Gina Nahai not only hopes her novel, “Caspian Rain,” will have an impact on readers, she expects it.
“The cosmos owes me one,” she says.
That’s because her last novel, “Sunday Silence,” came out three days after 9/11. Though well received, nobody was talking much about Iranian American literature during those tumultuous weeks.
This time, she hopes “Caspian Rain” will have a clear path to literary success. The novel tells a heartbreaking tale of a Jewish family in Iran 10 years before the Islamic revolution, a story that somewhat parallels her own childhood. “Caspian Rain” is not autobiography but, as with her three previous books, it explores Nahai’s Persian roots.
“It’s a beautiful country and has some of the kindest, smartest, most resourceful people in the world,” she says of the land she lived in until age 13. “On the other hand it’s a source of daily shame that the populace elected this insane Holocaust-denying so-called president. My attempt in writing this book is to figure out how this happened.”
Nahai appeared at Corte Madera’s Book Passage last week for a reading and book signings.
From her base in Los Angeles, home to one of America’s largest Iranian immigrant communities, Nahai reflects on the unique standing of Jews in her homeland. Though no government is more viciously opposed to Israel’s existence than Iran’s, she says the Iranian view of Jews and Judaism is more nuanced than many realize.
“The Shah protected the Jews,” she says. “Jews prospered and felt safe. I felt very much Iranian. We could do anything and go anywhere.”
However, she also remembers one frightening incident during her girlhood, when Iranian and Israeli soccer teams played each other in pre-Khomeni Tehran. When Israel scored the first goal, hooligans took to the streets beating up Jewish shopkeepers. The nervous Israeli team deliberately kicked a goal into their own net just to cool off potential rioters.
Despite her family’s personal sense of security there, Nahai stresses that “the worst place for Jews was Iran for 1,000 years until the last shah. My books chronicle the Iranian Jews and the horror under Shiaism. The mullahs always used Jews as a rallying cry. Jews were the pawns, so when they wanted to rally the troops the would call for massacres of Jews.”
Though she writes in English, and now teaches graduate level creative writing at USC, Nahai still has a fondness for her native Farsi.
“It is a very lyrical language,” she says, “with a lot of magical realism. There is a thinner line than in English between hard facts and imagined phenomena, so you might say someone is dying of sorrow because he swallowed too many tears. People speaking Farsi use that expression.”
Nahai has been writing all her life, but as a teen her parents tried to steer her into a more reliable career. She earned a master’s degree in political science at UCLA, and even served as an analyst of Iranian affairs with the Rand Corporation.
But the storytelling urge proved too powerful, and after writing a short story based on the life of her great-grandmother (“the first Jewish Iranian woman to leave her husband”), she turned to writing. She has written three other novels, including “Cry of the Peacock” and “Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith.”
As for her connection to Jewish life today, Nahai says that “part of it is a joy.” But she worries about complacency in terms of anti-Semitism. Earlier this year, while touring the new Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, she was struck by the history of the Jews in pre-war Germany.
“Their level of comfort and the certainty they were safe reminded me of the way we are in this country,” she says. “It gives me food for thought. When people say anti-Semitism is on the rise, I pay attention. We’re so comfortable here and so attached to this place, we may miss the signs.”
With all the belligerent talk about Iran these days, how does Nahai feel about another potential Middle East war? Let’s just say she’s no fan of the current occupant of the White House.
“I’m convinced the Bush presidency is the darkest period in this country’s history,” she says. “What is stunning is how wrong American policymakers have been from the start. How these people thought you could export American-style democracy is beyond me.”
Then again, she’s often found a striking ignorance among Americans when it comes to Middle East affairs.
As she recalls, “people used to ask me in L.A., ‘Do you have cars in Iran or do you ride camels?’
“Caspian Rain” by Gina B. Nahai ($25, MacAdam Cage, 250 pages).