Dalia Sofer’s first novel, “The Septembers of Shiraz,” is the story of a year in the life of a Jewish family in Tehran, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, when their comfortable life is interrupted by the arrest of their father on September 20, 1981. The opening words of the novel convey how life can change in a moment:
When Isaac Amin sees two men with rifles walk into his office at half past noon on a warm autumn day in Tehran, his first thought is that he won’t be able to join his wife and daughter for lunch, as promised.
“Brother Amin?” the shorter of the men says.
Isaac nods. A few months ago they took his friend Kourosh Nassiri, and just weeks later news got around that Ali the baker had disappeared.
“We’re here by orders of the Revolutionary Guards.” The smaller man points his rifle directly at Isaac and walks toward him, his steps too long for his legs. "You are under arrest, Brother.”
The novel approaches Isaac’s arrest and brutal incarceration from multiple vantage points: not only that of Isaac himself, but his wife Farnaz, his nine-year old daughter Shirin, his 18-year old son Parviz, their Iranian housekeeper (and possible thief and spy) Habibeh, and Issac’s interrogator (and former prisoner of the Shah) Mohsen, among others. It is a complex portrait, written in deceptively understated sentences.
Along the way Sofer interjects numerous observations about the uncertainty of life, the loss of home and youth, the fragility of friendship and love. Early in the novel Parviz, who is in New York to study architecture, but bereft of home and money, sits in class watching a professor’s presentation on California homes:
How clean these homes all seem, how simple and sunny and cheerful, carrying within their uncomplicated lines the promise of docile decades spend in the same town, on the same street, in the same house, but offering no protection against the tedium that accompanies all of that. Looking at the images he realizes that his classmates — congenial and starched and essentially unharmed — are products of such homes.
Lost in America, Parviz takes a job in the cleaner run by Zalman Mendelson, a Hasidic Jew who seems almost “the ideal advertisement for the fulfilled life.” Around him, Parviz sees:
the old man walking home, the fringes of his tallit peering from the bottom of his jacket, a reminder, to himself and to the rest of the world, of who he is. All these people, gathered here from Warsaw and Berlin and Krakow – the residue of a generation – have a private history, a log of losses and longings, the specter of their dead interrupting their days. And yet life goes on here, as elsewhere in the world. Milk must be bought, bread broken, shoes shined, dreams dreamt.
Parviz’s story is about the growing attraction to him of the “secure but stringent world” of the Mendelsons, as opposed to his own –“an unmarked road where visibility is poor.” Farnaz’s story is about coming to terms with the upheaval in her country and her marriage, and “[h]ow could a life as orderly as hers had been turn into such chaos in such a short time? . . . What an illusion, she thinks, the idea of an ordered, ordinary life.”
Isaac’s story is one of a person neither religious nor political, caught up in an historical maelstrom: In prison, he is placed in a cell with a former teacher and one of his students, who had supported the revolution but not wholeheartedly enough. The teacher explains to Isaac:
“Actually, he is like so many of my students, arrogant and idealistic. It was infectious for a while, that idealism.”
“And you got caught up in it?”
“I don’t know. There was a feeling that something was happening, and that we were the ones who were making it happen. We wanted to put an end to the monarchy. We thought we were cheering for democracy. So many different groups marched together – the Communists, the Labor Party, the Party of the Masses, you name it. Add to that the religious fundamentalists. What brought us together was our hatred for the shah. But there wasn’t much else to keep us together. In the end, we unleashed a monster.”
In the end, however, the stories are personal ones, with politics, religion and history simply the backdrop of an unending human need, expressed in Isaac’s thoughts as he is given a few hours of fresh air outside his cell each week:
During his first month he would use his hour to breathe as deeply as he could, as if breathing deeper and harder could somehow allow his body to store more oxygen for those remaining one hundred sixty-seven hours of the week. But just as overeating the night before the fast of Yom Kippur does nothing to quell the hunger that inevitably surges during the final hours of that long day of atonement and fasting, so too the deep breaths did little to help him endure those unending days spent in his dank cell. The human body is like that. It needs a constant flow of nourishment, air, and love, to survive.
Dalia Sofer was born in Iran and fled at the age of 10 to the United States with her family. She received her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002 and lives in New York City. The New York Times did a podcast interview with her on August 5.
