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Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs

French Hats in Iran

by (author) Heydar Radjavi

Publisher
Mage Publishers
Initial publish date
May 2011
Category
Personal Memoirs
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781933823454
    Publish Date
    May 2011
    List Price
    $30.00

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Description

"All memoirs bring the past into the present, but only a few manage to illuminate both simultaneously. French Hats in Iran, a quietly insightful masterpiece of remembrance, belongs in that select group. Heydar Radjavi's evocations of growing up in Tabriz in the 1930s and 1940s describe a traditionalist Iran grappling with modernity, a process as fraught with contradictions and stresses then as it is in Iran today. In a series of mini-tales, we meet a rich cast of characters: the elderly father who works in the Tabriz bazaar and runs his household according to unbending religious precepts; the resourceful mother who finds ways to enjoy such forbidden frivolities as music; the female playmate who marries at the age of nine; the teacher whose personal journey takes him from strictest piety to political radicalism; and many more. Finding a path through all the complexities is Radjavi himself—a wide-eyed little boy in some episodes, an adventurous teenager in others, and finally a young man preparing to enter a fast-changing world. The tone is always light, the memories wonderfully vivid, and the underlying theme of tension between old and new truly timeless. "

About the author

Editorial Reviews

"From a gifted writer delightful, funny, evocative, enlightening, nostalgic stories about growing up in Iran in the 1940s. A must-read for anyone who wants to know how traditional, conservative Iranian households dealt with modernization.?Willem Floor, author of A Social History of Sexual Relations in Iran

Heydar Radjavi describes each episode in his school years with lucidity and consummate art. He shows a very traditionalist Azerbaijani family grappling with modernity. The father and son are nicely contrasted in their own worlds. While the young Heydar is becoming part of a modernizing world, the father is clinging to his fast disappearing world.?Hasan Javadi, editor and translator of Obeyd-e Zakani: Ethics of the Aristocrats and other Satirical Works

Heydar Radjavi's memories of the 1930s and 1940s, when he was growing up in Iran (a country he describes as one that has been “in ambivalent flirtation with modernity for the past hundred years?), are a delightful and moving evocation of a vanished past. His wise, witty, gentle, and eminently humane voice is one that is irresistibly attractive, and the anecdotes he recounts have a quiet, resonant charm that stays in the mind long after the book is closed. This little book is a gem, as a memoir and as a human document. “Dick Davis, author of Epic and Sedition: A Case for Ferdowsi's Shahnameh"