Ladies of Iran Rise and Revolt: On Dora Levy Mossanen’s “Love and Warfare within the Jewish Quarter”

JANUARY 29, 2023

SOLEIMAN YARAN, the Iranian Jewish physician on the coronary heart of Dora Levy Mossanen’s World Warfare II–period novel Love and Warfare within the Jewish Quarter, has a doubtlessly lethal drawback. The primary dentist in Iran to have entry to novocaine, the Parisian-educated Yaran is ordered to heal the opium-ravaged enamel of Tehran’s highly effective governor basic, however there may be one small drawback: Yaran is forbidden to the touch the affected person’s mouth.

Like many Iranians on the time, the governor basic believes that Jews are “najes,” or ritually impure, and thus able to contaminating something or anybody, whether or not a vessel of water or human flesh. Excruciating ache lastly forces the governor basic to demand that Yaran wash his palms in a bowl of permanganate. Yaran is aware of he could also be killed for opting to sanitize with alcohol. The truth is, he is aware of he might simply lose his head if he fails to cease the person’s ache, a state of affairs made much more harmful as a result of novocaine may be lethal if administered to an opium addict. However for the antisemitic governor basic, identified to hateful locals as “the Land Eater,” the lifetime of a Jew issues lower than one flower bud amongst tens of hundreds within the poppy fields and opium factories flanking his ominous mansion.

Mossanen’s newest novel, a luscious work of historic fiction in a file that features Harem (2002), Courtesan (2005), The Final Romanov (2012), and Scent of Butterflies (2014), sheds a crucial gentle on two points of Iranian historical past that stay comparatively unknown to many. First, it highlights the discriminatory and inhumane najasat (ritual impurity) practices imposed on Iranian Jews, with the worst interval extending from Safavid rule within the sixteenth century to the 1900s. As a part of these practices, Jews weren’t allowed to stroll outdoors throughout rain or snow, in order to not contaminate the overall inhabitants, and had been mandated to construct their entryways particularly low, forcing them to bow to Muslim neighbors when leaving their properties.

The novel’s second main contribution is that it highlights Iran’s function within the rising theater of the Center East throughout the Second World Warfare, when Adolf Hitler, whom German propaganda broadcasts on Iranian radio known as “the Shiite Messiah,” was inching nearer to the nation’s borders. Aerial bombardments from the Anglo-Soviet occupation ravaged the skies and British, American, and Russian troops aroused the anger of hundreds of thousands of Iranians. And through that point, Iran, the identical nation whose supreme chief right this moment makes use of Twitter to disclaim the Holocaust, gave refuge to just about 1,000 Jewish youngsters from Poland, lots of them orphans.

Mossanen’s story begins in 1941, the 12 months the West deposed Reza Shah, the Iranian chief who, in 1925, overthrew the Qajar dynasty. Western powers favored his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who served because the shah of Iran from 1941 to 1979. Very like his up to date, Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Reza Shah created a historic marketing campaign of modernization and secularization that, nearly 100 years later, anti-regime demonstrators, who demand a secular Iran right this moment, memorialize as they chant his identify within the streets. However over 80 years in the past, the West feared Reza Shah’s rising susceptibility to the lure of Nazi energy. Britain additionally feared shedding its Iranian oil fields, and the Allies understood the potential catastrophe of the all-important Trans-Iranian Railway falling into German palms.

Towards this chaotic backdrop, Mossanen presents one other world, the smaller ecosystem of Tehran’s Jewish Quarter (most massive Iranian cities had Jewish quarters that restricted the unfold of “contaminated” Jews among the many basic inhabitants). It’s amid this cramped squalor that Mossanen introduces us to Dr. Yaran, his larger-than-life spouse Ruby, and their extraordinary daughter Neda, a toddler who possesses the expressive language expertise of an adolescent. Different necessary characters embrace Jacob, who’s determined to safe the required papers to allow Polish Jewish baby refugees to maneuver completely to then-Necessary Palestine, and Aunt Shamsi, whom Mossanen deploys as a warning in opposition to the cruelty of Outdated-World superstition when it’s weaponized to assign blame for loss of life and tragedy.

Even the Quarter Idiot takes his rightful place among the many forged of memorable characters who enliven Tehran’s outdated Jewish Quarter, permitting readers who might know little or no about Jewish life in Iran a glimpse into this once-vibrant neighborhood. Earlier than the 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and turned Iran right into a fanatic theocracy, over 100,000 Jews lived within the nation, an historic neighborhood relationship again 2,700 years. Immediately, roughly 8,000–10,000 Jews stay in Iran, constituting the most important Jewish inhabitants within the Center East after Israel. Their destiny was fragile within the Forties and stays much more fragile right this moment.

By comparability along with her different works, Yaran is Mossanen’s first male protagonist, and the plot weaves a fancy story of forbidden love, because the Jewish dentist yearns for the Muslim spouse of the governor basic, a intelligent, rebellious younger girl named Velvet. On this as in earlier novels, Mossanen is a grasp at growing feminine characters who stun readers at practically each flip. However she additionally demonstrates a exceptional intuitiveness in regards to the psychology of gender in Forties Iran, a time when a girl was handled as nearly the property of her husband. (Demonstrators in Iran are presently preventing in opposition to such misogynistic practices that the theocratic regime has upheld for 45 years, for the reason that onset of the Iranian Revolution.)

