[Note: This article has been corrected to properly name Angella Nazarian’s husband.]
When Jewish Iranian Angella Nazarian fled the violent revolutionary uprising of 1979 in her country and arrived in a predominately Jewish neighborhood in Beverly Hills at the age of 11, her father assured her it would only be a two-week vacation, long enough to let the political chaos subside.
But after the overthrow of the Shah in Iran and the installment of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic government, the political strife did not end as quickly as they had had hoped. Nazarian could not have imagined that she would not return to Iran.
In her latest book and memoir, Life as a Visitor (Assouline, 2009), the award-winning poet uses prose, poetry, and personal narrative to form an account of her displaced but redeemed life. She mingles pictures of provocative exotic art and historical photographs of Iran with family photographs from her former life in Iran and current images of her life today.
While in Seattle recently, Nazarian read to a packed room of young and the old from ages 12 to 82 at Elliott Bay Books.
Nazarian writes that her family decided to leave Iran when it was apparent to them that there was no future for Jews in an extremist Islamic government.
“My uncle, during the revolution, was imprisoned and was called a Zionist spy because of his high-ranking position during the Shah’s reign,” Nazarian said. “Thankfully he was fully acquitted. Most Iranian Jews fled because of the dangerous political situation and left behind most of their assets, as we did.”
In Life as a Visitor, Nazarian recalls what would be her last memories of her birth country.
“It was 5:30 in the morning, at the first light of dawn, when we left home for the forty-minute drive to the airport,” she writes in a chapter titled “The Crossing.” “As I sat in the back seat of my father’s car, I watched the shifting colors that played in the sky before the rising of the sun. By six, the sun’s rays peered from behind the rim of the Alborz Mountains and glimmered through the mist ahead. As we passed through the fog, I felt myself moving through a luminous halo. A good omen, I thought.”
Once in the U.S., she stayed with her brothers, who were students in Los Angeles at the time, and vividly recalls her astonishment at their heated, kidney-shaped swimming pool and the stunning, panoramic, floor—to-ceiling views of the Pacific Ocean that were unlike anything she could have imagined as a child in Iran.
Although her mother and sister came with her to the U.S., her mother would return to Iran to help her husband. Due to the persecution of Jews by the Islamic regime, Nazarian would not see her mother again for more than five years.
Instead, for her, it was an unexpected and melancholy transformation from a simpler life as a family-centered, sheltered youth in Iran into a fashion-focused, roller-skating, ‘80s-era teen.
“While my American friends would think about walking down Beverly Drive on weekends, or roller skating to the Bee Gee’s “˜Staying Alive,’ I worried if my parents were actually alive,” Nazarian wrote in a More.com profile.
Nazarian has come a long way since then. She earned her master’s degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. She is a former psychology professor who now offers workshops and seminars on personal development.
She is also the mother of two boys and wife of David Nazarian.
Nazarian considers herself a global citizen and a “permanent tourist.” Having been raised in Iran studying English and Farsi in a secular bilingual school, most of her schoolmates were Muslim, Baha’i, or Zoroastrian. First and foremost, she considers herself a Jew.
“I keep a kosher home,” said Nazarian. “My husband is Jewish and both my kids have had their Bar Mitzvahs in Israel, which is our spiritual home….I took Hebrew and Judaic classes as an adult and gave myself the gift that I always wanted to give myself — a Bat Mitzvah.”
Nazarian became an adult Bat Mitzvah at the age of 37, which she called “such a profound experience.”
For her, being Jewish is really about being a good human being, and that is what a global citizen should be.
“I realized one interesting thing about myself while writing the book,” she said. “I am incredibly proud of my roots and feel even more blessed and lucky that I ended up living in the U.S.”
Nazarian is a member of the Los Angeles Writers Collective and the American Iranian Writers Association, where she reads the work of other Iranians who have moved to the U.S. and shares her own writing.
Although there are no definite plans for another book, Nazarian is looking for her next great idea.
“I will continue to write because the act of writing fills me up with life and enthusiasm,” she said.