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"...delightful and moving evocation of a vanished past."--Dick Davis
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. {more>>}
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:
The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh
These are sketches of life in twentieth-century Iran, a nation in ambivalent
flirtation with modernity for the past hundred years. The inevitable clashes
with traditional beliefs, customs, and attitudes, at once comical and cruel,
were experienced and are now reported in the following pages by one witness,
this author, mainly through his childhood and adolescence.
Frangi hats arrived in Iran half a decade before World
War Two started. The ruling monarch at the time, Reza Shah, the father of
the last Shah of Iran, must have considered this event as the culmination
of his efforts in forced Westernization of his subjects. Dress reforms had
been introduced earlier, but it was at this time that the old Shah ordered
the nation to go all the way: any woman who ventured out of her house had
to bare her face; any man or woman insisting on a head-cover had to wear
one of the two prescribed types of these new “French” hats.
Although the word Frangi can be translated as “French,” it has,
for several centuries, had a much wider application for Iranians. It simply
means anybody or anything European or Western. The Shah’s compulsory
dress codes, seen by their stubborn advocates as an important ingredient
of modernization and progress, and thus well worth the pain, proved extremely
unpopular with traditionalists. The reforms and their consequences strongly
colored the early lives of my generation among ordinary city-dwellers of
Tabriz, as the stories attest. Frangi hats appear literally in several of
the narratives that follow, and can be viewed as symbolically present in
virtually all of them.
Absolute accuracy in the narration cannot be guaranteed, of course. Pitfalls
of memory, those unconscious revisions of personal history, are among obvious
excuses for this, but there are others. Names of some main characters, ordinary
folks who could not be remembered kindly, have been altered to prevent ready
identification by their offspring. (The characters themselves, if still alive
and able to read these reports from long ago and far away, will have no problem
recognizing themselves.) Furthermore, some secondary characters with indistinguishable
roles have at times been combined to keep the population under control.
I have introduced non-English words only when really
necessary. My transliteration of names of people and places may not always
be consistent with those the reader sees in the daily news. What may seem
even worse is that a few words appear with more than one spelling. This was
necessitated by my attempt to be as faithful as possible to the pronunciation
in the local tongue. The all-important word “Frangi” introduced
above is an example: it represents the pronunciation in Tabriz; the reader
may have encountered it in such other forms as “Farangi” or “Ferangee.”
Each piece is meant to be read independently; so I hope the reader doesn’t
mind an occasional reminder of a fact, an event, or a character already met
in another story. One small warning: in the face of the current extreme violence
engulfing that troubled region of the world, some readers might find the
contents unfashionably, and perhaps idiotically, light-hearted. I have no
excuses to offer. May light hearts reign once again.
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