Thursday morning, Adam woke up, took his medication and vanished. Just like that. A drop of water in the desert at high noon. A 34-year-old man with a round face and the temperament of a boy in his late teens, wearing a black jacket and pajama bottoms. One minute he’s standing in the middle of his mother’s kitchen in Stevenson Ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley; the next minute he’s nowhere.
I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Beverly Hills library. I go there almost every day, laptop in hand, impelled by the irrational idea that this is the only place in
the world where I can finish my new book. I also have an office with a great view and a house that’s empty and quiet all day where any normal person should be able to sit and work just fine, and yet, I have to get up and drive 15 minutes every morning to sit among dozens of strangers — some more strange than others — to find my focus.
A hundred years ago in Iran, my great-grandmother, Tavoos Khanum (later known as Mrs. Peacock), made history by becoming the first Jewish woman ever known to have left her husband. She had married him when she was 9 years old; he was two decades older.
Did you know that, if you’re a member of the United States armed forces, a war injury could be considered a self-inflicted wound? Say you’re serving a second term in Iraq, and you get shot at by the enemy, and you come back to the States in bits and pieces, and try to get on a plane, a Delta flight, say, from LAX, on Nov. 13, 2009. Say you’re under the impression, based upon some policy guidelines conveyed to you by an airline representative on the phone, that the airline makes special allowances for passengers with physical injuries, and so you get to the airport early and go to the Delta counter only to be told by the little man with the round, bald head that you are not, in fact, one of the injured.
Have you noticed how the people who work in luxury hotels never actually use the word “hotel” to refer to the place? They call it “The Property,” or “The Resort,” or sometimes even “The Estate,” which, I imagine, is supposed to describe something much grander, more awe-inspiring and worthy of one’s hard-earned money than a mere “hotel.”
In Los Angeles and New York and elsewhere in the West, families who had left Iran \”for the summer,\” to\”wait out the troubles\” and \”return in time for the kids to start school in September\” realized there was no going back.
I wonder every time I go into and out of the office, what art is for? To capture the truth of a person or a thing? To tell that truth in unexpected ways to people who expect it least?
It\’s been 30 years since I left Iran, and I still know I\’m going back some day, because I have to see that house again, to stand before the yard door and discover if it\’s indeed 12 feet high, or if I\’ve imagined it so, to ring the doorbell and see if I can hear its chime echo up and down the street.
We have more synagogues and more freedom to use them here in Los Angeles than we did in Iran, but that doesn\’t mean we\’re any closer to fulfilling the true purpose of gathering in a house of worship.
I don\’t know what will become of the legacy of Iranian Jews outside of Iran, how history will judge us in the context of the opportunities we had and the extent to which we helped make the world a better place with what we were given.
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