Rediscovering Judaism as an Iranian Refugee—Keynote Address at the Z3 Conference 2022
From her story about leaving Iran in 1978 to her experiences standing up for refugees and against antisemitism in recent years, Roya Hakakian explores the vast story that brought her to her proud Jewish identity today. Roya Hakakian is a poet, author, journalist and advocate for refugees. Every one of these roles is an offshoot of her own life experience as a child and teenager in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran and as an immigrant to the United States. Her poetry appears in many anthologies around the world, her books take a candid look at life under Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic regime and her documentaries tackle important issues like underage children in wars around the world.
Video Transcript
Z3 Project (00:04)
Good morning, everybody. ⁓ I can't tell you what a wonderful experience it is to be in a place where you're around people who are thinking about the issues that you're thinking about. It feels like, where was this tribe before? Why hadn't I run into it? ⁓ I want to thank ⁓ Zack and Amitai, who somehow found me. I'm not sure how, but I'm very grateful.
to be here and of course I want to thank whoever scheduled me after the Iraqi speaker, the Iranian to follow the Iraqi. No problem. Unity but not uniformity, it's okay. ⁓
So here we go.
In the mind of every conscientious individual, anyone who thinks it's her business to leave the world a little better than she came into it, there's always a mix. The mix is made up of concerns, experiences, and most importantly, formative stories swirling together. This is our personal moral cocktail.
It is this cocktail that determines who we are and what lives we will lead. Joan Didion said, we tell stories in order to live. But when it comes to our children, we tell stories in order to tell them how to live. Two stories more than any other make up the key ingredients of my moral cocktail. The first of the two is one that my father
one of Iran's leading Jewish educators for nearly 40 years, told and retold to us. It begins with the scene of a ceaseless rain in Khonsar, a town in central Iran, when my father was a small boy, sometime in the late 1930s. It had been an unusually wet October.
It had poured for four consecutive days and my restless father, a boy of nine or 10, could not go to school until the rain stopped. My father's family was one of few Jewish families who lived among a strict community of Shiite Muslims in that area, which happened to be in the most religiously conservative region of Iran, a place close to Qom.
the world's greatest Shiite center. The locals deemed Jews najis, meaning dirty, because Jews did not perform the washing ritual which Muslims performed before praying. On rainy days, Jews were not allowed to leave home, lest the water splashing off their bodies fall on the body of a Muslim passerby and defile them.
This, among other restrictions, was the Iranian equivalent of Jim Crow. On the fifth day of rain, my grandmother waged a small rebellion. She grabbed my father's hand, and together they marched to the school and into the principal's office. There, my grandmother fell onto her knees and begged the principal to let her son return to class.
An official from Tehran, a superintendent of sorts, who happened to be in town that week, overheard my grandmother. Moved by her plea, he decided to intervene. He grabbed my father's hand and stormed into my father's classroom and interrupted the teacher. He asked the student to fetch a glass of water.
When the boy returned with the glass, the superintendent handed it to my father and ordered him to take a sip.
eager to please, my father had taken a huge gulp. Then he had snatched a glass from my father's hand, drank what was left in it, and slammed it on the desk before him as he roared. If this water is good enough for me, it's good enough for all of you. From now on, this boy will be coming to class in all kinds of weather.
My father always ended this anecdote by saying, with that glass of water, that decent man washed nagesh, majes, and all that nonsense down for good. From that day on, my father went to school, regardless of the weather.
My father told us this story for many reasons, to uplift us, of course, to tell us who his mother was. But most of all, he told it to us to remind us that one must always challenge the status quo, resist bigotry, and rely on courageous others to come forward and join us in the fight. He wanted us to know
that he had encountered anti-Semitism, yes, but he had also encountered those who, though they themselves were not affected by that anti-Semitism, would strongly object to it.
The Greeks had taught us that stories are about heroes and kings, exceptional people who have a triumphant or tragic end. Jewish history, gave us the opposite. The Jewish view is that life itself is sacred more than anything else in the world, and human beings are the supreme beings on Earth. So in the Jewish narrative,
It is ordinary human beings who rise to the ranks of heroes and kings. My father's story would not fit the Greek mold because in it there is not one but three common people who each become heroes in their own right. The first is my father who loved learning and hated not going to school. The second is my grandmother, a Jewish woman.
who both as a woman and a Jew was expected to be submissive and keep only to her home and family, but refused. The third is the superintendent. The story's first hero, my father, made a happy ending. He went on to college, one of the first in his generation to do so, joined the military, and reached the ranks of a second lieutenant, a rare thing.
for a Jewish man and eventually immigrated to America. My grandmother lived a peaceful life and died of old age in Iran. The third hero is who I most wonder about, that superintendent. He had to have been an idealist, a serious reader, a dreamer, an educated urbanite,
who had been exposed to great ideas and wanted to bring them to his country. Freedom, egalitarianism, tolerance. He was probably on the streets demonstrating during the heady days that led to the 1979 revolution in Iran in the hopes of getting rid of a monarch and establishing a democratic society, everything that has evaded Iran ever since.
