Nahid Rachlin, a writer born in Iran, who defined the expectations of her parents of an arranged marriage, rather won a scholarship to study in the United States in the 1950s and became one of the first Iranians who wrote a novel in English, died in Manhattan on April 30. She was 85.
Her daughter, Leila Rachlin, said that the cause of her death in a hospital was a stroke.
The debut novel of Mrs. Rachlin, ‘Foreigner’, published the year before the Iranian Revolution of 1979 found in the year, shows the slow transformation of a 32-year-old Iranian biologist named Feri of a woman who has a comfortable but dissatisfaction with an Iran in an Iran in an Iran in an Iran who has been a distinction of an Iran in an Iran who has been a distinction in an Iran who has been a distinction in an Iran who has been a distinction in an Iran who has been a distinction in an Iran in a those who have an Iran’s. Has got her everywhere and her conviction and convince her and apart from the American husband.
“There is a subtle shift in ‘Foreigner’ that is fascinating to look at,” Anne Tyler, who won the Pulitzer price of 1989 for fiction, wrote in a review for the New York Times In 1979, “an almost imperceptible change of vision when Feri starts losing her westernized point of view.”
“What is clear in the beginning for Feri – the misery and the backwardness of Iranian life – is becoming less clear,” Mrs Tyler continued. “Is it that America is stable, orderly, peaceful, while Iran is turbulent and irrational? Or is it that America is only sterile while Iran is passionate and candid?”
The Critic Albert Joseph Guerard ‘Foreigner’ called ‘as a reserve as’ The Stranger ‘by Camus and with a part of his enigmatic power.’
In A lecture from 1990The Trinidadian writer vs Naipaul, who received the Nobel Prize in 2001, noted that ‘foreigners’,’ in his subdued, non -folitic way, the hysteria supported by the United States, in advance that was supported by the United States, and the popular Uprisinging.
Mrs. Rachlin grew up in those contradictions. In her hometown, Ahvaz, Iran, the local cinema contained American films, even while the mosque on the other side “warned against sinful pleasures”, she wrote in a memoir, “Persian girls” (2006).
Her own house “was chaotic, filled with a collision and confusing mixture of traditional Iranian/Muslim, and values, and Western,” she wrote. “None of us prayed, followed the hijab or fast.” But her parents insisted on arranged marriages for their children and reserved higher education for their sons.
Mrs. Rachlin’s second novel, “Married to a stranger” (1983), explored post -revolutionary Iran. Assessment in TimeBarbara Thompson said it was: “Better than most factual reports, what happened in Iran that made the theocracy of the Ayatollah possible.”
Nahid Bozorgmehri was born on June 6, 1939 in Ahvaz, the seventh of 10 children of Mohtaram (Noulowzian) and Manoochehr Bozorgmehri. Her father was a prominent lawyer and judge. Three of her brothers and sisters died in childhood.
After 6 months, Nahid was given by her mother to her aunt Maryam, the widow sister of her mother, who longed for a child after years of infertility.
But when Nahid was 9 – the age at which girls in Iran could legally marry – her father was probably worried that her more traditional aunt would follow that habit. (Maybe he understood the consequences after she was married to Nahid’s mother when she was 9 years old and he was 34.)
The divorce destroyed Nahid.
Mrs. Rachlin wrote “kidnapped”, wrote in one 2002 Essay for the New York Times magazineShe had a tense relationship with her biological mother and would never call her mother.
Over time, she grew close to her older sister Pari, who fought their father over her striving for acting and her resistance against arranged marriage – fights she lost.
Determined to avoid such a lot, Nahid begged her father to send her to America to go to university, like her brothers. She called in her brother Parviz to convince him: she was the first in her high school class and her writing showed promise. Her father refused Raf.
But when political tensions escalated – both the pronounced feminist teacher of Nahid and the bookseller who sometimes expressed her forbidden literature, her father, who had resigned after interference of the government, feared a servant or neighbor could tats about the stories of Nahid and her “white coat” books, the Savak.
When Parviz found her a women’s college near St. Louis, where he studied medicine, their father allowed Nahid to apply, hoping that his quirky daughter would cause fewer problems abroad – although not without determining that she returned home after graduation.
While visiting Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., Nahid discovered at a complete fair that although she had escaped the ‘prison’ of her house, as she wrote in her memoirs, she felt completely isolated in America.
“In the night I turned to my writing, my long -term friend,” she wrote. She had developed English quickly – although she had only taken hasty lessons in Iran before her departure – and had begun to write in her adopted tongue about the difficulty to feel neither Iranian nor American. “Writing in English,” she said, “gave me a freedom that I didn’t feel writing in Farsi.”
She studied psychology and, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1961, she decided not to return to Iran. She inquired her father in a letter in a letter; He would not talk to her for 12 years.
With just $ 755 she took a Greyhound bus to New York City, where she picked up strange jobs – babysitting, waitress – and, to keep her student visa, registered at the new school, where she met Howie Rachlin. They married in 1964.
Their daughter, Leila, was born in 1965. In addition to her, the survivors of Mrs. Rachlin are a grandson. Mr. Rachlin died in 2021.
After a few years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Mr. Rachlin studied for a psychology Ph.D. In Harvard, and then in Stony Brook, NY, where he taught, they moved to Stanford, California, in the In the mid -1970s. There, on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, she worked on ‘Foreigner’.
Her novel would never find a house in Iran. Censors blocked the publication in Farsi and argued that the descriptions of Mrs. Rachlin van Various streets and hotels of gat-in-the-wall suggested a failure of the modernization plans of the Shah. Her literary agent, Cole Hildebrand, said as far as he knows, none of her books was ever translated into Farsi.
In 1981 Mrs. Rachlin received devastating news: her sister Pari died after a fall of a staircase.
For decades, Mrs. Rachlin could not tolerate it to write about the tragedy; She did not turn to the subject to her memoirs, in 2006. “Yes, dear Pari”, the last rule of that work is: “It is to bring you back to life that I am writing this book.”
The other works of Mrs. Rachlin, who all explore Iranian social and political life, include two short -floors collections, ‘Veil“(1992) and” A Way Home “(2018), and three novels,” The Heart’s Desire “(1995),” Jumping over Fire “(2006) and” Mirage “(2024).
Her last novel, ‘given way’, which will be published next year, is the story of an Iranian child bride. It is based on the life of her birth mother, who gave birth to her first child at the age of 14.
The mother-daughter connection was prominent in the work of Mrs. Rachlin and in her life. She dreamed of living in the neighborhood of her aunt Maryam, whom she always called mother, but Maryam thought that life in America would be too shocking and would rather stay in Iran. With her own daughter, however, Mrs. Rachlin found the tight mother-daughter Bond who had always escaped her.
“Even in our rare disagreements,” wrote Leila Rachlin in an e -mail, “she would then gently reassure me:” We are still best friends, right? “
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