When Truth Is Given the Wings to Fly : Gina B. Nahai sends a strong message about the oppression of secrecy in her new novel.

Bestselling novelist Gina B. Nahai was talking to a woman she’d known from her childhood in Iran, when the friend shocked her with a story Nahai had never heard before.

“She’s telling me someone else’s story, and she says, ‘All this happened when I got out of the hospital.’ And I say, ‘What?’ And she says, ‘Well, you know, after my mother threw me off the roof.’ ”

Her friend was considered “a bad luck child,” a common Iranian belief stemming from something as intangible as the way a child looks you in the eye, says Nahai, a 38-year-old Iranian Jewish refugee who has lived in Los Angeles for 22 years.

“I asked her, ‘How come you didn’t die?’ And her older sister, who was in the room, said, ‘I always thought she was an angel, and that was how she survived childhood.’ ”

That story became the alluring focus of Nahai’s bestselling second novel, “Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith” (Harcourt Brace, 1999), in which Roxanna the Angel, a beautiful, ethereal girl from the Jewish ghetto in Tehran, is thrown off a roof by her mother for being a bad-luck child but survives by growing wings and flying off on a long and difficult journey to freedom. She ends up in Los Angeles, which in real life is now home to more than 30,000 mostly upper-class Iranian Jews who fled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalist regime just over 20 years ago. (Nahai’s family left shortly before the revolution.)

In her novel, Nahai incorporates not only the horror of her friend’s story and the contrasting beauty of the sister’s metaphorical interpretation, but also her friend’s classic Iranian instinct to keep the story secret--in contrast to the confess-all culture of the United States.

“There’s such a sense of keeping face in Iran, of keeping the family name intact--a sense that if the truth is allowed out, it can be devastating,” says Nahai, in her spacious Los Angeles home in the hills of Beverly Glen that she shares with her lawyer husband, Hamid Nahai, and their three children, Alexander Shahin, 12, Ashley Leila, 10, and Kevin Cyrus, 6.

“And the reality is, telling the truth can be devastating in Iran, because you’re not forgiven for your mistakes,” Nahai says. “Being a divorced woman is like being a leper. Having a handicapped child means that the entire family is doomed because if there is one bad gene, then none of the girls in the family can get married.”

Cultural Attitudes on Truth Telling

Although “Moonlight” sends a strong message on the warping nature of secrecy stemming from oppression, Nahai tries to avoid preachiness by drenching the reader in myth, allusion, history, zesty good humor and the sensibility of the Iranian language, Farsi, which she says is “very poetic and has a lot of what you might call melodrama” built into it. For example, Roxanna is said to be “dying of sorrow,” and there’s a word in Farsi for that. Thus, “Moonlight” is not simply a protest novel but a philosophical meditation on different cultural attitudes to truth and speaking the truth, as well as on the problems of accommodating these disparate truths in the fragmentary world of exile.

“The hardest thing for me growing up was understanding that no one is entirely good or bad,” Nahai says. Years ago, she discovered that one of her favorite great-uncles, “the nicest, most wonderful, great guy and loving father,” had tried to murder his wife. “How do you reconcile these two things?”

In the novel, Nahai explores the fractured nature of truth by filtering Roxanna’s story through various viewpoints. Her tough-minded sister, Miriam, tells Roxanna’s 18-year-old daughter, Lili, of her mother’s difficult marriage in Iran, her affair with her husband’s father, imprisonment in a Turkish whorehouse, and years of mind-numbing menial work until Roxanna arrives, old, broken and obese (symbolically bloated with sorrow) in Los Angeles. But it is Lili who relays Miriam’s story of Roxanna to the reader.

Nahai’s point is that sometimes it takes several generations for exiles to make sense of all the different cultural fragments of their lives. “In the beginning,” says Roxanna, as she lay dying, “there were many choices, and I, believing I was doomed, let them go to waste.” And Roxanna sees from the gleam in her daughter’s eyes that Lili will take her mother’s hard-earned insight to heart and perhaps make something of her life.

