How to Rescue the Resort

Latest

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Solving the riddle

By Gina Nahai

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.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

What is art good for?

By Gina Nahai

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?

Thursday, November 6, 2008

This time, I remember

By Gina Nahai

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.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Yom Kippur Dilemma

By Gina Nahai

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.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Exile’s gains and losses

By Gina Nahai

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.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Troubling (L.A.) Times

By Gina Nahai

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

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Diversity lost

By Gina Nahai

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?

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Obama?  Been there

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

This being Los Angeles . . .

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Cooking lessons

By Gina Nahai

Reflections on cooking, life lessons and mothers and daughters.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

‘Live from Tehran’

By Gina Nahai

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."

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Elegy for a Dream

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Want to hear a story?

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Book Tour Blues

By Gina Nahai

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Season’s end means mixed emotions for mom

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Why is this award different from all others?

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Becoming American

By Gina Nahai

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."

Thursday, February 22, 2007

My December visit with ‘lady’

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Rushdie’s ‘Clown’ No Laughing Matter

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Botox Beware

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, June 6, 2002

The Legacy of ‘Esther’s Children’

By Gina Nahai

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."

Thursday, October 4, 2001

To Become American

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, June 21, 2001

Age of Restoration

By Gina Nahai

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.

Thursday, May 17, 2001

Childhood’s Sweet Sharp Imprint

By Gina Nahai

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.