By Emily K. Alhadeff, Associate Editor, The Jewish Sound
Roya Hakakian was 12 when her country erupted in revolution. The daughter of intellectual Jewish parents in Tehran, she did what comes naturally to frustrated youth: She began writing poetry.
Poetry, she told me in the restaurant of her downtown Seattle hotel, was her way of coping with the tumultuous changes around her.
A Middle East fellow at the Woodrow
Wilson Center and the author of two Persian poetry books, a memoir, nonfiction and numerous articles in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, Hakakian is a needed voice and widely sought speaker regarding the Iranian Jewish experience. She spoke at the AJC dinner December 3 at Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle.
Elegant and eloquent, she began her keynote talk with a confession: She knew she was not the first choice for AJC’s keynote speaker.
AJC regional director Lila Pinksfeld had Hakakian on her radar, and when the original speaker, R. Gil Kerlikowse, Commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection and a former Seattle Police Chief, had to be out of the country for business, Pinksfeld reached out to her.
For Pinksfeld, Hakakian’s presence complemented the evening’s honorees, Carol and Allen Gown.
“We’re honoring a couple with a strong record of community service,” she said.
Bringing Carol Gown, who also volunteers for AJC nationally, and Hakakian to the stage also highlighted two very strong women, she added.
“Having a speaker like Roya would be a nice way to showcase things AJC is currently working to combat, like anti-Semitism,” said Pinksfeld.
Hakakian unwillingly fled Iran for America in 1985. Her life stories are peppered with incidences of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, both from Iranians back home and the activist crowd with whom she sought refuge.
Yet anyone expecting a run-of-the-mill speech about the dangers of an anti-Israel, nuclear Iran had another think coming. No poet can escape from her inclination to look below the surface, especially when everyone else seems to be looking up at the sky.
“In the mind of every conscientious individual, every citizen who thinks it his or her business to leave the world a little better than he or she came into it, there’s always a mix,” Hakakian began her speech. “The mix is made up of intellectual concerns and formative personal narratives swirling together, in the pot of the mind. I call this mix of questions, concerns, and narratives our personal moral soups.”
Everyone collects the stories that “will ultimately determine the recipe of the lives that we will lead,” she said.
To that end, she shares the remarkable story of her father, as a child in a predominantly Muslim region, who was not allowed to go to school on rainy days for fear that as a Jew, he would pollute the Muslim children through the water. During a long rainy spell, his mother grew frustrated with the policy and marched him to the school while the superintendent was visiting. After throwing herself before him to plead that the school allow her son to receive his education, the superintendent burst into his classroom and demanded a glass of water. He instructed the boy to take a sip.
“Then, the superintendent grabbed the glass and drank the rest, slammed the empty glass on the bench and roared: ‘If that water was good enough for me, it’s good enough for all of you. From now on, this boy will be in class every day, rain or shine.’”
From then on, the story goes that Hakakian’s father never again missed a day of school when it rained.
Despite the Iranian regime’s religious restrictions and focused hatred on Israel, Hakakian emphasizes the Iranian people’s general openness, and the Jews’ peaceful existence in Iran going back five centuries before the Common Era.
Even more in danger than Jews are the secular Muslims and dissidents of Iran, she argues. Those are the Iranians in whom we should place our hope. This is the flavor of Hakakian’s moral soup:
“That while Iran’s nukes may be greatly alarming, Iran’s youth are greatly promising. And to try to avert one without investing in the other would be immoral but more importantly unwise.”
The youngest generation of activists is growing extremely weary of the current regime (a recent article of Hakakian’s cites numerous instances of satirical mockery of the ayatollah), and the oft-cited Pew study found that of all Middle Eastern countries, Iran had the lowest levels of anti-Semitism — and dropping. As disillusionment with the regime increases, so does friendly curiosity about Jews and Israel, she said.
“The world is fast moving toward a place where alliances will be increasingly formed less by common religious and ethnic identities and more by common beliefs and shared values,” Hakakian concluded. “As Jews, I consider us the guardians of some of the most enduring and honorable values of history.”