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Caspian Rain

A young Iranian Jewish girl, faced with her own impending deafness, must also struggle to prevent the breakup of her family.

book cover of 'Caspian Rain' (MacAdams/Cage, 2007) In the decade before the Islamic Revolution, Iran is a country at the brink of explosion. Twelve-year-old Yaas is born into an already divided family: Her father is the son of wealthy Iranian Jews who are integrated into the country’s upper-class, mostly Muslim, elite; her mother was raised in the slums of South Tehran, one street away from the old Jewish ghetto.

Yaas spends her childhood navigating the many layers of Iranian society. Her task, already difficult, becomes all the more critical when her father falls in love with a beautiful woman from a noble Muslim family. As her parents’ marriage begins to crumble and the country moves ever closer to revolution, Yaas is plagued by a terrifying genetic illness that is slowly robbing her of her hearing. Facing the prospect of complete deafness, Yaas learns that her father is about to abandon her and her mother, and so she undertakes a desperate, last-ditch effort to save herself and her family.

At once a cultural exploration of an as-yet unfamiliar society, and a psychological study of the effects of loss, Caspian Rain takes the reader inside the tragic and fascinating world of a brave young girl struggling against impossible odds.

“Riveting family drama and compelling historical fiction…The multiple ways Jews and Muslims intersect is also clearly presented, offering a fascinating glimpse into Persian life prior to the 1979 insurgency. Richly detailed, emotionally intense, and tremendously moving, this work is highly recommended.” — Library Journal, starred review

More praise for Caspian Rain

“Nahai’s story of a haunted Jewish family in Tehran during the shah’s last years possesses the dark beauty and harsh lessons of a fairy tale…Nahai’s poetic and cathartic drama speaks for all silenced women, for all who are tyrannized.” — Booklist, starred review

“In her stirring fourth novel, Nahai explores the struggles of an Iranian family in the tenuous decade before the Islamic revolution…a poignant tale of a damaged family. — Publishers Weekly

“This novel is nothing less than a literary sensation, not only because it revives Iran’s past in a heavenly precise prose, but also since we will all too soon desperately look for books which explain this country. To truly understand Iran, you have to read this novel.” — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“Nahai’s alluring poetic style draws us into the lives of her female characters…captivating prose…a powerful testament to Iranian women’s fight against oppression.” — Ms. Magazine

“Filled with hope and despair, Caspian Rain is Nahai’s most emotional and inspiring novel yet. Nahai’s heroine — the inspired and inspiring Yaas — learns the lessons of obedience, subservience, and forbearance, and then chooses a surprising and unexpected path.” — Lisa See, author of Peony in Love and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

“Unexpected and heartrending, but also witty, elegiac, sophisticated and edgy. Caspian Rain is a beautiful book.” — Chris Abani, author of Graceland and The Virgin of Flames

“In Caspian Rain, Gina Nahai writes with subtlety and grace about the unappeasable forces of culture, class and family which shape the life of a young girl growing up in Jewish Tehran before the mullahs.” — Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint it Black

“Caspian Rain once more proves Gina B. Nahai’s ability to create through her wonderfully lyrical prose a fictional world that, while rooted in a particular culture and history, is universally relevant and appealing.” — Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

“In exquisite, poetic vignettes, Caspian Rain tells the intense story of a mother and daughter in search of approval within upper-class Iranian social circles. Ultimately though, what they struggle towards is acceptance from one another.  Nahai’s writing is a graceful balancing act between the lush and the stark. Her gorgeous sentences cut to the bone.” — Cristina Garcia, author of Monkey Hunting and Dreaming in Cuban

“Gina Nahai’s beautifully written novel Caspian Rain is evocative and poetic, with striking images that remain in the mind long after they are read.  It is also a heart-wrenching examination of the tragedies of women caught in the net of gender, history, family secrets and the unbending laws of high society. But ultimately it is a celebration of the human spirit — the moments of joy and courage and risk-taking that make all our lives worth living.” — Chitra Divakaruni, author of Mistress of Spices and Queen of Dreams

“Lovers of the art of storytelling should know Gina B. Nahai.  Much more than a fascinating, page-turning glimpse into the tribes and classes of Iran, Caspian Rain is an exquisite novel which, like a Ghost Boy on a bicycle, will continue to magically haunt its readers long after its ending.” — Sandra Tsing Loh, author of Depth Takes a Holiday and A Year in Van Nuys

“Gina Nahai, a gifted storyteller with a unique and powerful voice, invites us into a strange, unsettling but ultimately beguiling world, a place of both pain and enchantment. Remarkably, she allows to glimpse the hard realities of life in contemporary Iran in a new and unaccustomed light while, at the same time, she shows us that the innermost truths of the human heart are truly universal. Caspian Rain is both timely and timeless, an important book that comes at just the right time.” — Jonathan Kirsch, author of A History of the End of the World

“With her fourth novel, Gina B. Nahai establishes herself among the top rank of writers of her generation. In Caspian Rain, she brings to stunning life a cast of characters that continues to haunt the reader.” — John Rechy, author of City of Night

