Dalia Sofer and The Septembers of Shiraz
Dalia Sofer’s provocative debút novel, The Septembers of Shiraz (HarperCollins, 2007), approaches questions of belief and responsibility through the story of the Amin family, upper middle class Jews living in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution. The Amin’s world is shaken when their father, Isaac, is imprisoned by the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guard for the crime of living a life of privilege while others suffer.
This fall, New Voices had the opportunity to speak with Sofer about the Amins, Iran, and what it means to be home.
Sofer was born to a Jewish family in Iran. She lived there for ten years, leaving with her family in 1983. Although The Septembers of Shiraz is not an autobiographical work, Sofer’s father, like Isaac Amin, was for a time jailed by the Revolutionary Guard. “My father’s imprisonment completely bewildered me at the time, as did the chaos and confusion of that period,” she says. “These experiences instilled very powerful emotions in me…all of which fueled my need to write this book. So while the story is fictional, it came from a very real place.”
In this context, it is all the more surprising to find that the novel offers a full, humanistic portrait of the Revolutionary Guards who hold Isaac prisoner. Sofer says that she made no conscious decision portray the soldiers as sympathetic. Still, she says, “As I was creating these characters, I would ask myself, ‘How did this man end up as an interrogator?’ or ‘How did that other one become a torturer?’ I knew that they, too have a story, even if that story doesn’t justify their current actions…To take an extreme example: haven’t we all seen photos of Hitler patting his dog Blondi?”
In the prison where Isaac is held, the Guard’s professed faith in Islam is juxtaposed with the Amins’ lack of faith in Judaism. “Faith to me has various meanings,” Sofer says. “It can be religious, but it can also be something less tangible–faith in goodness, in the future, in the belief that the world is ultimately a safe place. I think that Isaac, prior to being imprisoned, had this latter kind of faith. Later, in prison, his faith in goodness is shaken and he tries to replace it with religious faith, because to be left with nothing at all – with a complete void – is terrifying.”
As the Iran of the Shah gives way to the Iran of the Mullah, the Amins flee their home for safer shores in Switzerland, grateful for their reunion, uncertain about what their new life holds beyond the promise of being together. The reader, too, is left to wonder about the future of Iran, a question that today still hangs in the balance.
In the wake of President Ahmandinejad’s visit to the United Nations and his much publicized speaking engagement at Columbia University, Sofer is noncommittal. “I do think that Iran, under this regime, remains a threat,” she says, “but the push for violence will most likely backfire, because a threat from an outside force often has the effect of banding people together.”
In an interview published in the New York Times Magazine, Sofer told interviewer Deborah Solomon that she doesn’t feel entirely at home in New York, her current place of residence. We asked what home means to her now. “For a long time I’ve thought of home as a place where you feel safe, a place where you have a history,” she says. “Home provides a deep connection that’s instantly recognizable – through a familiar smell, taste, or gesture. But lately I’ve been wondering whether there are other ways to define home. A friend recently said to me that ‘home can be a person,’ and I found this very beautiful.”