“There are times when it’s not just OK to tell the truth, but it will serve you,” Nahai says.

Speaking out has been a persistent theme in her own family, she says.

“I think that’s a big part of the reason my family left before the revolution. Not only didn’t we fit into Shiite society, we didn’t fit within Jewish society so well either. There was always the sense that there’s got to be something else out there.”

Nahai left Iran to attend a Swiss boarding school at 13 and she last saw her native country at 16 before leaving with her mother for Los Angeles, where she was to attend UCLA. It was the summer of 1977, two years before the Iranian revolution, and she didn’t know she was leaving for good.

“As far as I know, my clothes are still hanging in the closet,” she jokes.

But as violence escalated in Iran, her father joined the family in Los Angeles. (He had percipiently obtained a green card some years before.)

A Long Line of Free-Spirited Women

All the freedom-yearning women in the book--from Miriam and Roxanna to Alexandra the Cat, a bejeweled Russian emigre, even Roxanna’s harsh mother-in-law, Fraulein Claude, who cleverly reinvents herself to win the husband of her dreams--come from Nahai’s own family stories of free-spirited “runaway aunts” and other bold women.

“One of my aunts on my mother’s side, Eshrat Cohen, ran away and ended up in Shiraz, [Iran],” Nahai says. “She knocks on a door and the guy who answers says, ‘You can stay here, but you’ve got to marry me.’ So she says, ‘Fine.’ Under Islamic law you can’t stay with a man unless you’re married to him. She wakes up the next morning to find he has two other wives. But she became a women’s lib leader. I still get e-mails and calls from people who remember her standing up in the women’s section of the temple in the middle of a sermon on Yom Kippur saying, ‘Who says that women and men can’t sit in the same room?’ And that was heresy 50 years ago.”

Nahai also inherited a sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere from two lively grandmothers on her father’s side. Her grandfather’s first wife turned out to be sterile, so her grandfather went to Paris and married a “gorgeous woman who ran a factory,” a highly religious Roman Catholic who agreed to the marriage because she wanted to “see the East.” (Under Reza Shah, 1925-1941, polygamy was outlawed, though a man was allowed to have two wives if the first was sterile, Nahai says. Under the more ancient Islamic law, men were allowed to have four permanent wives and as many “temporaries, even for an hour,” as they wanted, she adds.)

Nahai grew up with both grandmothers, who had separate apartments in a house on the Avenue of Faith in Tehran, much like the one in the book.

“My French grandmother still lives in Iran and won’t leave. The Kosher Jew is in Santa Monica. She’s 96 years old and brilliant, the most liberal person you’ll ever find, all for gay rights and all that.”

True to the family tradition, Nahai also sometimes gets into trouble for speaking bluntly.

“I gave a lecture at Sinai Temple [in Westwood], the repercussions of which I’m still facing,” she says. The focus of her talk was a call for understanding between the American and Iranian communities. But she upset some Iranian Jews by talking about their origins in the ghettos of Iran, where Jews were a presence for nearly 3,000 years.

“I take pride in the fact that we came out of the ghetto and we’ve come this far,” she says. “But what I take pride in, some look at as something not to be aired out. It brought shame.”

For herself, Nahai embraces American freedoms but remains imbued with the culture of her native country. As a family, they celebrate Jewish, Iranian and American holidays. She also makes sure her children know Farsi and understand where they come from. But she likes the fact that her children mingle with children of all races in school.

“It enriches them and teaches them empathy,” she says.

Living in Los Angeles, “a community of exiles . . . living in the century of exile,” she feels optimistic about the future, for Iran and for the world.

“If we can be open with each other, if we can get over this nationalism that’s having people kill each other by the millions, it’ll be great,” she says. “I don’t believe in the ‘Jerry Springer’ mentality--say absolutely everything to the world--but I think there are times when the truth really shall set you free.”