Growing up Jewish in Tehran, Roya Hakakian never experienced anti-Semitism. Stories of her father’s boyhood in rural Iran, where Jews were not allowed to go to school on rainy days — the risk of Jewish “pollution” splashing on passers-by was deemed too great — seemed like bad fairy tales.
All that changed with the 1979 revolution. Almost from day one, the Islamic Republic’s mullahs relentlessly hammered Iran’s Jewish population. Among the victims, Roya Hakakian and her family, forced into exile from the only home they knew.
Living in the United States since 1985, Hakakian, 37, has embodied the American immigrant success story as well as anyone. The Connecticut-based journalist now turns memoirist with the publication of “Journey from the Land of No.” The book not only recounts her family history before and after the revolution, it also offers readers a rare inside view of that monumental event.
“It was important for me to be very precise when painting the political and social landscape,” Hakakian says by phone. “I spent time in the Princeton and Yale libraries, and borrowed archives from friends. I did what [writer] Grace Paley tells us to do: find out what I didn’t know about what I thought I knew.”
She paints a surprisingly warm portrait of close-knit family life in Tehran. Everyone feared the Shah’s secret police, but the Hakakians loved their country as it lurched toward modernity. However, the revolution and the advent of the mullahs marked a drastic change. The Islamic government saw Jews as Zionist tools, and little by little Jewish life in Iran vanished. For Hakakian, the teen years were a time of intimidation cloaked in a chador, the traditional Iranian Islamic garb for women.
“Twenty-five years of the Islamic Republic has almost undone 2,500 years of history,” says Hakakian. “But this happened not because there was a public rise in anti-Semitism among average Iranians. This was a campaign Islamic fundamentalists took up against ethnic minorities and all in Iranian society who didn’t follow them ideologically.”
From a community that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, there are now no more than 20,000 Jews left in Iran, most of them elderly. The rest have emigrated to the United States and Israel.
While many Americans have been quick to judge harshly the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hakakian says the revolution was a far more complicated event than meets the eye. In one chapter she describes an astonishing scene in which leading Iranian Jews meet with Ayatollah Khomeni, promising loyalty to his revolution and swearing they are not in league with Israel. Khomeni then issues a statement saying Iran’s Jews are OK.
That policy didn’t last. “In the case of Iran,” says Hakakian, “Jews have lived there far too long to make one categorical statement about the nature of their existence.”
Hakakian chose to write her memoir in English because “we are different people in different languages.” Had she written in Farsi, she continues, “I would have been somewhat intimidated. English makes me bolder. I can put away my demure Iranian upbringing.”
As for her Jewish upbringing, Hakakian admits she is not very observant, but she cherishes her Jewish identity. “Remembering is one of the most important characteristics by which I perceive my Jewishness,” she says. “We’re a people who do not forget.”
She has reveled in the richness of Jewish life in America. “In Iran, you had one kind of Jew, and not the amazing diversity you have here,” she says. “That fabulous diversity should be one more signal why democracy is wonderful. It allows us to be many.”
Hakakian’s life in America (which is not described at length in her book) has been good. She mastered English, attended college and became a TV news journalist for ABC and CBS, including a stint with “60 Minutes II.” She also studied poetry with Allen Ginsberg. But as much as she loves her adopted American homeland, she knows she will always have a Persian soul.
“I am two different people,” she says. “Sometimes I’m an entirely Persian person; other times, American. It’s an electricity that turns on and off, and I can’t seem to combine them. But Persian is a language I will always have a love affair with.”
That doesn’t mean she longs to return to Iran. Even if the progressive moment afoot there succeeds in overturning the mullahs, she intends to stay put in America.
“Go back?” she asks. “No. The Islamic Republic undid an ancient history and made us extinct. That’s devastating to me. I can’t put it out of my head. I cannot go back to a place where so much of what I knew is unwelcome.”
Roya Hakakian will have a book signing 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 8, at Cody’s Books, 2454 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley. Information: (510) 845-7852.
“Journey from the Land of No” by Roya Hakakian (256 pages, Crown Publishers, $23).