In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Murder in Holmby Hills (from The Pearl Canon) Gina Nahai The shiva was held at Raphael’s Son’s house—1.6 acres on Mapleton Avenue in Holmby Hills, just across Sunset Boulevard from the Playboy mansion, with its peacocks and swans and naked twins running loose, a stone’s throw from Aaron and Candy Spelling’s 56,000-square-foot, $80 million pad with the leaky roof, down the street from the 45,000-square-foot, $125 million “Little Versailles” of that nice Jewish couple who spent five years building the house and divorced the minute it was completed. Every afternoon for six days (the seventh being Shabbat), Raphael’s Son’s house was filled with callers who arrived for the reading of the minha. They stayed anywhere from five minutes to five hours, drank hot tea brewed with cardamom, and ate dates and peeled cucumbers served to them by harried, grumpy Armenian women who had been somebody back in Iran but who were now reduced to waiting tables because they didn’t speak English and didn’t have papers. In the evening, a lavish dinner was served courtesy of Roberto, a SeventhDay Adventist young man from Guatemala who used to work at the Russian kosher butcher shop on Doheny and Pico and who managed to parlay that job into a full-service Iranian-kosher catering business. Some of the callers, like Raab Moussa, one of the many Iranian rabbis who competed with each other for the mantle of leadership in the community, made a point of coming by every night. Others, like Shazdeh Khanum—a lifelong friend of the family and an aunt to the late shah—came only once, for less than a half hour. Financially ruined but still imperious, she marched in ahead of her two useless sons—one 19 an opium addict and the other a charlatan—who followed her everywhere like a pair of Pekingese, ignored Ra’ana, acknowledged Elizabeth the Great with barely a nod, and took her seat at the very top of the room. She waved away an offer of tea and a plate of dates, lit a cigarette that she smoked on an enamel holder, and, in what could only be interpreted as her earnest opinion about the passing of Raphael’s Son, exclaimed loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” In the early years of the revolution, Raphael’s Son had sent his mother to live in Israel, but stayed in Iran himself. He came to Los Angeles in 1982, having stopped in Tel Aviv long enough to bury his mother, having also circumvented, in ways that were not so mysterious if you knew what he had been up to in Iran, the usual visa requirements that had made it so difficult for other Iranians to immigrate to the United States after the hostage crisis. Before the revolution, he was impecunious, but he came to LA with a suitcase full of cash—American dollars—and a briefcase filled with jewelry and gold coins that had been “confiscated ” (read “looted”) from the homes and bank safe deposit boxes of Jews, Muslims, and Baha’is who had been executed, jailed, or forced to go into hiding by the mullahs’ regime. This was during the last big recession before the really big recession of 2007 and thereafter. By then, many Iranian Jews had bought homes or invested in real estate up and down California. Since the idea of buying on credit, or having a mortgage, was entirely new to them (in Iran, everything was bought with cash), many had miscalculated the debt they were undertaking and their ability to pay it back. Just when the banks came calling to foreclose on their property or repossess their cars, Raphael’s Son arrived on the scene, rolling in money and only too happy to lend it—at 20 percent interest —to anyone in need. It’s to his credit that he learned the ropes as quickly as he did, having had no real schooling and speaking a painfully incorrect English that sounded less bad than it was because of the way Raphael’s Son uttered each word like it was an insult, harsh and withering and with as much confidence as if it had fallen straight out of Shakespeare’s mouth. Within a year of arriving in LA, he had registered dozens of corporations, all under the umbrella of the “Soleyman Development Group” (the group consisting only...

Share