Blazoned Days

Few people went on vacations in 1950s Iran.  To leave the country, one had to pay a hefty exit tax and to travel inside Iran meant driving over miles of rough, unpaved roads with few stopping places.  My family hadn’t taken a vacation together that I remember.  There are pictures of my mother, sister, aunt and uncle at the Caspian Sea before I was born, but in my memory, the first vacation we took as a family was when I was nine, and we went to Hamadan.  That said, my father didn’t join us on this vacation; it was my mother, my two sisters and my baby brother who went.  My uncle drove us there, the one who had taught my mother to drive. Intrepid as my mother was, she wouldn’t have braved dirt roads, flat tires, car repairs, miles of wilderness, and no maps or road signs.  Travelling outside Tehran was a fairly primitive and intuitive affair.  One stopped wherever there was a village to ask for directions and to have punctured tires fixed.  We too...

It was always a treat to be taken to the office with my father when I was a child.  It was a treat to be selected as the one to go to the office.  It was a treat to rummage around in the loft that held the samples of goods that my father imported.  It was a treat to date correspondence with a stamp that recorded the date and number of letter copies.  Best of all treats was getting café glacé.  Whenever my father took any of us to the office, it was a given that we also got this delicious concoction.  My father would send the office boy to Osman’s, a bakery nearby that specialized in coffee; everything in the shop smelled and was flavored by coffee.  The delectable café glacé consisted of a little iced coffee, a lot of heavy cream, and a large scoop of ice cream, and one had to sip it through a straw to get the right combination of all the ingredients.  I have tried to recreate this treat, but the one in my memory always wins. Fortified with...

My mother was the first woman driver in Iran, and for about a decade, she was the only licensed one. In the family, we knew that, since driving with her always attracted immense attention, but my mother got confirmation of that fact. Women started getting licenses and driving in Iran in moderate numbers in the mid-1970s, and harassing them was great sport for the resentful men who thought women had no business driving. My mother’s purse was stolen some time in the 1970s along with her driver’s license, and she went to get a replacement. She was always assiduous about memorizing her license number and the license plate number of our car. She gave the clerk at the licensing office the number of her driver’s license and he went to look for it. He returned to tell her there was no such license number. She repeated the number and assured him it was hers. He responded that only men had numbers with that prefix (the licenses were segregated by gender for fear of cross contamination, o...

In 1961 I met my father’s side of the family.  Up until then, they had been trapped in Bagdad , but that summer, they escaped to New York , where one of my uncles lived.  My parents had left Iraq before I was born and had settled in Iran .  As Jews, they could not return to Iraq after the formation of Israel in 1948, because my father was accused of being a Zionist, so his property in Iraq was confiscated and our family was declared stateless.  Most of the rest of the family was trapped in Iraq , so I hadn’t met them. The government of Iraq refused to allow Jews to leave the country, fearing that they would go to Israel. A few of my mother’s family members had escaped to Iran or Israel, but for the most part, my father’s family was imprisoned by accident of birth.  To me, the Iraqi relatives remained spectral until 1961.  Iran, in contrast to the other Moslem countries in the Middle East, was open to all refugees. My mother’s relatives, who had ma...

Hello and welcome to my new blog! Over the years many people have suggested that I write a memoir, a very daunting task. On these pages I'll be jotting down memories from my childhood in Iran through my school days in England and years beyond. The title, Blazoned Days, comes from a Wallace Stevens poem: From this the poem springs That we live in a world that's not our own And much more not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.