A Rare Look at Persian Fiction : STORIES FROM IRAN: A Chicago Anthology, 1921-1991 <i> Edited by Heshmat Moayyad</i> , <i> (Mage Publishers: $35 cloth, $19.95 paper; 571 pp. </i>

“Persian prose and Persian women have one bitter experience in common,” writes Heshmat Moayyad, the editor of this anthology of Iranian short stories, “they have both been suppressed for many centuries, women by men, prose by poetry.” Moayyad has set himself the very ambitious and much-needed task of setting right this wrong.

The first and most comprehensive body of short fiction in translation, “Stories From Iran” samples the works of some of the greatest Iranian authors of this century, as well as those by lesser-known writers with few published stories to their name. Presented in chronological order, the stories have been translated by the scholars of Persian literature at the University of Chicago. Some of the translations are superb, while others have obviously wounded their subject, but as a whole, the stories provide a comprehensive overview of a little-known genre of Persian writing.

An in-depth essay gives the novice reader an introductory background on Iranian prose, while brief author biographies and some dramatic black-and-white portraits introduce the author and his career at the beginning of each story. The editor has also made a conscious effort on behalf of women: They have been given fair representation, both as authors and as characters.

In “The Long Night,” an Iranian village lies awake, terrorized, as it listens to the sounds of a young girl’s screaming. Trying to escape the sound, the villagers close their doors and their shutters, and command their children to sleep. But for a whole week the screaming has not stopped, and now the children are begging their mothers to help their friend.

There has been a wedding. Golpar, the child bride of the story, has been given away by her mother to a much older man, her own Uncle Ebrahim, in return for a few bracelets, a head scarf and two pairs of shoes: one for Golpar, “and a pair for ma too, so her feet don’t get blisters.” Golpar is so much smaller than her husband she barely reaches his waist when they are both standing. She understands nothing of matrimony, only that she can’t play with the other girls any more, and that if she waits long enough, Uncle Ebrahim will “make me a doll . . . a talking doll.” Now she moans and screams under the caresses of her uncle: “Please . . . please, don’t . . . you’re killing me . . . killing me . . .”

Moniru Ravanipur, the author of this poignant and well-crafted tale, is a young addition to the cast of Iranian writers of short fiction. Her career dates back only to the post-Pahlavi era, but the realities and concerns of her tale--the backwardness of village life, the overriding poverty of peasants, strict and unmerciful social norms, stifling traditions so ever-present and established that no one dares challenge them--are recurrent in the works of earlier and better-known authors:

In Sadeq Chubak’s “The Gravediggers,” Khadijeh, a young village girl pregnant out of wedlock, is chased by cruel children and cursed by vicious adults, so terrorized and helpless that she runs to the forest after giving birth and buries the newborn in the mud.

In Sadeq Hedayat’s “Abji Khanom,” a young woman is humiliated and ridiculed by her own mother for the sin of having been born ugly. Convinced that no one will ever marry her, she has devoted her life to prayer and mourning, and agonizes in jealousy over her younger sister, Mahrokh (literally, beautiful as the moon ), and resorts to everything from cruel remarks to slander against her in order to quench her own jealousy. The night of Mahrokh’s wedding, Abji Khanom is absent, having chosen instead to attend a ceremonial wake. Later she comes home, ignoring her mother’s reprimands, and takes her revenge: She commits suicide by throwing herself into the water reservoir.

What is striking in all of these titles is the characters’ perceived impotence in the face of life’s tyrannies, and their internalization of the evil that pervades their lives; instead of rejecting the darkness and pulling together in hardship, the characters divide--mother against child, lover against lover, society against the individual. This is as true of stories that date back to the beginning of the century as it is of ones written in the 1980s; through war and occupation, revolution and coup d’etat, even Khomeini’s return to God, the fate of the Iranian people has changed but little, and so, we are to presume from these stories, has their response to their plight.

Nowhere is this point more evident than in the work of Simin Daneshvar, Iran’s greatest contemporary female novelist, whose prose has been characterized by a passionate love and concern for the plight of the common people. Daneshvar’s best-selling classic, “Savushun,” was the first novel ever published by an Iranian woman, and translations exist in English. In “The Half-Closed Eye,” she writes of two working-class women--an older aunt and her younger niece--rendered petty and small by their poverty, who devote themselves almost obsessively to the task of slandering the other. Ashamed of their status in life, they try to relieve their own sense of inferiority by belittling the other.

Daneshvar’s prose is all the more effective because it is devoid of the political affiliations that slant the works of some of Iran’s greatest writers. These others--Bozorg Alavi, Beh’azin, Ahmad Mahmud, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Fereydun Tonokaboni, Shahrnush Parsipur-- were deeply involved in politics, most of them leaning to the Left, and have suffered imprisonment and persecution under one regime or another. Courage and devotion aside, their stories are transparent attempts to make political statements, and as such are devoid of the magic and the charm which their medium can possess: Bozorg Alavi’s “Mirza” speaks to the dehumanization of the individual that results from persecution and exile. Fereydun Tonokaboni’s “The Obvious Charms of the Bourgeoisie” condemns the lifestyle and the corruption of Iran’s Western-leaning upper-middle class in the 1970s. Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s “The American Husband” is a naked statement about the ravages of the West upon the character and the life of the East.

Taken as a whole, the anthology serves as a witness to Iran’s recent social and political history, her many battles with herself, and the peace that has always eluded her. It also leaves the reader with a dual impression of Persian storytelling: either sad and impotent, or rebellious and preaching. One could debate whether this is a complete and fair presentation, but from a country where leaders rarely have tolerated their own literary figures, the translation and publication of these works, many of which have at various times been banned inside Iran, does a rare and invaluable service to the literature of the East and the West alike.