MERCY
Gina Nahai

“…And so we lived, my multi-cultural family and their many-layered sorrows, seven Jews and one Catholic in a country that was ninety-seven percent Shiite Muslim, at a time when the West cast a shadow nearly as strong as our own history over every Iranian’s consciousness. My mother, offspring of a Russian Lubovicher rabbi and of his Iraqi wife, had internalized the discipline and the sense of duty they had taught their children. But she was also a freedom-loving soul who dreamt of doing significant things she knew were beyond her reach. She wanted to go to university, but was not allowed to because she was married; wanted to have a career, but had children instead. She was outspoken in a place where women were expected to be silent, restless when she had no choice but to stay put.

By age twenty, my mother had arrived at the conclusion that being a woman was the worst thing that could happen to a person. She said this to my sisters and I, then told us we had a duty to find a way out: we had been born in Iran’s golden era, when Jews were liberated from the tyranny of the mullahs and when women were beginning to have rights. We had access to a real education, and, more importantly, permission to believe in possibility. Unlike our mothers before us, we were allowed—within reason—to question authority, to challenge the conventional wisdom that had long ago determined a woman’s best option to be a well-placed marriage. My sisters and I were allowed to have expectations: that our parents would value their daughters—not as much as they did their sons, but value them nevertheless; that our husbands would treat us, if not with respect, at least with kindness; that our elders—male and female—would not deny us happiness merely because it had been denied them. . .”

Gina Nahai is a best selling novelist and a professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her books on Iranian Jewish experiences include Cry of the Peacock (Crown, 1991) Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (Harcourt, 1999) and Sunday's Silence (Harcourt, 2001). She's currently at work on Dreams of a Caspian Rain. She is a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and has researched the politics of pre and post-revolutionary Iran for the United States Department of Defense. Gina’s novels have been translated into 26 languages, and are taught at a number of universities in the U.S and abroad. She holds a BA and a Masters degree in International Relations from UCLA, and an MFA in Creative Writing from USC. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Magazine, and the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.