Jewish, Female, and Miserable in Iran

By JILL SUZANNE JACOBS

WEDDING SONG
Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman
By Farideh Goldin
205 pages. Brandeis University Press. $24.95.

At a recent book reading, I heard an author say that "Every writer must have been an ugly child"—an obtuse metaphor if I ever heard one. I know plenty of published writers who were pretty children.

His point, though—that good writing often comes from a place of pain and otherness—is valid. That precarious place, on the interstices of society, is one in which Jews have traditionally stood. Throughout history and across time, Jewish stories have often described marginality and displacement.

Taking its place among such literature is Farideh Goldin’s Wedding Song, a memoir of her experiences as an Iranian Jewish woman.

Goldin begins her story at dawn in 1968 Iran, one decade and one year before a revolution led by fundamentalist Sh'ia Muslims would unseat the Shah and replace his Western-oriented government with an Islamic one. Smoke fills the rooms and hallways of the home Goldin shares with her mother, father, grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins and siblings: Her books are burning. The book-burner is her father, disposing of her library in the family stove for fear that her compulsive reading might make her an unsuitable bride.

This memorable opening is followed by the painful tale of Goldin’s coming of age in 60s and 70s Iran. It’s not a pretty picture, and it’s not intended to be. Goldin confesses, “My daughters have a hard time reading my childhood stories. Something good must have happened, they say. I must have forgotten about the good parts.”

She must have—her narrative describes a dark, unhappy childhood in sometimes whiny prose that reads like dirge rather than song. I hoped that the narrative might at some point mention the pleasures of growing up in an inter-generational family, offer insight into the richness of Persian-Jewish culture, or even describe the beauty of the Iranian landscape. Unfortunately, Goldin rarely focuses on the positive. The book’s gloomy attitude makes for an interesting, but difficult read.

As we might expect of a recent immigrant, Goldin is hardly able to view the culture she left, or the new one she has joined, with objectivity. Describing her feeling about having relocated to America, she writes, “More than anything else, my children’s lives affirmed how right I had been to leave Iran … As women, they live in a country and an era that give them liberties and choices that I never knew to yearn for." She describes how her mother was married off at the age of thirteen, and how brides in Iran are subject to a ritual where their pubic hair is shorn. Yet perhaps in her eagerness to criticize the culture she left, she overvalues American freedom.

Goldin’s work often reads like an unedited journal, with awkward sentences and key background information mysteriously absent. Words in Farsi and Judi, a form of Judeo-Persian spoken by Iranian Jews, appear throughout the text, but the glossary does not include all of them.

Nonetheless, Wedding Song offers a fascinating individual view of growing up female and Jewish in Iran. Through Goldin’s eyes, we glimpse life lived in a Middle Eastern and Muslim milieu. The call of the muezzin, the rush of open-air markets, the cozy yet stifling nature of close-knit families and communities are an integral part of life there. The graves of Mordechai and Esther—the protagonists of the Purim story—lie within driving distance.

Iranian women have been in the limelight as of late. This year, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to win the prize. Three recent books—Funny in Farsi,  Persepolis, and Reading Lolita in Tehran—offer readers accounts of Iranian female experiences, and Goldin's book adds a Jewish element. At a time of increased interest in Iranian women, Goldin’s book offers not a window into the richness and complexity of Iranian life, but rather a view through a keyhole.