If there is a Jewish book of Exodus, the departure of the Jews from Iran must make up its last chapter. I’ve often wondered what it was that drove my father to sell our house, his dream home, located in one of Tehran’s trendiest neighborhoods, at No. 3 Alley of the Distinguished.
That house was the monument to his success. The son of a poor, illiterate traveling fabric salesman had made good: left the village, educated himself and settled in the heart of the capital. Our house was where all the extended family gathered for Passover every year. To honor the ancient Israelites’ hasty departure from Egypt, my family hastened, rallying around my mother, to wage our own crusade. Our enemies were not at all alike: The slaves had fought against pharaoh whereas we fought against dirt. We armed ourselves with an arsenal of brooms, rags, mops, scrubs and sprays. We awoke at dawn, when the “cotton beater” made his yearly visit. He camped in the corner of the courtyard, stripped our quilts and mattresses and removed all the cotton inside. Then squatting among the heap, he brought out a harplike tool. Holding it amid the heap, he plucked at the coarse strings until the flattened cotton, caught in the strings, separated and regained its fluffiness.
Inside the house, we got busy. We brought down the curtains, dusted every rod, rolled every rug and swept underneath everything. Searching our closets, we emptied our wallets and handbags, unrolled our pant cuffs, lined up every jacket and pair of trousers on the clothesline, and turned the pockets inside out. We stretched the corner of a rag over our index finger, traced along the sides of each drawer to the four corners and twirled our fingertip around a few times. The merriment would come later, only when seriousness had been paid its due. And our savior, our seasonal Moses, our year-round Job, mother, with an outstretched arm, lamenting her migraine, led us in battle against dirt.
Despite all the work, we enjoyed Passover more than any other holiday. Perhaps because it came at the heels of the Iranian New Year, and it felt as part of the same festivity. Or perhaps because all the drama made the holiday feel like a theatrical production. At the Seder, like actors, we recited words that often conjured no immediate bitter memory to the minds of anyone except the few elders. “Bondage,” “affliction” and “suffering at the hands of a bad majority” meant little to most of my family. They vowed “next year in Israel” but knew, even as the words rang in the air, how hollow they were. The family dreamed of the land of milk and honey but wanted to wake up in Tehran. Bondage seemed like a very distant history.
What did truly drive us out of Iran? Was it the swastika that appeared on the wall across our door on the eve of the 1979 revolution? It terrified us, to be sure. But nothing followed that ugly presence on the wall–no rise in hostility among our neighbors or friends. If it was meant to galvanize some latent anti-Semitic feeling among the public, it failed to do so. Similarly in 1984, that perfectly Orwellian year, an order came for the washroom facilities in schools to be separated by religion. One morning, as my class filed through the schoolyard, we saw men posting signs above the toilets that read: Muslims only. Above the last two stalls, another sign read: Non-Muslims only. Like the swastika, the signs worried us at first. But they, too, failed to mean anything more than a couple of ugly signs. There was an unspoken code among us teenage girls that saw abiding by them an “uncool” thing to do. Everyone ignored it. With Iran’s war with Iraq in its fourth year, the “red-alert” sirens shrieking through the school corridors on most days, the school officials, even if they wished, were too busy to enforce washroom rules.
So, why did we leave? Not for the reasons that our ancestors left the biblical Egypt. We were rarely singled out to bear great burdens. We didn’t leave even for the reasons that Jews left modern-day Iraq or Syria. We left Iran primarily because life under the new circumstances was becoming increasingly intolerable. We left for all the reasons that anyone, Jew or Muslim, was compelled to leave.
This is why Iran still is home to the largest community of Jews outside of Israel in all of the Middle East. Jews arrived in Iran long before Islam had come to exist. And today, nearly 20,000 Jews live in Iran. Along with Christians and Zoroastrians, Jews are considered “people of the book” and are a legitimate religious minority. The community sends its own representative to the parliament. There are synagogues and butcher shops, even several schools throughout Tehran, though the schools are run by Muslim staff and are kept open on Saturdays.
Like every year since we arrived in America, my family will sit at this Seder. Someone will make a bitter allusion to the past: Thank God we left unscathed! Everyone around the table will second it. All these words will be spoken in Persian. Then, the lavish holiday dinner will be served: bowls of eggplant or parsley stew, colorful trays of saffron, cumin and berry rice. And as the music of Mahasti, Iran’s favorite diva, fills the air, they will compete to tell their stories of the good old days.
