Gina Nahai

No one loves the stranger

Published on May 15, 2013

I know what happened with those three women in Cleveland, how one man was able to imprison and torture them in the middle of a residential neighborhood for 10 years, even though he had grown children, brothers, cousins who visited the house for hours at a time. It’s not a pretty tale, but we’ve all heard it, although to a lesser degree, countless times before.

Iconoclast

Published on April 4, 2013

This may be just another useless explanation, the kind of futile attempt at finding meaning and logic that we all resort to in response to grief, but sometimes it seems life has it in for you in a very personal way.

Radiate this

Published on March 14, 2013

In the category of: Too little knowledge can be a dangerous thing

In praise of pastrami

Published on January 30, 2013

You know you’re getting old when every meal starts and ends with an admonition about how food will kill you.

Indigo: Remembering Iran

Published on October 10, 2012

It gets dark early in winter, so by the time you start to walk home, you’re already dipping into twilight. Your breath is a ribbon of fog against the silver-blue glare of the atmosphere, and your legs are heavy in the wet snow boots splattered with the sludge that flies off the wheels of buses and trucks and cramped, orange taxis swerving in and out of traffic as you count the first street lights to come alive.

Leonard’s story

Published on October 3, 2012

Years ago, I created a class, “Writer’s Marketplace,” dedicated to the business side of writing. It was inspired by all the I-wish-I’d-known-then-what-I-know-now moments in my own career, the realization that good writers often are clueless about how to sell their work, and that writing schools are often remiss in communicating the practical aspects of the profession to their students.

You can go home again

Published on September 5, 2012

On Fridays, the children would line up, all glittery pink shoes and Ninja Turtle T-shirts, and hike up a steep driveway from the preschool yard to the temple sanctuary. They walked single file or in pairs, one teacher in the lead and another bringing up the rear, each holding one end of a rope. The kids, 3 and 4 years old, gripped the length of the rope with their little hands stained with watercolor paint and Play-Doh dye. You could hear them singing Shabbat songs as they walked, and later, as they poured into the aisles and climbed onto the chairs in the temple and tried to sit still for a whole 20 minutes. By noon, when parents went to take them home, they were spent and tousled, excited but worn out by the morning's exploits. In their backpacks, they carried small challahs they had baked for that evening's dinner.

Thank you, David Rimoin

Published on June 6, 2012

There’s a country, I know, out in the sapphire glass heart of the universe, where every sick and ailing child has a likeness: One is of the flesh; the other, of light. One embodies what is; the other, what should have been.

Three Jews walk into a Starbucks

Published on May 9, 2012

I was sitting in the Starbucks in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C., listening to two men talk about a three-day hike through Israel’s Arava desert, when Bayaaz Khanoom appeared.

The bad, the worse and the ugly

Published on February 29, 2012

A painfully unappealing, unemployed woman in her late 30s with sumo wrestler thighs who wears 10-inch heels and a micro skirt to push around a pink stroller in which she carries her pair of Chihuahuas...

Elizabeth Taylor was my aunt

Published on February 1, 2012

It’s true. Really. The Elizabeth Taylor. She of the many husbands and the showpiece jewels, the on-screen splendor and off-screen grit was, indeed, related to me by marriage. This isn’t a recent discovery; I’m not like my mother, who tends to unearth a long-lost or previously unknown cousin every time she steps out of the house. I’ve known about my relationship to Elizabeth Taylor since I was a young child in Iran, and I was reminded of it again recently during a book launch at USC.

Opinion: Tunisian pizza

Published on January 4, 2012

There’s a concept in the Persian language – ghessmat – for which no exact equivalent exists in English. It refers to a person’s unrelenting, inescapable, for better or worse but either way, it was designed and executed specifically for you, destiny.

