When Eric R. Kandel says that this award means as much to him as the Nobel, a chuckle rises from the audience and quickly spills into applause. But Kandel isn\’t joking. \”I\’ve been asking myself,\” he says, \”what the difference is between being here and being in Stockholm.\” Again, there\’s laughter from the audience.
I\’m thinking of the Southern accent, the country-club attitude, the ship-captain husband, trying to figure out how any of that fits in with a story about a family from the Jewish ghetto of Esfahan. \”She might have told me,\” I confess. \”I didn\’t listen because it didn\’t make sense.\”
When I first started writing, I sat with Khanum for hours at a time, asking questions. I was 21 and on leave of absence from law school. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but I knew some stories from Iran, and had begun to write them. They were scattered pieces of people\’s lives, bits of conversations I had overheard through the years, rumors that had been whispered too many times and taken on a reality that may or may not have been deserved.
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 promote his newest book.
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 breakfast in their apartment in Tehran, Houman\’s father, a top planning commissioner in the Shah\’s Iran, notices the Star of David pendant — a recent gift from a grandmother — hanging from his son\’s neck. He reaches over and slips the necklace under Houman\’s shirt.
\”If anyone in school asks about your religion,\” he instructs his son, \”lie. Tell them you\’re Muslim.\”
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 choked with traffic, shops overflowing with merchandise, buildings that block out the sun and cast permanent shadows upon the city. It\’s the first of many visits I\’ll make with my family to America, a small and tentative step along a journey that has begun long ago in my parents\’ hearts.
No need to explain why I\’m late, I realize. It\’s an Iranian party. You\’re not expected to be on time — just to stay late and socialize.
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 I take the hose to the yard and stand there as the day\’s heat rises out of the brick floor in a cloud of white steam. My mother spreads our bed on the terrace, and we crawl into it, hours before we can actually fall asleep. We thrash about in the cool sheets that smell of dust, summer and lavender bleach; listen to the music that drifts up from our grandmother\’s radio downstairs; eat fresh mulberries we have picked from the tree in our own yard.
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 behind her. She\’s been breaking hearts since she was 14 years old and walked into a cousin\’s wedding in a frilly white dress and a wide lace headband. Now she dances on stage, next to the singer with the forlorn music, and the crystal beads on her wedding gown glow like fireflies in the dark.
I\’m not usually at a loss for words, it is true, but something about a library, about speaking there during Women\’s History Month, strikes a nerve and resonates deeper than usual.
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