His children or grandchildren surely are the very generation who are now on the streets today fighting for the same things as their parents and grandparents had.
Now here is the second story.
one that I was witness to myself. This is how this one begins. It was 1978, the year that Iran was in the throes of its last revolution, which overthrew the monarchy. Demonstrations had swept through the country, including in Khonsar, my father's childhood town, where my aunt and her husband and his two brothers together had a fabric business.
Sometime on an afternoon in December, a chain of powerful knocks pounded on the door of our Tehran home, rattling it in its frame. My father buzzed the caller in. It was his sister, Mu'nafar. Her face blurred behind a stream of tears. My father was so alarmed that he did not greet her and only cried out to her, what was wrong? Hearing this,
she erupted into a frenzy of words and sobs. There had been a huge demonstration in Khonsar the day before, which at the end had led to a looting. A mob had broken into my aunt's fabric store and set the place on fire, chanting, Jews get lost.
The store had been far more than a store to my aunt's family. It was also their safety deposit box since, for years, they had tucked all their savings in the rolls of the cloth. The store had also been their home since my aunt and her family lived above it on the second floor. The fire turned everything they ever owned into a heap of ash in a matter of hours. My aunt, uncle,
and his two brothers, their wives and their combined 18 children were suddenly left both penniless and homeless.
Any other family would have been ruined by that experience, but they were not. There was still a place they could turn to. A few days later, they headed for Israel.
As readers, we are told stories are meant to set our imagination free. But some stories are meant to burden our imagination, to make us think about what is discomforting and inconvenient. The story of this arson has always been just that for me. Over the years, much of my work as a writer
has simply been to make sense of these two tales and reconcile them with each other. In the same city where a Shiite man drank from the same glass as my father's and thus made it possible for him to get an education, a band of thugs setting fire to the town's last Jewish outpost had ended the history of Jewish life there, a history so ancient.
that it preceded that of the Muslims in that town.
How does one attach evil to the end of good? In claiming our histories and identities, can we claim only what is defensible? Can we disown our histories? Should we? Every time I sit down to write, no matter the topic, these questions turn in my mind before I begin.
When I first came to the United States, I was stunned to hear some Iranians call themselves Persians. I suppose by using the ancient name, they were disowning Iran, hoping to instead associate themselves with the land of Scheherazade, long-haired cats and beautiful rugs. I could see why. It's not been easy being Iranian in the US or anywhere in the West for that matter.
Once I took a taxi in New York City and the driver, who did not speak much English, insisted on making conversation. He asked where I was from. At first, he did not understand what I said, but after a few attempts, he ran his hand across his neck to sign a beheading and said, ah, Iran, yes?
2,500 years of history now had a meat cleaver for a shorthand. Cyrus the Great must have been rolling over in his grave. It is hard to claim the land of dangerous mullahs, angry mobs, chanting death to Israel and America, where a woman can be beaten to death because a few strands of her hair had peeked from under the scarf. But there's also a beautiful language.
a long-standing literary tradition, especially of poetry, a warm and generous people like that superintendent whose act of courage would be lost if it weren't matched with another act of decency.
The truth is that the meat cleaver, Cyrus the Great, Esther and Mordecai, and the Holocaust denying high officials are all products of the same land. All of these contradictory forces, complexity is what makes up my birthplace.
In praising the value of complexity, the author Salman Rushdie, who in an interview with the BBC was asked what he thought of the many atrocities that took place in the Balkans during the 1990s, said that the most important lesson to take away from those wars was that the quest for racial purity is foolish, and we would all be better off forgoing purity and accept...
and accepting a little bit of dirt instead.
