It’s 8 p.m. on a Wednesday, and I’m at the studios of KIRN — a Persian-language AM radio station on Barham Boulevard near Universal Studios. I’m a guest on a program called “Live From Hollywood.”
The host/producer, Suzi Khatami, is an Iranian woman who, like me, left the old country — long before the revolution — […]
I came to America 30 years ago last month. I arrived in Los Angeles the night Elvis died. I was 16 years old, fresh out of a Swiss boarding school, about to start my first year of college.
This was two years before the Islamic Revolution, yet I had left Iran willingly and without regret, certain […]
So I’m at the Jewish Book Council’s (JBC) open auditions, in the main sanctuary of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan, in the front row of the L-Z section of authors who have written a book with a Jewish theme and who would like to sell more than three copies of that book […]
“Never again,” I swear every time I’m on a book tour.
I’ll never do this again, I don’t care if I sell one book or 10 million, I’m not getting on another 6 a.m. flight out of an airport that’s been closed for two days due to bad weather and is therefore mobbed now with livid […]
I don’t believe for a minute that Bush, Cheney, and their posse care an iota whether the people of Iraq live in freedom or not. They went into Iraq for the oil contracts, and the construction contracts, and all the billions of other dollars that their buddies have made from this war. But they did […]
The civil war in Iraq, and the battle between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza, while tragic, do serve a useful purpose: they put the lie to the myth, created by Muslim nation-states and bought into by many Western governments, that the source of all the trouble in the Middle East is the Arab-Israeli conflict. Solve […]
It’s 2 p.m. on a Saturday, and I’m sitting with a dozen other women in the bleachers on a field in Palos Verdes.
I’ve had to get up at 6 a.m. start driving at 7 a.m. to get my son here at 8 a.m., and I know I’ll be here for at least another couple of […]
I’m sitting with my husband in the packed and darkened auditorium at Royce Hall in UCLA. It’s the night of the LA Times Book Prizes, but we might as well be at some Hollywood awards show: The stage is decorated like the set of a movie — Sean Penn is sitting two seats to my […]
She comes up to me through the crowd — designer clothes and Tahitian pearls and that I-know-I’m-gorgeous confidence that makes her impossible to look away from — and hands me one of my own books. We’re at a writers’ conference in Long Beach. I’m scheduled to speak later in the day, and to sign books […]
“Agha isn’t here,” she says as soon as I walk in through the door. “I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
Agha is her husband — dead for thirty-five years and buried in Iran — but she speaks about him as if he were just out running an errand.
“No point waiting around for him,” she tells […]
So he’s the biggest disaster ever to hit this country, Bush still needs a job after his second term as president is over. I know he’s been in semi-retirement since he took office anyway, and he does have that ranch, but can he really be content wielding an electric saw all day, every day, for […]
“Shalimar the Clown : A Novel,” by Salman Rushdie (Random House, 2005).
Salman Rushdie is at Disney Hall, addressing a near-capacity audience as part of the Music Center’s 2006 Speaker Series. He has come this March 1 evening to talk about politics and art, truth and tyranny, free and forbidden speech. He has come, also, to […]
At night, the scent of Poet’s Jasmine woke me up.
We slept outdoors, on wooden beds arranged next to the 12-foot deep fish pool with statues of silver-skinned dolphins that spat water into the air when the fountain was turned on. Tehran’s summers were dry and brutal. At mid-day, the heat melted the asphalt on the […]
On Monday this week, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (I’m sorry; I find this whole name change thing with the Pope rather spooky) went on record against a referendum that would ease restrictions on artificial insemination and embryonic research in Italy. Shortly before that (this guy doesn’t waste time) he had urged the Catholics in Spain to […]
The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles: Cover Story
My first inkling that something has gone tragically wrong is when I hand the parking attendant my valet ticket and see a wicked, knowing smile — I know what you’ve been up to and trust me, you shouldn’t have — spread across her face. I try to […]
Where I live now the walls are painted green and yellow and ocean blue. The ceilings are high, the rooms forever inundated with light. There are rose bushes in the yard, and bougainvillea, and a lemon tree I once planted by mistake, not knowing what it was or whether it would grow, and which surprises […]
Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood, A Memoir of Growing Up Female in a Muslim World, Taslima Nasrin, Translated from the Bengali by Gopa Majumdar, Steerforth Press: 308 pp., $26
Less than a decade ago, Muslim clerics in Bangladesh issued a series of fatwas against a 31-year-old woman who had written a novel they found offensive. The woman, […]
Esther’s Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews, edited by Houman Sarshar. The Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History/ The Jewish Publication Society: 458 pp., $110
In his introduction to “Esther’s Children,” editor Houman Sarshar speaks of a time when, 6 years old and about to start elementary school, he discovered his legacy as an Iranian Jew. […]
A chronicle of Iran’s Jews from the Megillah to the 20th century tells a story that few people know.
In his introduction to Esther’s Children,” (Jewish Publication Society, $110) editor Houman Sarshar speaks of a time when, at 6 years old and about to start elementary school, he discovered his legacy as an Iranian Jew. Over […]
A writer on a book tour finds the city’s ’serious’ literary community to be less than genuine.
I’m not one of those writers who routinely predict the demise of the written word, feel ignored by their publishers or lament the possibility that their books may be read by the huddled masses. The written word, I believe, […]
I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters by Rabih Alameddine. W.W. Norton: 288 pp., $23.95
Rabih Alameddine’s new novel unfolds like a secret, guarded too long, which is at last pushing toward the light: It moves in jagged lines, flows forward and backward andsideways. It grows by bits and pieces, each one as thrilling, as […]
I’m 11-years-old, my world a patchwork of mixed identities and conflicting beliefs, my eyes searching for a horizon I cannot yet see but that I follow almost by instinct. It’s August in New York — a long and gray stretch of humidity and noise, people speaking to me in an accent I cannot understand, streets […]
I’m two hours late for a noon invitation, my eyes itching from the unfamiliar weight of mascara so early in the day, and as I drive through town I’m rehearsing the many excuses I think I’ll have to offer my host. It’s a Sunday in June, and I’m about to celebrate a cousin’s high school […]
It is summer, a long time ago, and I am lying on a terrace overlooking an ancient garden full of rosebushes and fruit trees. The days have been so hot, the asphalt on the sidewalk melts under my feet if I dare step out of the house. At night, the temperature drops. My sisters and […]
So there’s a fairy-tale wedding: a thousand guests in a flower-filled ballroom, a dozen violins playing Mozart, a grainy-voiced singer belting out an old Persian love song. The bride is 20 years old and ravishing, of course, but she’s also blessed with charm and charisma, the kind of exuberance that turns heads and drags stares […]
Every year for Women’s History Month, I’m asked to address groups of people brought together to mark the occasion. Some years it’s at a university, a museum, or a foundation. This year it’s in the Milken High School library.
I like the idea, of course — to support the library and the school, to visit with […]
I have a picture of my daughter the first time she dressed up for Purim. She is 4 years old, her bangs too short as a result of a self-inflicted haircut, her face round and perfect as a green apple. She is standing between her two brothers, an arm around each boy’s neck, a mischievous […]
Review: An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender (Doubleday; 242 pages; $22.95)
With a voice as clear as water and a hand that is honest, light and sincere in its intentions, Aimee Bender steers her reader into the depths of her heroine’s private hell. In this fairy tale, Mona Gray is a 20-year-old math […]
