Casualties of a Revolution

THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ

By Dalia Sofer

Ecco. 340 pp. $24.95

The early 1980s in Iran were frightening for anyone caught in the crossfire. As Islamic factions asserted dominance over other groups that had helped bring down the shah, thousands of Iranians were rounded up and accused of being monarchists, communists, Western intellectuals or Freemasons; of listening to the wrong music, wearing the wrong clothes or being related to the wrong people. Many were tortured and executed.

"The Septembers of Shiraz," Dalia Sofer's gripping first novel, tells the story of one such arrest. The book opens on Sept. 20, 1981, when a Jewish jeweler named Isaac Amin is drinking tea in his Tehran office. Two men with rifles seize him, put him on a motorcycle and drive him into a surreal and terrifying world.

The story alternates among Isaac in the infamous Evin prison, his wife and daughter in their Tehran neighborhood, and his son, an architectural student living in Brooklyn. As the narrative shifts between each person's internal struggles, the emotional impact increases. We don't feel just Isaac's dread and confusion but also his wife's guilt for being annoyed with him the night before his arrest, and for years before it; we also feel their daughter's panicked attempts to salvage the worsening situation.

Sofer's own father was imprisoned in Evin and, like Isaac, falsely accused of being a Zionist spy; the family fled Iran in 1982, when she was 10. Her descriptions of prison and exile ring true: Isaac feels not only afraid but also embarrassed at being arrested; when a child sees Isaac blindfolded in the street and asks his mother what he has done wrong, Isaac worries that people are "chattering about him by their doorways and windows." Meanwhile, his son, safe but lonely in New York, realizes that "people here still live with that sense of permanence he once felt when strolling by the Caspian Sea . . . the kind of trust that comes only from having a place in one's bones." Sofer skillfully depicts the post-revolution era's subtle shifts of balance between social classes, the new ways in which people must lie to survive and the constant specter of political denunciation from anyone with a personal grudge.

Some characters may sound familiar to Americans: the wealthy Iranians who cling to the shah's glittering coattails and worship Yves Saint Laurent, the vengeful revolutionaries seeking payback for the old regime's injustices. But Sofer also introduces us to more nuanced and conflicted ones: the revolutionary teenager made to suffer terribly for throwing paint on a mullah, the communist persecuted by those he helped bring to power, the maid unsure whether her relationship with her employer has been exploitive or nurturing, the rich man who sees flaws in the shah's regime even as he profits from it.

Like "Persepolis," Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir about the same period in Iran, this book's strength lies partly in Sofer's ability to characterize Iranians in any epoch: the obsession with saving face, the moments of sweetness between strangers, the interplay between Muslims and Jews that can be ugly or tender. "The Septembers of Shiraz" shows what happens when a society is abruptly reordered and ordinary people -- a housewife, a child at a birthday party, employees in a shop -- behave in ways they'd never considered.

Isaac Amin and his family are not ultra-religious or particularly political. They are secular Jews in a Muslim country, but they are also Iranians, and they feel more at home in Iran than their son does in Crown Heights, where he rents a room from a Hasidic family. To this boy who has grown up with girlfriends in bikinis by his pool, the world of kosher chocolate and modest women is as unfamiliar as revolutionary Iran is to his parents, and, in its restrictions and watchfulness, it contains some similar elements. But it also provides a comforting old-world community that can be hard to find in America.

Sofer's prose is lyrical and sometimes haunting. The day after the arrest, Isaac's wife imagines the city carrying on as usual, unaware that it is "short by one man this morning." She later recalls photographs of the shah's ministers in a morgue, "naked, like mice in a testing laboratory -- an experiment gone bad." And Sofer's depiction of Evin prison was particularly chilling to read this summer, as several Iranian Americans languished there without clear charges.

The plot wraps up a bit too neatly when a timely intervention takes care of some incriminating material, and the author occasionally inserts into characters' mouths history lessons that might have sounded more natural in their heads. But these are quibbles. "The Septembers of Shiraz" rises above being an ethnic novel about an intriguing place. It does not exoticize the Middle East or focus unduly on tempting targets such as women being forced to cover themselves or the persecution of Jews. These things exist, but they are part of a panoply of strangeness wrought upon everyone regardless of religion, gender or class. Instead, the book is about how people, in any country, live mostly without thinking about the political implications of their choices, and how they are taken by surprise when revolution or war crashes in. And how, even after the soul searching and the questions about whether they have led their lives the right way, they still care mostly about family, work, love and money. They are still, in the end, themselves.