Opinion: Oh, to be young and stupid again

Published on November 2, 2011

I was 21 years old, a first-year law student at USC, when I walked by a trailer parked on an empty lot off McCarthy Way on the downtown campus. It was late afternoon, and I was on my way home; I only noticed the trailer because it was such an anomaly among the red brick buildings surrounding it. The door was open, and I could hear voices inside, and I saw a young man with dark skin and a sparse, reddish beard standing amid a mess of paper on the floor.

Opinion: In praise of falsehood

Published on August 31, 2011

What is it with people telling the truth all the time? I don’t mean under oath, or even in response to a question that has been posed to them...

Opinion: Culture clash

Published on August 2, 2011

In case you were too busy watching Congress make a fool of itself last month to have noticed, a parallel, no-less-wrenching debate was raging in the halls of Beverly Hills

Gina Nahai: What Remains

Published on July 5, 2011

We were exchanging “memorable aunt” stories, and my friend, who’s a trial attorney, had a clear lead over all the rest of us.

Staying true to our own heritage

Published on June 1, 2011

I once wrote a novel about an Iranian Jewish woman who grows wings and flies away from her husband’s home.

Purple Eyes

Published on March 30, 2011

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m walking down a busy sidewalk in an upscale neighborhood in Tehran. My mother and her friend have picked me up from school and driven me here without saying what we’re going to do or why we can’t stop at home first so I can change out of my uniform.

The solitude of the Arab soul

Published on March 1, 2011

“This,” I thought, “is what the surface of Mars must look like.”

Tehran to Cairo

Published on February 2, 2011

It all looks dauntingly familiar — the spectacle on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt. People in the streets, buildings on fire, a wavering army, a vanishing police force. We saw this 32 years ago, in 1978 and early ’79. That time, it was the Shah who was being forced out. Like Mubarak, he had ruled for three decades, been a staunch ally of the United States, stymied the reach of the mullahs. Like Mubarak, he clung to too much power for too long, became a victim of his own hubris (or paranoia), woke up one day and found himself alone in the world.

Conspicuous consumption — What don’t we get?

Published on January 5, 2011

Not long ago, I happened to be standing next to a guy at the Apple store in Century City. I was waiting by the register to pay for a new charger for my laptop; he was in line to buy the new iPhone. He looked like he was in his 60s and had had a few facelifts.

Glitterati no match for ‘This Lovely Life’

Published on December 1, 2010

May I make a suggestion for a great Chanukah or Christmas gift? Or recommend a selection for your book club? Or offer a proposal for making time disappear during your next long and painful airline experience? “This Lovely Life,” by Vicki Forman. I read two-thirds of it during a fancy and fabulous dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel two weeks ago, came home and finished it that night, read it again the next day, and now it’s on the nightstand next to my bed, where I keep reading passages from it.

Tales of Iranian nights, and days

Published on September 28, 2010

Friday night at dinner, we were talking about a guy, a Muslim friend of my grandfather’s, who had — very literally — come back from the dead. He had been in Germany during World War II, safe from the Nazis because Iranian Muslims, unlike Iranian Jews, were considered part of the Aryan Nation. The Iranian government at the time had very close ties with Germany, and my grandfather’s friend was having a wonderful time in Hamburg, doing God knows what and drinking enough for three people, until he came down with a severe case of bleeding ulcers and had to be rushed into surgery. On the operating table, he lost too much blood and died.

Secrets of the murderous human heart

Published on August 31, 2010

David Scott Milton, 50-some years old, Jewish, is alone in a locked room with a young Nazi. They’re in the library of the Maximum Security Yard of the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi. It’s night, and the prison is in lock-down. David and the Nazi had a standoff a few days earlier — the Nazi doesn’t like Jews and David doesn’t like people who push Jews around — but that time, they were surrounded by prisoners and guards, and so the Nazi had backed down. When the lock-down began, he knew David would be sent alone to the library. Somehow, he evaded the guards, got there before David, and waited. He knows it’ll be some time before anyone realizes he’s missing, and some more time before he’s f

