Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman

2 | My Grandmother's House

Chapter Two 8 MY G RANDMOTHE R’S HOUSE On a cold day in January of , two years after my parents’ wedding, my mother, age fifteen, gave birth to me at Morsalin Hospital, a missionary facility . My birth sealed her place in my father’s family, the family she had contemplated leaving every day. Learning that other imported brides had simply taken the bus back home, she had begged my father for a divorce. He refused. She didn’t have money for a bus ticket anyway; and having spent most of her time at home, she didn’t know the city well enough to find the station. And even if she could, where was home and who wanted her? With my birth, her hope of running away and escaping her life in Shiraz ended. At the same time, she felt that maybe she finally had something of her own—a little girl who would alleviate her deep loneliness among strangers, a daughter to listen to her story, to sympathize with her saga of pain, abandonment , and abuse. Instead, I distanced myself from her constant retelling of the same tale. What did she expect of me? That I would be the historian of her life, conspiring against my father, grandmother, aunts, and uncles? Impossible! Giving birth in Iran was often a family affair. Women of the family came as they heard the news of a family member or a neighbor in labor. They used pillows to support the pregnant woman’s back, spread fresh ashes underneath her thighs, and rested her legs on top of bricks. They brought in chai and aromatic drinks, sweets and nuts, a freshly prepared waterpipe, and all their gossip. They sat around the room talking and laughing to distract the woman in labor from her pain. They ate, sang, and exchanged gossip while the mother-to-be screamed and cursed. Once in a while, a guest would tell the screaming mother, “Calm down, you think you are the only woman who’s ever been in labor?” [] If they felt the labor had lasted a long time and the mother and child were in danger, they prayed, “O, God! Let one body emerge from the other. Let one life separate from another.” My mother had witnessed this ritual a few times, once walking out in disgust as women tried to drown the screams in their own laughter. She made my father promise that she would give birth in a hospital. She didn’t tell him that she didn’t want the women to stare down her open legs as they cracked watermelon seeds. Instead, she convinced my father that the midwife’s dirty hands and unsanitary conditions at home could infect both her and their child. To the family’s chagrin, my father sided with her. Even in hospitals, it was essential for women to help one another in childbirth. Mothers followed their daughters through the pregnancy, labor, and birth, and were often present in the birthing room. My aunt Shams once helped her daughter give birth when the doctors at Namazi HospiMy Grandmother’s House [] On the back of my baby picture, my father wrote, “Farideh is actually a pretty child but she wouldn’t sit still for a picture.” tal, a newly built modern facility, were busy and didn’t believe that my pregnant cousin knew that her baby was ready to see the world. Years later, when I was visiting one of my aunts at the same hospital where I was born, I witnessed the birthing of a baby. The dark waiting room was filled with women from the surrounding villages. It smelled of the fresh soil of wheat farms, the pungent sweat of horses and sheep, the greens of fava bean pods. As the head nun screamed at a Ghashghai woman from a nomadic tribe outside Shiraz that it was not yet her time, the women of her family surrounded her in their multi-skirt costumes and long colorful head covers, reached under the layers of red, green, and gold fabric around her waist, and pulled out a screaming, slippery baby, right there, squatting over the dirty floor. The nun ran to them in her long dark robe, her hair covered in white fabric, her face tired and weary from long hours on her feet, and pushed them away as if they were primitives who had rushed God’s work. Since...