Book Buzz

Dalia Sofer

When I first started reading SHIRAZ, I thought that it wasn’t by far the best fiction about Iran. But the more I read the more I enjoyed and started to love this story and its writing. It is the story of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran shortly after the revolution.

Isaac, the father, is a successful jeweler and gem merchant.. In the opening chapters, he is arrested by two armed Revolutionary Guards, taken from his office at lunchtime on a routine workday.  ” What crime has he committed?” is frequently asked. Before the revolution he had  been patronized by many in the aristocracy, including the wife of the shah. This economic class separation between the middle class before the revolution and the revolutionary guards after, was not something that I understood before this book.

Well worth reading.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Family, Nonfiction, Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.