A Daughter’s Story of One Family, Two Lands

One day, when Tara Bahrampour was a young girl growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran, her father took her to the holy city of Qom. Ordinarily, Bahrampour wore T-shirts and pants, but on this afternoon she donned a child-sized chador. In her memoir “To See and See Again,” Bahrampour--now a journalist living in New York--remembers the confusing beauty of the city’s dazzling, mirrored shrine. “It is a reflection of the outside world, shattered into fragments,” she writes. “I keep looking, trying to see myself in the mirrors. But every time I move a little bit the reflection changes.” This memory might well serve as a metaphor for Bahrampour’s dislocated life.

We readers of memoirs are taught to look askance at idyllic childhoods, but Bahrampour seems to have been one of those rare children who was, simply, happy. Her father, Essie, was a progressive Iranian Muslim architect, her mother, Karen, a freewheeling American singer-songwriter. The two meet at Berkeley in the early ‘60s and shock both their families by marrying. In Tehran, they are surrounded by Essie’s extended family, which is fiercely loving, passive and protective. Essie and Karen laugh off centuries of superstitious fears and, instead, invite Tara and her siblings to embrace the world with gusto. Later, Bahrampour will remember how her father rejected the supposedly comforting Sufi proverb “this too shall pass” because “it seemed like an excuse for paralysis.”

Bahrampour’s portrait of Tehran in the last contradictory decade of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s rule is fascinating. Miniskirts and radical students appear, the shah’s picture hangs in every shop, the sadistic secret police are feared. Bahrampour’s relatives--descendants of wealthy feudal landowners--import Valium and birth control pills from the West, but they are also immersed in tradition and blood ties. Tara feels torn between her Iranian and American heritages, yet navigates them with a child’s dexterity: She attends an international school, watches the Persian version of “Jaws” and sews a chador for her Barbie. Bahrampour is obviously offering us a privileged child’s view of life, but it is no less compelling for that.

The idyll ends with the overthrow of the shah--seen, again, from a child’s perspective: “But now the shots are right outside our house. We hear them while we’re watching ‘The Flintstones.’ ” Along with much of the country, Essie and Karen support the anti-shah movement, albeit belatedly and lazily. Certainly the Bahrampours have no intention of abandoning their home when the shah is deposed; like so many others, they decide to leave temporarily--just until things settle down. But things settle down into terror.

Life in the United States is not lovely. Tara, who is 11 when she emigrates, watches her once-proud family become impoverished and confused: These graceful heirs to the world no longer have a place in it, although they also “don’t know how to be poor.” Tara sees her confident father transformed by failure and, far worse, sees her own contempt for him: “Since we had left Iran something in him had become fragile. . . . I knew that people could be mean to him; I knew this because I had been mean myself.”

The last third of Bahrampour’s tale--her visit to Iran in 1994--is the least absorbing. Her comments on a Khomeini-ized Iran seem oddly wan, especially given the repressive, blood-soaked catastrophe that the revolution had become. But in its evocation of a charmed childhood and an off-kilter American adolescence, Bahrampour’s memoir is magical and moving; you can almost taste the sweetfigs and smell the rich spices and see the magnificent mountains of the land she still loves.