IRANIAN AUTHOR TELLS HER TALE ‘FROM THE LAND OF NO’
By: Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
Lawrence Ledger, NJ
April 5 2007
Author Roya Hakakian spoke to the Adath Israel Women’s League in
Lawrence last week.
Despite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s pledge to wipe Israel
off the face of the earth, Jews have lived mostly peaceful lives in
Iran for 3,000 years – the Hakakian family of today, being among them.
Author and journalist Roya Hakakian, who was born in Iran, said her
family had lived there since the 15th century. Ms. Hakakian’s three
brothers immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s to study
in American colleges, and she and her parents moved in 1985.
The author of "Journey From the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in
Revolutionary Iran," Ms. Hakakian read some passages from her 2004
book to Adath Israel’s Women’s League at its March 25 spring brunch
at the Greenacres Country Club, on Lawrenceville Road.
When the Iranian revolution occurred in 1979 and the Shah of Iran
was overthrown, most young Iranian Jews welcomed the change, said
the 40-year-old Ms. Hakakian, who now lives in Connecticut. They were
hoping for a democratic country, she said.
"We believed things were going to improve (after the revolution),"
Ms. Hakakian said. "When did it become clear to me, when did I realize
things were going in the wrong direction?"
She realized there would be changes when the bell rang at the Jewish
high school that Ms. Hakakian attended and a woman in a black veil,
worn by devout Muslim women, walked into the room and announced
herself as the school’s new principal.
"The new principal gave us a speech and tried to convince us to
convert to Islam. (But) whoever appointed her to the task must not
have auditioned her," Ms. Hakakian said, because the principal failed
to convince any of the Jewish girls to convert.
Nevertheless, the Iranian Jewish community felt relatively safe, she
said. Representatives of the Jewish community approached the Ayatollah
Khomeini, who assured them they would not be harmed. He made the
distinction between "our own (Iranian) Jews" and "the blood-sucking
Zionists" who populate Israel, Ms. Hakakian said.
President Ahmadinejad cannot be bad to Iranian Jews because his
mentor, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, made that promise to the
country’s Jewish community shortly after the 1979 revolution, she said.
Many wealthy Jews left Iran in the 1970s and 1980s for economic
reasons, and the middle class followed them, Ms. Hakakian said. The
Jewish community that remains – about 20,000 people – is "really
wedded" to Iran, she added.
However, during the early 1980s, there was a ban on Jews leaving the
country, Ms. Hakakian said. When she and her mother applied for new
passports, the documents were confiscated. There was an emigration
quota, based on religion.
Ms. Hakakian said that she and her mother, through some bribery,
received permission to leave Iran by posing as Armenian Christians.
Mr. Hakakian was smuggled out of the country into Pakistan, and the
family made their way to the United States.