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\"In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. She sought an escape from the suffocation she felt under the cultural rules of her country and the future her family had envisioned for her. While she settled uneasily into American life, the political unrest in Iran intensified and in February of 1979, Farideh’s family was forced to flee Iran on the last El-Al flights to Tel Aviv. They arrived in Israel as refugees, having left everything behind, including the only home Farideh’s father had ever known. Baba, as Farideh called her father, was a well-respected son of the chief rabbi and dayan of the Jews of Shiraz. During his last visit to the United States in 2006, he handed Farideh his memoir that chronicled the years of his life after exile: the confiscation of his passport while he attempted to return to Iran for his belongings, the resulting years of loneliness as he struggled against a hostile bureaucracy to return to his wife and family in Israel, and the eventual loss of the poultry farm that had supported his family. Farideh translated her father’s memoir along with other documents she found in a briefcase after his death. Leaving Iran knits together her father’s story of dislocation and loss with her own experience as an Iranian Jew in a newly adopted home. As an intimate portrait of displacement and the construction of identity, as a story of family loyalty and cultural memory, Leaving Iran is an important addition to a growing body of Iranian–American narratives.\"

Within the emerging genre of Iranian women's memoirs, Farideh Goldin'sWedding Song(2003) and Roya Hakakian'sJourney from the Land of No(2004) are distinctive in that their authors are Jewish. While Goldin and Hakakian share the nostalgia and sense of loss expressed by their fellow memoirists in exile, they offer a nuanced reading of Iranian culture that reflects their dual consciousness of being both Iranian and Jewish, identities that have sometimes been in conflict. Their differing accounts and impressions of growing up in observant Jewish families testify to the diversity of Iranian Jews. In addition to serving as historians of Iran's recent past—Goldin relates events leading up to the Islamic Revolution, while Hakakian relates events that took place during and after it—they critique and commemorate Iranian Jewish life, especially the lives of women. As women writers, they trace the importance of words and stories in their lives, and the destructive role of both censorship and self-censorship.

Like the Iranian Jewish women whose writings I analyze here, the past of thirty years ago is another country for me. That country is Iran. We look backwards to that past Iran, but also sideways to the Iran and the United States of today (if the past is another country it is of course not the case, as Clifford Geertz reminds us, that another country is the past). What follows is written from the shared experience of living in pre-revolutionary Iran, and from the shared experience of writing about a remembered Iran.

The eldest daughter in a poor but well-respected Iranian Jewish family, [Farideh Goldin] mostly focuses on her teenage years and on the intense emotional battle she finally faces to break free of her family and society's strict social traditions. Her story begins in 1968 at the age of 15. Goldin recalls in storyteller's fashion the day her father burned all of her books. It was at that point, she says, that she realized she must get out of Iran or share the same fate as all the other women around her. Accepting an arranged marriage and a limited education was a fate she did not intend for herself. Many of Goldin's earliest memories focus on her mother who was married at 13, but was never accepted into her extended family. Goldin's grandmother, who went by the name of Khanom-bozorg or \"great lady,\" regarded her daughter-in- law as a peasant and never allowed her to freely express herself. Another magical moment centers on Goldin's recollections of the \"leech-lady,\" who was fetched to save Khanom-bozorg's life with her blood-sucking leeches. Such stories of witch doctors and magic, mixed with old wives' tales and Iranian folklore, make Wedding Song feel almost a world apart.

[Farideh Goldin], born in 1953, in conservative Shiraz, immigrated to the US in 1975 after university study, a few years before the revolution, while [Roya Hakakian], born in 1967, in the modern sophisticated capitol of Teheran, is an adolescent as the revolution begins. Together they span two generations of society, at home and as immigrants, detailing culture, traditions and family dynamics. SOME reviewers have spoken of Goldin's book as a psychological account of her life, and while her triumph is central, I found her descriptions of her community and pre- revolutionary society on point. Although we lived in westernized Teheran (1970-78), we occasionally visited extended family in Shiraz. Her insider descriptions of that more traditional society brought back memories. As I read Blue's thoughts on mothers and daughters, I imagined Goldin explaining her experiences to her three American daughters and how Hakakian will explain hers to her descendants. Over the years, I've explained our life in Teheran to our daughter, who firmly believed those events had taken place on Mars - until she attended a reunion of our old friends, who told her similar stories.

The Doug Cisney Room at the Flagler County Library in Palm Coast was filled Sept. 10 with patrons interested to hear about the lives of five Jewish women born in Muslim countries.

Melammed reviews Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile by Farideh Dayanim Goldin.

Minor reviews Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman by Farideh Goldin.