Sex, Shopping and the Second Half of Life

Published on August 4, 2010

It so happened, the other night at a dinner in Bel Air, that I found myself sitting next to the author Judith Krantz. I had met her only minutes before, introduced by a mutual friend who referred to her as Judy and said nothing about who she was and what she did. I thought she was truly elegant, glamorous in a tasteful way and remarkably pretty in her advanced age. She was talking about the years she had spent living in Paris with her husband, how she loves the scent of a book, the sound of its spine cracking the first time it’s opened. I noticed she wore a bracelet similar to mine, only hers had an inscription I couldn’t make out from a distance.

Becoming American

Published on June 2, 2010

The bride, tall and beautiful, is half white, half African American. The groom, no less attractive than his new wife, is half Russian, half Iranian. His father is half Jewish, half Baha’i. There is a sister who is half Baha’i, half Muslim, one who’s all Jewish and one who’s undecided. There’s a brother who is half Baha’i, half Christian, a niece who thought she was Muslim, discovered she’s in fact Jewish and finally settled on Catholic. There are two nieces and a nephew who are one quarter Jewish Iranian, one quarter Baha’i Iranian, and two quarters Chinese of undetermined religious affiliation. And this is only the groom’s side of the family — 20 people, to be exact, among some 150 guests milling around at the reception on a gorgeous afternoon in a beautiful ranch just outside of Los Angeles.

Family Still Asking, ‘Where Is Adam?’

Published on May 4, 2010

Thursday morning, Adam woke up, took his medication and vanished. Just like that. A drop of water in the desert at high noon. A 34-year-old man with a round face and the temperament of a boy in his late teens, wearing a black jacket and pajama bottoms. One minute he’s standing in the middle of his mother’s kitchen in Stevenson Ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley; the next minute he’s nowhere.

People of the Book Grapple With Growth of New Technology

Published on March 2, 2010

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Beverly Hills library. I go there almost every day, laptop in hand, impelled by the irrational idea that this is the only place in
the world where I can finish my new book. I also have an office with a great view and a house that’s empty and quiet all day where any normal person should be able to sit and work just fine, and yet, I have to get up and drive 15 minutes every morning to sit among dozens of strangers — some more strange than others — to find my focus.

The Plight of the Iranian Jewish Divorcée

Published on January 6, 2010

A hundred years ago in Iran, my great-grandmother, Tavoos Khanum (later known as Mrs. Peacock), made history by becoming the first Jewish woman ever known to have left her husband. She had married him when she was 9 years old; he was two decades older.

An Airport, a Vet and a Catch-22

Published on December 2, 2009

Did you know that, if you’re a member of the United States armed forces, a war injury could be considered a self-inflicted wound? Say you’re serving a second term in Iraq, and you get shot at by the enemy, and you come back to the States in bits and pieces, and try to get on a plane, a Delta flight, say, from LAX, on Nov. 13, 2009. Say you’re under the impression, based upon some policy guidelines conveyed to you by an airline representative on the phone, that the airline makes special allowances for passengers with physical injuries, and so you get to the airport early and go to the Delta counter only to be told by the little man with the round, bald head that you are not, in fact, one of the injured.

How to Rescue the Resort

Published on November 5, 2009

Have you noticed how the people who work in luxury hotels never actually use the word “hotel” to refer to the place? They call it “The Property,” or “The Resort,” or sometimes even “The Estate,” which, I imagine, is supposed to describe something much grander, more awe-inspiring and worthy of one’s hard-earned money than a mere “hotel.”

Let’s Set Our Sights Higher

Published on September 30, 2009

Two things I learned on the first day of Rosh Hashanah this year: 1. An Iranian Jewish man in Los Angeles recently risked life and limb to save a complete stranger from dying inside a burning car, and 2. Another Iranian Jewish man in Los Angeles recently made enough money to buy and drive (as opposed to keeping them locked up in his garage, like Jay Leno does) a number of very expensive cars.

