Esther Amini: Interviewing My Younger Self

April 21, 2020 | By Esther Amini | 1 Reply More

Esther Amini, Author of: “Concealed”—

Memoir of a Jewish-Iranian Daughter Caught between the Chador and America

Interviewing my younger self…

As a young child, born unto Iranian parents and growing up in the United States, what is your greatest fear?

The sound of my voice.

Why?

My Persian father believes speech should be avoided at all cost. Words are lethal, they lead to disagreement, violence, and eventual death.

Since I seem to have a need to speak but am afraid to, I ask myself, “Am I his bad seed?”

When you explore your parents’ past, in order to better understand them, what do you learn?

They carried scar tissue from their past.

My parents were Orthodox Jews raised in the city of Mashhad, the most intolerant and fanatically Islamic city in all of Iran. Here, of all places, they lived underground lives, like the Marranos of Spain. Due to life-threatening anti-Semitism, Mom wore the black chador and Pop prayed from the Koran in public squares, each posing as Muslim. However, within the privacy of their home they were devout Jews. Orphaned at birth, my mother was strong-armed at age 14 into marrying my then 34-year-old father.

I also learn about Pop’s upbringing and his terror-stricken life in Mashhad. He had endured more pain and suffering than I knew and would ever know.

At the end of World War II, incensed by persecution, Mom dragooned Pop and my two older brothers to the States. Here, in America, I was born.

After learning all about their story, what gong rings in your head during childhood?

The fear of being married off against my will during childhood, just as my mother was.

In Iran, my paternal grandmother was married at the tender age of 9 to my 29-year-old grandfather. And my mother, at 14, was forced to marry my 34-year-old father. This was partly because they were underground Jews in Mashhad. Holding on tightly to their Jewish faith, guarding against intermarriage, they told themselves if a Muslim knocked on their door asking for the hand of their daughter, they could truthfully say “She’s spoken for.” Consequently, babies were often betrothed to one another, upon birth, in their bassinets.

This may have worked well in Iran, but Pop had hauled these Mashhadi values into our twentieth century home in Queens, New York.

What’s your backlash?

Growing up in a tight-knit Mashhadi community in Kew Gardens, Queens, I know it’s not acceptable to criticize and certainly not to break ranks.

But I feel different—with a wish for a larger mission. I want something new, a freedom that hasn’t been had by any Mashhadi girl prior to me. I want to find a way out of this prescribed destiny. All thoughts point to “college.” Attending college becomes my inconceivable and certainly unattainable secret dream. An Ivy League college, I might add.

You forge your father’s signature and by hook or by crook you’re now enrolled in Barnard College. You’ve just told your parents you’re moving into the dorms. Your father goes on a suicidal hunger strike. What are your immediate feelings?

I’m an assassin. A murderess. I’m about to kill my father for a dorm bed. How selfish and short-sighted of me. After battling my conscience, I bargain with God. “If you keep Pop alive, make sure he lives through my move, I’ll return to him after college and become the Iranian daughter he has always wanted.”

At the age of 18, do you feel you will achieve your dream—attend college and still have your family?

No, I don’t.

How did you view your mother?

She’s a wild, wonderful, unpredictable, finagling female with an uncensored tongue.

At each stage of life my perception changes.

As a 1st grader, I want her to be able to read and write. I want a literate mother and am deeply hurt and ashamed that she isn’t. On the one hand she doesn’t measure up to other Kew Gardens, Queens moms who help their children with homework, and on the other hand I’m in awe of this swashbuckling rebel with deep disdain for rules and regulations. Quite a combo that is hard to wrap my little head around.

As a teen I view her as hefty, hardy and terrifying. She eats everything in her path—man, woman, child.

As a young adult, I come to know she is all about emptiness.

What made it difficult to be a youngster attending public school in the 1950s?

Back then, America believed in a fabled melting pot. People from diverse backgrounds were expected to assimilate and blend into one homogeneous culture. My first-grade teacher had tacked onto the classroom wall a huge poster with the words: “MELTING POT,” and beneath it was a drawing of black, white, and Asian faces piled into a large black wok. We were supposed to melt into one another, and all become the same—-Americans.

Stepping into P.S. 99, with parents who spoke Farsi, from a kitchen smelling of home-made marzipan, Persian green and red stews, saffron rice, all bubbling to the sound of Persian love songs crooning from our turntable, I wasn’t the same. Another reason to self-conceal.

As a young adult, do you feel more American or Persian?

I view myself as part of multiple societies to which I have incomplete claims.

Why did you become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist?

I’m drawn to lives of volcanic feeling with a drive to understand what seems incomprehensible. Growing up with diametrically opposite parents, an Iranian father who worshipped silence and a rebellious, larger-than-life mom who unleashed her feelings whenever and however she chose…became my natural habitat. At times humorous, at times painful, and often perplexing.

As a married woman, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, mother of two, painter, and writer—how do you now view your childhood?

My childhood was both the trap and its spring. I felt stuck in a home that was utterly confusing and quite limiting, yet it became my springboard. Never did I think feeling trapped would lead to self-invention and the ability to design my own life. If I hadn’t felt so constricted, perhaps I wouldn’t have felt as compelled to expand.

Today, do you feel your Iranian-American story is uniquely yours, different from those of others?

Mine is a very personal story. One that hasn’t been told before. However, given the meaningful feedback I’ve been receiving from readers, I’ve learned the struggle between one’s past and present isn’t unique to any particular immigrant group. Readers with lengthy American heritages have written saying, “I totally relate to you, your family, the humorous paradoxes and conundrums.” “Concealed” addresses how we’re shaped by the demands of loyalty and legacy and the universal challenge of what to keep and what to discard.

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CONCEALED:

Esther Amini grew up in Queens, New York, during the freewheeling 1960s. She also grew up in a Persian-Jewish household, the American-born daughter of parents who had fled Mashhad, Iran. In Concealed, she tells the story of being caught between these two worlds: the dutiful daughter of tradition-bound parents who hungers for more self-determination than tradition allows.

Exploring the roots of her father’s deep silences and explosive temper, her mother’s flamboyance and flights from home, and her own sense of indebtedness to her Iranian-born brothers, Amini uncovers the story of her parents’ early years in Mashhad, Iran’s holiest Muslim city; the little-known history of Mashhad’s underground Jews; the incident that steeled her mother’s resolve to leave; and her parents’ arduous journey to the U.S., where they faced a new threat to their traditions: the threat of freedom.

Determined to protect his daughter from corruption, Amini’s father prohibits talk, books, education, and pushes an early Persian marriage instead.

Can she resist? Should she?

Focused intently on what she stands to gain, Amini comes to see what she also stands to lose: a family and community bound by food, celebrations, sibling escapades, and unexpected acts of devotion by parents to whom she feels invisible.
In this poignant, funny, entertaining, and uplifting memoir, Amini documents with keen eye, quick wit, and warm heart how family members build, buoy, wound, and save one another across generations; how lives are shaped by the demands and burdens of loyalty and legacy; and how she rose to the challenge of deciding what to keep and what to discard.

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