“In Caspian Rain, Gina Nahai takes us on a privileged journey into an Iran a contemporary traveler can only hope to know through fiction — an Iran before the Islamic Revolution where women could aspire to independence and dream of larger lives. Through the eyes of her 12-year-old heroine, we see a whole society mirrored, a society enmeshed in superstition but struggling to emerge into modernity. A heroine — and a book — to embrace. I was mesmerized.” — Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, author of A Woman of Independent Means

“If writers do indeed write what they know, then Gina Nahai has a PhD in the human heart. Her characters inhabit their culture and their time so profoundly that her readers do too; from moments of magical realism to years of anxious drifting and struggling, Nahai’s characters are as much in search of themselves as the turbulent nation they live in.” — Patt Morrison, author of Rio L.A., Tales from the Los Angeles River

A word from Gina B. Nahai

What do you do with a loss you can neither cure, nor accept, nor overcome?

In the beginning, there was only this question. It was one that I had grappled with for nearly my whole life, and that had become more urgent in the decade before I started Caspian Rain.

I grew up in the Iran in the “glory years” of the Shah’s reign. We had a thriving economy and a seemingly stable social order, but we also had a history that dated back twenty-five hundred years — much of it marked by war and natural disasters, by foreign occupation and internal strife, personal tragedy and collective grief. We were — are — a nation of survivors, but one that has been marked, in ways that are too fundamental to alter easily, by our experience of loss. We were defined as much by our achievements, as by our longings, as much by our desires, as by our failure to fulfill them. We did not, as the saying goes in the United States, “make lemonade from lemons.” We did not believe, as Westerners seem to do, that we could transcend our natural disadvantages, or overcome man-made obstacles, or escape our past.

Instead, we wore our grief like a crown of thorns, carried it around all our lives and passed it down to our children. In every household, we kept a painted glass jar — like the bottles that release the genie in Western cartoons — adorned with pearls and drawings. They were called “tear jars,” used to collect our own, and our loved ones’ tears in times of great sorrow. We cried into the jars and kept our tears so our children would inherit them.

I left Iran at age thirteen — at first for boarding school in Europe, then for university in the United States. Looking back in the years prior to the Islamic Revolution, I saw was a nation caught between the desire to free itself of the constraints of old beliefs, and the instinctive urge to hold on to what it knew. I saw a people that was fascinated by the West’s confidence and audacity, that tried to comprehend, even imitate, the West’s optimism, but that remained haunted by its own memories: a nation that no longer had a need for the tear jar, but that had no taste for American lemonade.

I saw this same people — survivors of yet-another devastating turn of history — migrate to the United States and Europe in decades after the revolution. I recognized in them the same convergence of hope and skepticism that I grappled with in my own life; I saw the same tension between what they would like to believe in — that every loss is an opportunity for success, every tragedy a prelude to conquest — and what they had learned through generations of experience. The older I became, the more losses I endured, the more vital it became for me to reconcile these two forces. So I invented little Yaas and her parents, placed them in the jaws of misfortune, and gave them the riddle to solve.

The enigma of Iran
(or Why American policy-makers should read more fiction)

The fundamentalist mullahs of Iran rule the country through the unwavering support of a special military police force called the pasdaran. This is a corps of zealot Muslim men eager to become martyrs in the fight against the Great Satan and its “Zionist” allies. In Tehran where they breed terror for their merciless and abrupt justice, one of the best known and most feared of the pasdaran goes by the name “Clint Eastwood.” He arrests his victims by putting a gun to their head and breathing the words of his all-time idol: “go ahead, make my day.”

This — a simultaneous love of all things Western and a burning hatred of the West — is at the heart of the present clash between Iran and the United States. It is both the cause of, and the cure for the thirty-year-old stalemate that began with the advent of the Islamic Republic and has worsened since the coming to power of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The emotional ties that bind the people of Iran with the idea of America have proven indestructible over time. They have transcended generations and ideologies, changes of government, open conflict and proxy wars. But to make use of that bond, to employ it in the fight against the ever-spreading fever of fundamentalism, must first understand the duality between faith and culture, the conflict between modernity and tradition that has defined Iran (and its Arab and Muslim neighbors) for over a millennium.

Why does a country where the first-ever declaration of human rights — freedom of speech, religion, and thought — was issued over 2,500 years ago, now denies its citizens the most elementary forms of self-determination? Why did a revolution aimed at restoring to Iran a secular, democratic, modernist government, suddenly embraced the canon of fundamentalist Islam? Why, in the most recent presidential elections, did a nation that, by all accounts, is dangerously weary of the tyranny of the mullahs, willingly elect the most extremist of candidates in the running?

The answers to these questions lie not in the self-serving dogma of political activists, or in the shallow and shortsighted policy papers of American think tanks, but in the honest and objective narrative of Iranian writers, the many-layered truths, the history buried within their tales. Iran, as any civilization, is defined most thoroughly by the stories it spawns.