Skid Row Poetry Gives ‘Slam’ New Meaning

Published on July 29, 2009

A few weeks ago, one of my students, Andrew McGregor, sent me an e-mail to ask if I would serve as a judge at a poetry slam he was staging in Los Angeles.

A Point of No Return

Published on June 16, 2009

There is a rhythm to every nation’s history — a pattern that repeats over the centuries, that creates forward movement, pulls back, pushes ahead. So it is with Iran in modern times: about every two to three decades, major change — a war, a famine, the overthrow of a dynasty — occurs with unmistakable ramifications.

Auto Esteem Deficiency

Published on June 3, 2009

I swear I didn’t plan it this way. I know it fits just a little too well into my recent string of rants about our upside-down values and meaningless priorities, like a too-tidy resolution to a too-scripted reality TV show, but everything I’m about to tell you actually happened to me over the last three weeks, so bear with me just one more time, and I promise I’ll move on from the subject into something even more drastic and depressing next time.

Wake Up, Angelenos

Published on April 29, 2009

Our Mess Will Be Our Children’s Moment

Published on March 4, 2009

It’s like Alice falling through the rabbit hole: step onto any university campus, and the world is bigger, more colorful, more full of chance and wonder than you thought possible. To be reminded of the beauty of youth, the innocence of the untested, the buoyancy and optimism of the untouched. It’s a transformative experience — humbling and hopeful, a reminder of life’s most sacred promise: that every mistake can be corrected, every disappointment can lead to joy, every generation’s failures can be mitigated by the triumphs of the next.

A Person of Consequence

Published on February 4, 2009

“So,” the man in the lilac vest asks me by way of greeting, “Are you making any money these days?”

Solving the riddle

Published on December 31, 2008

In Los Angeles and New York and elsewhere in the West, families who had left Iran "for the summer," to"wait out the troubles" and "return in time for the kids to start school in September" realized there was no going back.

What is art good for?

Published on December 3, 2008

I wonder every time I go into and out of the office, what art is for? To capture the truth of a person or a thing? To tell that truth in unexpected ways to people who expect it least?

This time, I remember

Published on November 7, 2008

It's been 30 years since I left Iran, and I still know I'm going back some day, because I have to see that house again, to stand before the yard door and discover if it's indeed 12 feet high, or if I've imagined it so, to ring the doorbell and see if I can hear its chime echo up and down the street.

Yom Kippur Dilemma

Published on October 1, 2008

We have more synagogues and more freedom to use them here in Los Angeles than we did in Iran, but that doesn't mean we're any closer to fulfilling the true purpose of gathering in a house of worship.

Exile’s gains and losses

Published on September 3, 2008

I don't know what will become of the legacy of Iranian Jews outside of Iran, how history will judge us in the context of the opportunities we had and the extent to which we helped make the world a better place with what we were given.

Troubling (L.A.) Times

Published on July 30, 2008

Maybe all the layoffs and buyouts have cut just a little too deeply into the newsroom, or Mr. Zell is purposely dumbing down his newspaper in hopes of making it more profitable

Diversity lost

Published on May 1, 2008

Are we electing a candidate based on his or her ability to lead the country, or are we crowning a king who looks good in pictures and who is above criticism, examination and challenge?

Obama?  Been there

Published on April 3, 2008

I don't think Obama is a bigot or malicious. I think he's someone who's risen too high too fast, on the merit of some exceptional oratorical skills and some natural charm and charisma, at a time when this nation is hard-pressed to find a person in whom it can put its faith. I think he hasn't even had a chance to examine his own loyalties and politics enough to know where he has stood up to now and how he can reconcile his "base" -- the Louis Farrakhans and the Rev. Wrights of the world -- with his new, much wider constituency.

This being Los Angeles . . .

