antiqui-
ties, and closets filled with stylish Western
clothing that have to be veiled with long
black garments in the streets of Tehran.
Isaac's sister asks her husband, whose
father was a minister in the shah's govern-
ment, "If we leave this country without
taking care of our belongings, who in
Geneva or Paris or Timbuktu will under-
stand who we once were?"
Already in exile, Parviz has gone from
being the "son of a wealthy man to starv-
ing shop boy:' as he works for his Chasidic
landlord when his checks stop coming
from home and he can no longer pay his
rent.
On a predawn walk over the Brooklyn
Bridge, the smells of the Fulton Fish
Market remind him of a place near his
family's beach house.
"That he is awake at this hour and able
to smell the sea pleases him, and he tells
himself that to understand the world, and
even find in it an occasional reprieve, a
person must always alternate his hours of
sleep, his road to work, the places he visits,
the foods he eats and even, perhaps, the
people he loves;' Sofer writes.
Parviz is falling in love with his
landlord's daughter, but he is warned
that unless he intends to take on their
Chasidic ways, he should stay away from
her. So Isaac, who never cared much about
his Judaism, is thrown into prison and
tortured because of it; and his son isn't
accepted as Jewish enough.
When speaking about her own Jewish
identity, Sofer says that she feels conflict-
ed. "I think of myself as Jewish. I'm not
observant. I think I've always struggled
with the idea, because from a young age, I
saw religion as something that separates
people. I do appreciate culture and tradi-
tion; I can't get myself to belong to any-
thing I view as tribal."
Although her next works may have
very different settings, Sofer, who lives
in Manhattan, says that her writing will
always be connected to her Iran experi-
ence. "So many things stay with you. The
sense of alienation, not feeling safe any-
where — that will always seep into my
writing."
Dalia Sofer is one of three writers
who will appear at the Jewish Book
Fair as part of the "Lunch with the
Authors" program at noon Thursday,
Nov.15, at the Jewish Community
Center in West Bloomfield.
Comic novelist Elinor Lipman
(Then She Found Me, The Pursuit
of Alice Thrift) will talk about her
newest book, My Latest Grievance
(Houghton Mifflin; $24), a satiric yet
compassionate family portrait set
in a small women's college outside
Boston.
Dani Shapiro, author of the novel
Family History and the memoir Slow
Motion, will speak on her new work
of fiction, Black and White (Knopf;
$24), an examination of mother-
hood that pits artistic inspiration
against maternal obligation and asks
whether the two can ever be fully
reconciled.
Tickets are $25. Call the JCC's
Jewish Life & Learning Department
at (248) 432-5577, ext. 7; or register
online at www.jccdet.org .
October '18 • 2007
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