![]() Yaran, his larger-than-life wife Ruby, and their extraordinary daughter Neda, a toddler who possesses the expressive language skills of an adolescent. It is amid this cramped squalor that Mossanen introduces us to Dr. Britain also feared losing its Iranian oil fields, and the Allies understood the potential disaster of the all-important Trans-Iranian Railway falling into German hands.Īgainst this chaotic backdrop, Mossanen presents another world, the smaller ecosystem of Tehran’s Jewish Quarter (most large Iranian cities had Jewish quarters that limited the spread of “contaminated” Jews among the general population). But over 80 years ago, the West feared Reza Shah’s growing susceptibility to the lure of Nazi power. Much like his contemporary, Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Reza Shah created a historic campaign of modernization and secularization that, almost 100 years later, anti-regime demonstrators, who demand a secular Iran today, memorialize as they chant his name in the streets. Western powers favored his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who served as the shah of Iran from 1941 to 1979. Mossanen’s story begins in 1941, the year the West deposed Reza Shah, the Iranian leader who, in 1925, overthrew the Qajar dynasty. ![]() And during that time, Iran, the same country whose supreme leader today uses Twitter to deny the Holocaust, gave refuge to nearly 1,000 Jewish children from Poland, many of them orphans. Aerial bombardments from the Anglo-Soviet occupation ravaged the skies and British, American, and Russian troops aroused the anger of millions of Iranians. The novel’s second major contribution is that it highlights Iran’s role in the emerging theater of the Middle East during the Second World War, when Adolf Hitler, whom German propaganda broadcasts on Iranian radio called “the Shiite Messiah,” was inching closer to the country’s borders. As part of these practices, Jews were not allowed to walk outside during rain or snow, so as not to contaminate the general population, and were mandated to build their entryways especially low, forcing them to bow to Muslim neighbors when leaving their homes. First, it highlights the discriminatory and inhumane najasat (ritual impurity) practices imposed on Iranian Jews, with the worst period extending from Safavid rule in the 16th century to the 1900s. Mossanen’s latest novel, a luscious work of historical fiction in a dossier that includes Harem (2002), Courtesan (2005), The Last Romanov (2012), and Scent of Butterflies (2014), sheds a critical light on two aspects of Iranian history that remain relatively unknown to many. But for the antisemitic governor general, known to hateful locals as “the Land Eater,” the life of a Jew matters less than one flower bud among tens of thousands in the poppy fields and opium factories flanking his ominous mansion. In fact, he knows he could easily lose his head if he fails to stop the man’s pain, a situation made even more dangerous because novocaine can be deadly if administered to an opium addict. Yaran knows he may be killed for opting to sanitize with alcohol. Excruciating pain finally forces the governor general to demand that Yaran wash his hands in a bowl of permanganate. ![]() Like many Iranians at the time, the governor general believes that Jews are “najes,” or ritually impure, and thus capable of contaminating anything or anyone, whether a vessel of water or human flesh. The first dentist in Iran to have access to novocaine, the Parisian-educated Yaran is ordered to heal the opium-ravaged teeth of Tehran’s powerful governor general, but there is one small problem: Yaran is forbidden to touch the patient’s mouth. SOLEIMAN YARAN, the Iranian Jewish doctor at the heart of Dora Levy Mossanen’s World War II–era novel Love and War in the Jewish Quarter, has a potentially deadly problem.
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