In essence, he was saying that all nations have a mixed history of proud and not so proud past, and rather than deny the shameful aspects or disown history, we must claim the entire imperfect narrative. To be an Iranian is a complicated inheritance. But inheritances are not simply the things we are handed. They're also the things we shape
and make our own. Wrestling with the difficult aspects, understanding them, recasting them, or changing them are what gives order to our minds and a sense of purpose to our lives in the times of chaos and confusion. We must engage with criticism and form our responses to it because our intellectual health depends on it.
Every time we turn away from what discomforts us or proves to be intellectually difficult to tackle, every time we disown what seems hard to wrap our minds around and walk away, we leave a vacuum which will inevitably get filled with mayhem, or worse, with evil.
The taxing negotiation I do to define myself as an Iranian is something I must replicate at least twice more for two other countries and causes. The first for my adopted homeland, for America. In 2016, when anti-immigrant sentiments had reached a fever pitch and we were hearing voices saying, our country is full or
Why can't we have more Norwegians coming in? Or we should no longer accept immigrants who do not speak English, have any skills, or don't come with money. Which happens to be precisely how I had been, how I had come to the United States without English, without skills, and with only a backpack to my name.
I then set out to write a book in defense of the immigrant and America as I knew her, the land that had opened its doors onto me and the likes of me. The America whose promise was, I believe, contrary to what those politicians were trying to shape her into. In 2016, America was another inheritance I had to own and shape for myself.
yet for a third country, for Israel. And in defense of my Jewish identity, I put myself through the same exercise.
I had to do it when a swastika appeared on the wall of the boys' bathroom in my son's fancy private elementary school one day. The next day, the swastika had been wiped clean. Then, to educate the staff and the students, a Holocaust survivor had come to address the community, which really meant that the school's cure for a tiny tragic
tragic incident had been to treat it with another outsized tragic experience.
What most students said after that event was how amazed they were that a person so old who had suffered so much could still walk and talk, but they didn't say much more. Tragedy, I explained to my son, was one piece, but there are other pieces too. Joy is another. For instance, the joy of watching the Torah
emerge from the ark on Sabbath mornings. As a writer, I have never ceased to be amazed by the notion that I belong to the world's most ancient book club.
So devoted are the members of this book club, so stubborn, that they have kept reading the same book over and over again.
for centuries. So passionate they are about this book that they have choreographed they worship around it. During every service, they rise to their feet when the book comes out into the view. They reverently pass the book to that day's honoree, whose privilege it is to carry it, press it to her chest, tightly as if it were a living thing made of flesh and blood.
The honoree circles the sanctuary while others reach to kiss the book. ⁓ what great fuss they make over this book. Someone then lifts the book up like a boastful champion holding up a prize and turns in every direction, then march a proud march to an ornate arc dressed the bejeweled book in an elegant fabric.
and shelve it until another week. That's a hell of a bestseller.
There is not a week that I don't say to myself, I wish I'd written that. And this is not just any kind of joy. It is not rooted in the worship of a revered figure, but a revered text. And that distinction shapes every large and small thing that follows, most of all, the entire annual calendar.
Those who have not lived under a theocratic rule cannot appreciate what this, in fact, means to the daily order of life. Rather than mark the births and the deaths of prophets, saints, imams, and other notable figures, it is the chapter that tells the cycles within the book that order the Jewish sense of time. Rather than mourn or celebrate the individual, the Jewish tradition
marks its main observances by reading yet another book uniquely written for that occasion. The joy is the relief that sets in from always being called upon to engage with the text, learn the narrative, reflect, discuss, and of course, finally, eat. To counter an aberration like the swastika, invoking the memory of the Holocaust is one piece.
The other is recounting all the unique beauty of this ancient tradition. We exercise to keep physically fit, meditate to keep mentally fit. To keep intellectually fit, we must create pairings. Pair the story of an arson with that of the superintendent. Pair the political vitriol of those who wish to turn our land of
of immigrants into a private club void of the authentic and richness of its immigrant history. Pair the ugly anti-Jewish accounts of bigotry not simply with the remembrance of other tragedies, but with the beauties inherent in the exercise of the tradition. We underestimate beauty if we think of it
as something pleasant to the eye. Beauty is also an antidote to the mark that evil wishes to leave on its subjects. Extremism thrives on uniformity and ubiquity of a single narrative. Extremism needs a Manichaean universe. Extremism bleaches all colors into only black and white. Our task
is to see, our task is to see the nuance and take the trouble of coping with complexities. Our task is to recognize all these complicated ingredients and make our own moral cocktail for our sake and for the sake of our future generations. Thank you so much.
