Where the Shah Went Alone

Meditations on a life under tyranny

Iraj Isaac Rahmim from the July 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

My grandfather valued order, cleanliness, and the rule of law above all else. He was born and raised in a provincial town in the mountains of western Iran, at a time when ethnic conflicts, government corruption, religious intolerance, and western colonial dominance made daily life a risky venture. He ran away from his home in the Jewish ghetto at 16 to go to Baghdad, then a commercial center, was robbed down to his underwear in the frozen winter, returned home humiliated, and ran away again. For a while he took jobs as a driver or mechanic for the British. Then he met my grandmother, married, and settled again in his provincial birthplace, where he worked as a driver for many years before starting a truck parts business.

Once, when he was a young man delivering a car to Tehran, he encountered a crowd blocking the road. He forced the car through the crowd, inch by inch, until he found himself at the center of the gathering face to face with Reza Shah himself.

"What are you doing, man?" the Shah asked my grandfather.

"Delivering an automobile, Your Excellency," my grandfather replied in his deep Kurdish accent. Then he bowed.

The Shah laughed and waved him through. "He knew I was just an uneducated provincial driver," explained my grandfather. "He was a fair man."

I imagine when one has grown up where highway-men rob you naked in midday, where the government has been corrupt and randomly lawless for generations, where foreign powers come and go, where religious persecution is the unquestioned routine, one craves order, security, and clarity about the consequences of one's actions. And so a Reza Shah or even a Mussolini or Stalin are accepted and admired in their own time, and wistfully remembered by the old once they are gone and the land has settled back into its ancient and familiar chaos.

As a child, I could not make sense of the social structure in Iran, whose elements were personally beneficial to me in some ways but not in others.

Growing up, I found that it was good to be the son of a doctor, of a professor, of people of relative comfort. In fact, it was good to be a son. It was also good to be apolitical, as we were.

It was not good to be Jewish or Baha'i, or Christian or Zoroastrian. (We did not know of any other options.) I felt that being Christian (mostly Armenians and the rumored-
to-exist-but-never-seen Assyrians of western Iran) was better. They were not mocked by friends, avoided by strangers, or put down by teachers as we Jews were. (That didn't happen often in my family's protected circle, but once or twice in a lifetime is enough.) Armenians seemed jolly people. They sang and danced, had fun accents, owned most of the delis in town, and sold liquor. I remember thinking that Zoroastrians were not so badly off either. Their population, at least in Tehran, seemed small enough for them to be considered a relic of the nation's 3,000-year-old fire-worshipping past. (I imagined their children placing the dead bodies of their parents atop mountains to be devoured by vultures, as Zoroastrians were said to do. It seemed very cool.)

My mother admonished us not to go out on Ashura, the day of mourning for a Shi'ite imam killed at the dawn of Islam. If we did go out, we were not to wear red, smile, let it be known that we were Jewish, or eat in public. To my child's mind, this had no internal logic. Here was a holiday where throngs come to the streets tearing at their clothes and beating their bodies with such passion and ferocity that the uninitiated passerby might easily think they were mourning the recent death of a loved one, not that of the innocent son of Ali 14 centuries earlier. All we knew as children was that being Jewish plus wearing red plus Ashura equaled certain death, or at least a beating.

I first noticed dissent in my early teens. At an aunt's wedding, following the rabbi's flowery invocations for the health of the Shah, a family friend refused to say "amen." He did so quietly, without making a point of it, and only my mother and I noticed because we stood beside him. I was 13.

The next year I spent some summer weeks in a small British fishing village. I was supposed to study English, but mostly I ditched class and took the train to London with my Iranian classmates. (What liberating discoveries these were, both the trains and the freedom from parental oversight.) During one trip to central London, I was horrified to see "Death to the Shah" graffiti on public buildings, in Persian and English. I recounted these to my English family that night, nearly in tears. Until then I had known of no overt dissatisfaction with, and no strong opposition to, our way of life. Life was simple and well-organized. Its outlines and limitations were provided by the government and assented to by my elders, to my innocent eyes willingly and happily. I did not know -- nor did it matter to me at the time, I suppose -- that our comfort was not the result of a social contract among free citizens, that our seemingly modern and secular society was only so at the surface, ready to burst from its own contradictions. Nor had I understood the reality of our lives as middle-class members of a religious minority group, perched at the intersection of fear and comfort.

As a teenager, I was envious of the very rich and powerful and of the royalty. I wanted to be like them. Thanks to my parents' positions as successful doctors, we were close enough to the powerful to observe their lives but did not have as much money ourselves. Once we went to a house, a mansion really, to drop off my sister with a classmate. The house had two-story balconies with columns, an exterior grand staircase that reminded me of the scale of Persepolis, and a large, gated garden. After that I fantasized for hours about living in such a house and having several maids and butlers instead of our one. Our reality, our averageness, seemed intolerable.

I sometimes behaved mysteriously in front of people to appear more exceptional than I was. In high school, which was unique to begin with -- among the top schools for overachievers in the country, built by wealthy Jews thrown out of Iraq after 1948 -- I pretended that my father was a Savaki, that he carried a gun, and that he could have anyone -- teachers, the principal, and the bullies or their parents -- arrested and tortured on a whim. In the streets I talked into my watch, pretending to be a Savaki myself, keeping the masses in their place. Around friends I wasted money, once literally pulling small bills out of my pocket and throwing them one by one to the wind as we walked down the street. Yes, I was wealthy enough to waste.

I made up stories about my ancestry. I pretended that my grandfather had been a horseman and a bandit who raided Iraqi prisons with his gang and freed political and religious prisoners. "There is a price on his head," I would claim proudly with a mysterious smile, "to this day." The truth is that, though he crossed the Iran-Iraq border many times in his life, mostly illegally, this was for family and business reasons and was not uncommon for the times.