Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora

Lily

Lily I interviewed Lily in a restaurant in Chicago in 1992. I met her through Pari with whom she had worked in Tehran in the 1960s and 1970s. Born in 1930 in Tehran, Lily has worked as a teacher, a writer, and a translator. One of many women who worked within the system to change the education of teachers and of children from reinforcing a unitary model of ethics and class identity to educating Iranians in their difference, Lily hired Pari at Franklin Publications and then helped her through her early work with children’s literature. Lily speaks of her childhood, her family, her schooling and move to Moscow, her education, her marriage, and the politics of work and censorship in the 1960s and 1970s. Because Lily predicated her rewriting of texts and teaching methodology on questioning the “submission” demanded by the dictates of the State, her style of education would have met with disapproval under the Shah or the current regime. She continued to write books after she left Iran in 1979. She currently lives and teaches in the United States. I was born into an Iranian family privileged with highly educated men and women. What made my paternal family elite was not wealth but education. My mother was Russian. She came to Iran at the end of the First World War to marry the man she loved, my father. My father, who had finished his higher education in political science at Moscow University, was the third child of a large, traditional Persian family. He was a fervent nationalist and believed that to serve Iran and its people was our most sacred duty. Although we were brought up as Muslims, we were not a very religious family. We were taught respect for other people’s religions and beliefs. My mother, a Christian, became a believing Muslim by her own wish. Try to imagine yourself as a young Russian woman seventy-five years ago, coming to Iran, a young woman who had completed her studies at the music conservatory of Moscow and St. Petersburg in singing and piano, and who, because of the war, had become a trained nurse as well. This educated, European girl in her mid-twenties had decided to become a Muslim because to her there was only one God, and different religions were simply a matter of difference of rituals. 52 there: remembering home She used to say, “It doesn’t matter to God how we pray to Him or in what language.” She felt that if becoming Muslim would make her more accepted in a new culture and in a new family, she should do that. But she did not do it out of hypocrisy. She really became a Muslim. Her most sacred vow was “Be Ali, or Be Hazrat Abbas” [“I swear on Ali or St. Abbas”]. She had many stories of her early days in Iran. This is one of my favorites. Once, when she was still nursing her firstborn, my aunts took her for pilgrimage to a religious shrine. While encircled by other women in the shrine, suddenly, her chador slipped off, revealing a bit of her golden hair. An angry mullah ran up to them and said, “Who is this farangi [foreigner]?” My mother said, “I am not a farangi, I am a Muslim.” The astonished mullah said, “Well, if you’re a Muslim, throw a stone on that rock you see over there. If you are truly a Muslim the stone will stick to the rock, and if not, we will tear you to pieces because you have soiled this sacred place.” My mother was scared to death as she knew that a stone was not going to stick to a rock. So she said, “God, you know that I did not lie, that I have become a Muslim, and that I’m here with all my faith. So, please, do something so that the stone will stick to the rock.” Then she picked up a stone, closed her eyes, threw it. And it stuck! Screams of joy filled the air. The women were trying to tear her chador to pieces, as an omen of good luck. Later on, she went to see what had made the stone stick to the rock. She noticed that the rock surface was one on which candles had been lit; the stone had stuck to the wax. I was the youngest child of our family. I saw very little of my always-busy father...