In London I waited anxiously for news. The regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation. Shaul and I spoke on the phone; repeatedly we postponed my return, our mood wildly gyrating between unrealistic hopes that things would calm down and mounting evidence that the regime was near collapse. My two-week stay stretched into three, then four and five weeks. The shah left Iran on January 16, never to come back; Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1, 1979, greeted by a crowd of more than a million. Ten days later, with the army having declared its “neutrality,” people in Tehran rose up and overran government ministries, military barracks, police stations, and the radio and TV broadcasting centers. The monarchy had collapsed; an Islamic republic had taken its place.
Revolutions such as Iran’s are huge upheavals in the life of nations, overturning not only governments and institutions but the lives of every individual and family caught in the vortex. Both Shaul and I were deeply rooted in Iran. Everything we had built over a lifetime was there. On the other hand, the country was in turmoil. Armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime—many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist. Farrokhrou Parsa, the first woman cabinet minister in Iran and a former minister of education, was charged with “prostituting young girls,” placed in a sack, and executed by firing squad. Prime Minister Hoveyda, a friend of my parents whom I had known as a child, was given a summary trial and shot—in the middle of the night, on the rooftop or backstairs of a prison, it was reported. The Kayhan Organization, where Shaul worked, had been seized by the revolutionary government. Shaul had been offered a one-year visiting professorship at Princeton; reluctantly we decided that he would accept. Without admitting it to ourselves, we had agreed to leave Iran.
Shaul joined us in London in January 1980. He had managed to salvage a few of our belongings; but everything else—our home, property, careers, friends, family, the feel of the familiar—we left behind.
AMERICA
Shaul left London for Princeton in late January, and I followed in July, after Haleh finished school. Princeton was a quiet university town, very different from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Princeton campus was self-contained, and university life did not spill out into the small town very much. There were few coffee shops and fewer bookstores.
We lived for a year in a tiny two-story town house owned by the university, amid rented furniture and an assorted collection of dishes, cutlery, and kitchen appliances loaned by friends. Shaul had a one year contract, but we had no certainty of employment beyond that. The news out of Iran was uniformly grim. Disorder continued on the streets, on university campuses, and in government offices. I worried about my parents in Tehran, yet I felt helpless to do anything for them.
During my first week at Princeton I met Janina Issawi, whose husband, Charles, was a professor. Janina knew what it meant to be an exile. Polish by birth, she and her family had been rounded up by the Soviet army in World War II and sent to labor camps in Russia. Somehow, the family made it overland to Iran, then to Lebanon, where she studied at the American University of Beirut and met her future husband.
“Get yourself a house; put down some roots,” she told me, an easier proposition for Shaul than for myself, since he had attended boarding school outside of New York City as a teenager, as well as doing both his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard. Except for the eighteen months I spent in Cambridge in the mid-1960s, when I was preoccupied with a new baby, I did not know America. I had to get used to its sky, soil, and rhythms, to hearing English rather than Persian spoken around me. I had to start a new career. Yet I vowed to follow Janina’s sensible advice. We registered Haleh in school. We made a down payment on a house outside Princeton, got ourselves a secondhand car, planted our garden, and asked friends over. We began to put down roots, even though a bit of replanting from time to time proved inevitable.
Shaul taught at Princeton for two years and held fellowships at various research institutes for three, spending a year in North Carolina and another in Washington, D.C. This meant separation and long commutes. I started teaching Persian at the university, initially for only a couple of hours a week. Soon I was carrying a full teaching load. It was very satisfying work. I was eager to share my love of Persian language and literature with the students, and I formed strong bonds with many of them.
In 1985, Shaul was offered a professorship at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, not far from Washington. We moved again and purchased a house in Potomac, Maryland; but for the next few years I continued to teach at Princeton, and Shaul and I took turns commuting between Princeton and the Washington area.
In 1992, my teaching came to an end. I used two back-to-back fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center to write my book Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Based on interviews, the book profiled a number of Iranian women and the strategies by which they coped with the revolutionary upheaval in Iran. At the end of my Wilson Center fellowship, Robert Litwak, who directed the Division for International Studies, asked me to join his team on a parttime basis to start a small project on the Middle East. I plunged into my new task with energy. We began very modestly, but within a few years, the Middle East Program was one of the most active in the Washington area. We organized seminars, lectures, and conferences and invited speakers and participants from the Middle East, including Iran. I was pleased to be fostering dialogue between Iranians and Americans. I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, that such work could be construed as subversive by the country of my birth.
But as Ja’fari’s summons on that January morning reminded me, this was precisely the prospect I faced as I prepared for another round of interrogations at the Intelligence Ministry.
MR. JA’FARI HAD GIVEN ME an address in affluent north Tehran, off Africa Avenue. I realized when I stepped out of my taxi that this was a building I knew, even though I had never been inside. Before the revolution, it had been the home of a member of one of Iran’s leading industrial families. The house had been modeled after the Petit Trianon, the eighteenth-century palace Louis XV had built for his mistress Madame de Pompadour at Versailles, outside Paris. Expropriated by the new regime after the Islamic Revolution, it had been used for a time as a rehabilitation center for prostitutes. Rooms where the family had lived, raised children, and entertained their well-heeled guests were now a Ministry of Intelligence interrogation center. The walls around the garden were topped by barbed wire, naked and jagged against the blue Tehran sky.
The Intelligence Ministry has houses like these—anonymous, tucked away in residential areas—scattered about Tehran. The ministry, friends told me, even has rooms and suites in hotels, to keep an eye on foreign visitors and fellow Iranians. It was not uncommon, they said, to be summoned to a hotel for questioning.
I went not to the main gate of the “Petit Trianon” but, as instructed, to a side door, which had perhaps served as the servants’ entrance in the old days. A small sign by the door said only Passport Office—the kind of circumlocution beloved by the Intelligence Ministry, as if they wished to hide from Iranians and even from themselves the nature of their reprehensible business. Ministry of Intelligence offices in various government buildings were called “the President’s Bureaus.” My interrogator, Ja’fari, referred to himself and was known to others as the karshenas, “the specialist.” His superior didn’t have a name at all and was known simply as Hajj Agha, an honorific for a man who had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca.
I rang the bell. The door was opened by remote control. A young soldier in a glass cubicle set aside the book he was reading, took down my name and other particulars, carefully noted the time of my arrival, and pressed another buzzer to open a door to my right. I hardly knew what to anticipate.
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