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“Persian Tea” Sweetens an Immigrant’s Struggles

In her recently published book, “Persian Tea,” Lawi describes her family’s painful decision to leave Iran, and her own (often failed) attempts to assimilate in America. 
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November 11, 2021
Jasmine Lawi (Photo by Steve Lucero)

As an Iranian Jewish child in 1980s Los Angeles, Jasmine Lawi didn’t exactly fit the mold of other little girls. And it didn’t help that her vivid imagination warped her insecurities into terrorizing thoughts.

In 1985, she accidentally ran into Michael Jackson, but convinced herself that, as an Iranian, she would face imminent arrest by the FBI for talking to the world-famous pop star. 

The following year, she befriended a classmate named Suzy and imagined what the little girl thought of her and her family: “She [Suzy] was perturbed by us. Like her, we were Jews, yet a different breed. In her eyes, we were poor, dark-skinned, loud, illiterate, primitive and hairy.”

Lawi shares these reflections in her recently published book, “Persian Tea,” in which she describes her family’s painful decision to leave Iran, and her own (often failed) attempts to assimilate in America. 

As a young immigrant, Lawi’s imagination didn’t always play tricks on her. To be sure, there were many who perceived her and her family as strangely foreign at best, and pathetically out of place at worst. 

One Purim, her mother dressed her in a “frosty pink satin gown” and adorned her head with a floral wreath so she could attend a local Jewish school as Queen Esther. Feverishly excited, Lawi even donned a giant crinoline, or stiffened hoop, beneath her skirt, and proudly entered Mrs. Berger’s third-grade class. 

“If ‘dead silence’ had a face, it was the vapid look on each student and Mrs. Berger,” she writes. “Did I miss the memo? Because everyone dressed in school uniform. Once again, I was the outsider.”

 Lawi was born in 1977, two years before the Iranian Revolution that upended the region and turned Iran into a fanatic theocracy, resulting in a mass exodus of the country’s Jews (over 90% of Iran’s 100,000 Jews fled for places such as the United States, Canada and Europe). 

Her brother, Ezra, was born in 1979, just days before the Shah and his wife, Empress Farah, left Iran amid poisonous propaganda and dangerous street violence against the royal family and their allies, including the U.S.

“We left because we feared a second Holocaust — this time in Iran.”
— Jasmine Lawi

“We left because we feared a second Holocaust — this time in Iran,” Lawi told the Journal. “Also, my grandfather had strong ties with the Shah and we feared our lives were in danger, especially after the brutal murder of Habib Elghanian.”

Elghanian was Iran’s most prominent Jewish businessman and philanthropist, who, one month before Lawi’s family left, was killed by firing squad, sending horrified shockwaves across a Jewish community that had inhabited the country for nearly three millennia. 

Lawi’s maternal grandfather, whom the family called Baba Jan, was a successful exporter of dried fruits on whom the Shah relied for economic updates about the country’s trade and commerce. Born in the late 1920s in Urmia, the largest city in the West Azerbaijan province of Iran, Baba Jan spoke a secret Jewish language called “Lishan Didan” (“Our Language”), a Jewish dialect of Aramaic spoken by the Jews of Urmia, known to scholars as “Jewish Azerbaijani Neo-Aramaic.” His close ties with the Shah placed the family in immediate danger during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini immediately ordered the imprisonment — and in many cases, execution — of the Shah’s allies.

Several chapters of “Persian Tea” are told in the voice of Lawi’s father, whose recollections are as vivid as they are heartbreaking. In describing the family’s decision to leave Iran, she recounts her father’s words:

“Farewell to the 23,000 books left in pristine condition inside the [Shah’s] Palace and without a friend to read. Despair for an ancient Jewish language, orally passed down for 2,000 years, only to vanish in a snap. Grief for the illustrious gowns once worn by Queen Farah that hang on headless mannequins inside these historic landmarks to signify the death of a dynasty.”

After leaving Iran, Lawi’s family lived in Israel for three months before arriving in the “rat-infested slums of Queens,” where her mother pushed strollers through icy pavements and snow flurries because the family couldn’t afford a car. It was a far cry from the lavish and wealthy stereotypes that plague Iranian Jews in L.A. today. 

In 1982, Lawi’s family moved to L.A., where her youngest brother was born. She attended UCLA and Loyola Law School. In 2016, while on vacation in Israel, she was offered a job at Ernst & Young in Tel Aviv. It was there that she met her now husband, Amir, who encouraged her to write her family’s story. In 2017, Lawi moved back to LA (Amir followed two months later); in 2019, she began writing “Persian Tea” after the birth of her daughter. 

Lawi’s strength lies in her ability to write about pain with humor and gentle self-deprecation. She acknowledges another stereotype about Iranians, particularly Iranian women: “We’re expected to be demure, classy and beautiful,” she said. “Beautiful women are not deemed funny and vice versa. In fact, being funny may even be considered masculine in Iranian culture.” 

For Lawi, the growing pangs of assimilation were painfully real. In describing another mortifying wardrobe mishap in school, Lawi writes, “Did Queen Esther have it this rough? I fathomed she did. Like me, Esther was Jewish and Persian. She escaped death and I escaped Khomeini. I was a modern-day Queen Esther skillfully attempting to navigate the evil decrees of Jewish Day School, when all I really wanted was to be accepted unconditionally.”

But Lawi finds humor in her struggles. “For many immigrants and those who have endured difficulties, I believe time heals, and we begin to recognize the strength and resilience that we and our parents had, and maybe even give ourselves a pat on the back for never giving up.

“I laugh at my pain,” she continued. “It’s the best way to learn and grow. Why? Because I should never take life so seriously. Nothing is life or death, unless it’s really life or death.”


Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker, and civic action activist. Follow her on Twitter @RefaelTabby

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