Published on January 31, 2008

Last Thursday night at LACMA, I was treated to a reading of my own works by the very talented and beautiful actress Bahar Soumekh, and by UC Irvine professor Nasrin Rahimieh. Outside the Bing Theater, rain poured in sheets, and traffic on Wilshire was at a standstill because all the lights had been blown out by the wind and -- this being Los Angeles where even the mildest winter storm is dealt with like Armageddon -- I was rather astonished that anyone had shown up at all.

As she remembers it

Published on January 3, 2008

Do you write from memory? Someone always asks, and I become tongue-tied and uncertain, scrambling for the words, the ways to make believable what I know will sound bizarre -- a too-complicated response where all that is required is a simple "Yes" or "No" or "Sometimes; the rest is research."

I lived in Iran for only 13 years. I remember very little -- a handful of places, a couple of dozen friends and relatives. Yet, I've spent my entire career writing about the country and its people, and I've written it all -- this is the part that's difficult to explain -- from memory.

Cooking lessons

Published on December 6, 2007

Reflections on cooking, life lessons and mothers and daughters.

I’ve never had real heroes

Published on November 8, 2007

t is true that Gunter Grass has brought much good into the world by his writings. It is also true that his late-in-life revelation calls into question or, depending on your point of view, entirely invalidates his right to the high moral ground he has for so long occupied. But in doing so, he has proven to those of us who have followed his life and career what he says he learned as a POW after the war: That no truth is ever entirely true, that what we revere today may become indefensible tomorrow, that the wisest path through life is to distrust certainty and instead to walk, in Grass' own words, "the long route, paved with doubts."

‘Live from Tehran’

Published on October 4, 2007

It's 8 p.m. on a Wednesday, and I'm at the studios of KIRN -- a Persian-language AM radio station on Barham Boulevard near Universal Studios. I'm a guest on a program called "Live From Hollywood."

Elegy for a Dream

Published on September 8, 2007

The Shah of Iran symbolized, with his youth and his seemingly limitless future, the power and grandeur that, we believed, would one day be his -- he symbolized for us a life of possibilities, such as we hadn't known for centuries.

Want to hear a story?

Published on August 2, 2007

Somehow, this most blatant form of self-promotion, this venue that, until a couple of hours ago, had looked to me like a literary meat market, has suddenly reminded me of the reason I started writing in the first place: to tell a good story; a story about Jews; a story that in its own small way continues the tale of this people who have had to struggle, in every generation, to ensure that their story doesn't end.

Book Tour Blues

Published on July 5, 2007

Season’s end means mixed emotions for mom

Published on May 31, 2007

I'm not feeding the homeless, or doing a beach cleanup, or raising money for Hadassah and ORT and the Israel Defense Forces. I'm here because my youngest son, who is 14 years old and in eighth grade, is playing goalie on a lacrosse team for his school.

Why is this award different from all others?

Published on May 3, 2007

When Eric R. Kandel says that this award means as much to him as the Nobel, a chuckle rises from the audience and quickly spills into applause. But Kandel isn't joking. "I've been asking myself," he says, "what the difference is between being here and being in Stockholm." Again, there's laughter from the audience.

Becoming American

Published on April 5, 2007

I'm thinking of the Southern accent, the country-club attitude, the ship-captain husband, trying to figure out how any of that fits in with a story about a family from the Jewish ghetto of Esfahan. "She might have told me," I confess. "I didn't listen because it didn't make sense."

My December visit with ‘lady’

Published on February 22, 2007

When I first started writing, I sat with Khanum for hours at a time, asking questions. I was 21 and on leave of absence from law school. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but I knew some stories from Iran, and had begun to write them. They were scattered pieces of people's lives, bits of conversations I had overheard through the years, rumors that had been whispered too many times and taken on a reality that may or may not have been deserved.