The novel’s warnings in regards to the similarities between the struggles of Iranian girls within the Forties and right this moment appear fairly prescient, given the present revolution underway in Iran to oust the regime and set up a secular democracy. Although Mossanen started writing Love and Warfare within the Jewish Quarter in 2016, allusions to the pent-up rage of oppressed Iranian girls that’s driving the revolution in Iran right this moment leap off the e book’s pages like red-flag warnings. Most notable amongst these are the lyrical phrases of Ghamar-Al-Molouk Vaziri, a real-life classical singer referred to as “the Queen of Persian music,” who, in a single chapter, sings: “The nation is a large number. The nation is asleep. Ladies of Iran rise and revolt.” Into this simmering kettle of Persian tea enters the tragic character of Tulip, a younger eunuch who serves as an indispensable member of the governor basic’s family employees and who’s a part of the story’s extraordinary denouement. It’s nearly as if the destiny of Iranian Jewry itself rests on this closing chapter.

Mossanen, who was born to an Iranian household in Israel and moved to Iran on the age of 9, depends on a mix of fictional and real-life characters, reminiscent of Queen Fawzia, the primary spouse of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom Yaran should additionally deal with for her tooth ache. However it’s Yaran himself who straddles the best line between truth and fiction; the character’s profession trajectory relies on Mossanen’s late grandfather, Habib Levy, who was born in Tehran’s Jewish ghetto in 1896 and wrote the primary scholarly e book dedicated to Iranian Jewry, the seminal Complete Historical past of the Jews of Iran: The Outset of the Diaspora (1999). Levy, who was educated in Paris, was additionally the primary Jewish officer within the Iranian military. Nevertheless it was his function as the private dentist of Reza Shah that almost all knowledgeable Mossanen’s Dr. Yaran.

At occasions, the extent of Mossanen’s analysis, as revealed in even the smallest particulars, is staggering, and invitations the query of whether or not readers really want to know the precise names of the run-down streets in Tehran’s Jewish quarter or the exact gadgets in a soldier’s food-ration bag. However such particulars finally show a present moderately than a diversion. Because of Mossanen’s practically obsessive analysis, the creator earns — and retains — the belief of readers, enabling us to satisfy the one valuable purpose of fine historic fiction: to quickly escape our present-day actuality and permit ourselves to be transported to worlds beforehand unknown.

In doing so, Mossanen — who, like tens of hundreds of Jews, left Iran in 1979 and settled in Los Angeles, the place she resides right this moment — performs an act of affection and repair for the neighborhood of Iranian Jewry worldwide. Studying the novel is like taking a Google Earth tour of Iran’s former Jewish Quarter, and although this space is lengthy gone (in some instances, it has been intentionally razed), Mossanen’s work ensures that the desires and nightmares of those that as soon as occupied these haunted areas by no means die. In the end, her work, although fiction, builds on the contribution of her legendary grandfather in documenting and bringing to life the expertise of Iranian Jewry over centuries.

Whereas her analysis is meticulous, Mossanen’s prose appeals deeply to the senses: a feast of language through which one can nearly odor the divine scent of roses that follows Velvet and drives Yaran to close insanity. Described because the Isabel Allende of Persia for her work’s magical realism, Mossanen has the facility to depart readers recoiling in terror on the powers of a toddler’s eerie mushroom patch or a neighbor’s door that, witnesses swear, cries tears of despair. Her vivid descriptions transport us to, amongst different locations, the looming mansion of the governor basic: “It’s early afternoon and a bitter odor of sin wafts off the sweating poppy fields. The encompassing mountains are all laborious stone, portray all the pieces with a veneer of sorrow.”

These born after 1979 might view Iran by means of a slim lens of fanatical ayatollahs, gender oppression, and state-sponsored terror. Iranians themselves are likely to romanticize the years previous the 1979 revolution, however, as Mossanen demonstrates, Iran throughout World Warfare II was additionally a depressing time for hundreds of thousands. Those that learn Mossanen’s novel with the express purpose of evaluating and contrasting pre- and postrevolutionary Iran are lacking the purpose; the novel’s most necessary achievement is just not that it glamorizes prerevolutionary Iran (it doesn’t) however that it affords a vastly completely different image of the nation than the one we now have seen for the previous 4 a long time.

Given its themes of forbidden love, wealthy with blush-worthy embraces and defiance of husbands, and its characterization of presidency officers as corrupt opium addicts, Love and Warfare within the Jewish Quarter would by no means see the sunshine of day in Iran underneath the present theocratic regime. However with the historic revolution underway in Iran right this moment, maybe subsequent 12 months or the 12 months following, Mossanen might discover herself studying excerpts from the novel in a free and democratic Iran, within the presence of Jews, Muslims, and an awesome variety of newly liberated girls.

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Tabby Refael is an award-winning, Los Angeles–based mostly author and weekly columnist for The Jewish Journal of Larger Los Angeles.