Blazoned Days

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 managed to get out of Iraq, use

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.