Rushdie’s ‘Clown’ No Laughing Matter

Published on April 27, 2006

Salman Rushdie is at Disney Hall, addressing a near-capacity audience as part of the Music Center's 2006 Speaker Series. He has come this March 1 evening to talk about politics and art, truth and tyranny, free and forbidden speech. He has come, also, to promote his newest book.

Botox Beware

Published on January 20, 2005

My first inkling that something has gone tragically wrong is when I hand the parking attendant my valet ticket and see a wicked, knowing smile -- I know what you've been up to and trust me, you shouldn't have -- spread across her face. I try to smile back at her, but my cheeks are frozen stiff and my eyes feel as if they'll pop out of my head if I try to force the muscles. So I sit in the car and drive sufficiently away to escape the attendant's stare, then flip open the visor and check for signs of disaster: $350 and a trip to the dermatologist, a little vial of poison strong enough to paralyze a horse and here I am, looking exactly like before, except that smiling is out of the question.

The Legacy of ‘Esther’s Children’

Published on June 6, 2002

In his introduction to Esther's Children," (Jewish Publication Society, $110) editor Houman Sarshar speaks of a time when, at 6 years old and about to start elementary school, he discovered his legacy as an Iranian Jew. Over breakfast in their apartment in Tehran, Houman's father, a top planning commissioner in the Shah's Iran, notices the Star of David pendant -- a recent gift from a grandmother -- hanging from his son's neck. He reaches over and slips the necklace under Houman's shirt.

"If anyone in school asks about your religion," he instructs his son, "lie. Tell them you're Muslim."

To Become American

Published on October 4, 2001

I'm 11-years-old, my world a patchwork of mixed identities and conflicting beliefs, my eyes searching for a horizon I cannot yet see but that I follow almost by instinct. It's August in New York -- a long and gray stretch of humidity and noise, people speaking to me in an accent I cannot understand, streets choked with traffic, shops overflowing with merchandise, buildings that block out the sun and cast permanent shadows upon the city. It's the first of many visits I'll make with my family to America, a small and tentative step along a journey that has begun long ago in my parents' hearts.

Age of Restoration

Published on June 21, 2001

No need to explain why I'm late, I realize. It's an Iranian party. You're not expected to be on time -- just to stay late and socialize.

Childhood’s Sweet Sharp Imprint

Published on May 17, 2001

It is summer, a long time ago, and I am lying on a terrace overlooking an ancient garden full of rosebushes and fruit trees. The days have been so hot, the asphalt on the sidewalk melts under my feet if I dare step out of the house. At night, the temperature drops. My sisters and I take the hose to the yard and stand there as the day's heat rises out of the brick floor in a cloud of white steam. My mother spreads our bed on the terrace, and we crawl into it, hours before we can actually fall asleep. We thrash about in the cool sheets that smell of dust, summer and lavender bleach; listen to the music that drifts up from our grandmother's radio downstairs; eat fresh mulberries we have picked from the tree in our own yard.

Chinese Box

Published on April 26, 2001

So there's a fairy-tale wedding: a thousand guests in a flower-filled ballroom, a dozen violins playing Mozart, a grainy-voiced singer belting out an old Persian love song. The bride is 20 years old and ravishing, of course, but she's also blessed with charm and charisma, the kind of exuberance that turns heads and drags stares behind her. She's been breaking hearts since she was 14 years old and walked into a cousin's wedding in a frilly white dress and a wide lace headband. Now she dances on stage, next to the singer with the forlorn music, and the crystal beads on her wedding gown glow like fireflies in the dark.

Words, Blessed Words

Published on March 29, 2001

I'm not usually at a loss for words, it is true, but something about a library, about speaking there during Women's History Month, strikes a nerve and resonates deeper than usual.

Holiday Halvah

Published on March 1, 2001

Holiday Halvah

Purim Story

Published on March 1, 2001

I have a picture of my daughter the first time she dressed up for Purim. She is 4 years old, her bangs too short as a result of a self-inflicted haircut, her face round and perfect as a green apple.