An intimate portrait of one family’s displacement after the 1979
Iranian Revolution and their search for identity.
Description
In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search
of her imagined America. Meanwhile, the political unrest in Iran
intensified and in 1979, Farideh’s family was forced to flee Iran
on the last El-Al flight to Tel Aviv. Farideh's father was a
well-respected son of the chief rabbi and dayan of the Jews of Shiraz.
During his last visit to the US in 2006, he handed Farideh his memoir
chronicalling his life after exile: the confiscation of his
passport when he returned to Iran for his belongings, the 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. Leaving Iran knits
together Farideh's story of dislocation and loss with her own
experience as an Iranian Jew in a newly adopted home.