Gina Nahai: What Remains
We were exchanging “memorable aunt” stories, and my friend, who’s a trial attorney, had a clear lead over all the rest of us.
We were exchanging “memorable aunt” stories, and my friend, who’s a trial attorney, had a clear lead over all the rest of us.
I once wrote a novel about an Iranian Jewish woman who grows wings and flies away from her husband’s home.
“This,” I thought, “is what the surface of Mars must look like.”
It all looks dauntingly familiar — the spectacle on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt. People in the streets, buildings on fire, a wavering army, a vanishing police force. We saw this 32 years ago, in 1978 and early ’79. That time, it was the Shah who was being forced out. Like Mubarak, he had ruled for three decades, been a staunch ally of the United States, stymied the reach of the mullahs. Like Mubarak, he clung to too much power for too long, became a victim of his own hubris (or paranoia), woke up one day and found himself alone in the world.
Not long ago, I happened to be standing next to a guy at the Apple store in Century City. I was waiting by the register to pay for a new charger for my laptop; he was in line to buy the new iPhone. He looked like he was in his 60s and had had a few facelifts.
May I make a suggestion for a great Chanukah or Christmas gift? Or recommend a selection for your book club? Or offer a proposal for making time disappear during your next long and painful airline experience? “This Lovely Life,” by Vicki Forman. I read two-thirds of it during a fancy and fabulous dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel two weeks ago, came home and finished it that night, read it again the next day, and now it’s on the nightstand next to my bed, where I keep reading passages from it.
Friday night at dinner, we were talking about a guy, a Muslim friend of my grandfather’s, who had — very literally — come back from the dead. He had been in Germany during World War II, safe from the Nazis because Iranian Muslims, unlike Iranian Jews, were considered part of the Aryan Nation. The Iranian government at the time had very close ties with Germany, and my grandfather’s friend was having a wonderful time in Hamburg, doing God knows what and drinking enough for three people, until he came down with a severe case of bleeding ulcers and had to be rushed into surgery. On the operating table, he lost too much blood and died.
David Scott Milton, 50-some years old, Jewish, is alone in a locked room with a young Nazi. They’re in the library of the Maximum Security Yard of the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi. It’s night, and the prison is in lock-down. David and the Nazi had a standoff a few days earlier — the Nazi doesn’t like Jews and David doesn’t like people who push Jews around — but that time, they were surrounded by prisoners and guards, and so the Nazi had backed down. When the lock-down began, he knew David would be sent alone to the library. Somehow, he evaded the guards, got there before David, and waited. He knows it’ll be some time before anyone realizes he’s missing, and some more time before he’s f
It so happened, the other night at a dinner in Bel Air, that I found myself sitting next to the author Judith Krantz. I had met her only minutes before, introduced by a mutual friend who referred to her as Judy and said nothing about who she was and what she did. I thought she was truly elegant, glamorous in a tasteful way and remarkably pretty in her advanced age. She was talking about the years she had spent living in Paris with her husband, how she loves the scent of a book, the sound of its spine cracking the first time it’s opened. I noticed she wore a bracelet similar to mine, only hers had an inscription I couldn’t make out from a distance.
The bride, tall and beautiful, is half white, half African American. The groom, no less attractive than his new wife, is half Russian, half Iranian. His father is half Jewish, half Baha’i. There is a sister who is half Baha’i, half Muslim, one who’s all Jewish and one who’s undecided. There’s a brother who is half Baha’i, half Christian, a niece who thought she was Muslim, discovered she’s in fact Jewish and finally settled on Catholic. There are two nieces and a nephew who are one quarter Jewish Iranian, one quarter Baha’i Iranian, and two quarters Chinese of undetermined religious affiliation. And this is only the groom’s side of the family — 20 people, to be exact, among some 150 guests milling around at the reception on a gorgeous afternoon in a beautiful ranch just outside of Los Angeles.