Rachlin, Nahid 1944-

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Rachlin, Nahid 1944-

PERSONAL:

Born June 6, 1944, in Abadan, Iran; immigrated to the United States, 1962, naturalized citizen, 1969; daughter of Manoochehr (a lawyer) and Mohtaram Bozorgmehri; married Howard Rachlin (a professor of psychology); children: Leila. Education: Lindenwood College, B.A.; attended Columbia University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—Harriet Wasserman, 230 E. 48th St., New York, NY 10017. E-mail—nahidr@rcn.com.

CAREER:

Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, research assistant, 1968-69; New York University Continuing Education Division, New York, NY, adjunct assistant professor of creative writing, 1979-90; Barnard College, New York, creative writing instructor, 1991—; New School University, New York, writing instructor; Unterberg Poetry Center, New York, writing instructor. Writing teacher at conferences and at colleges and universities, including Marymount Manhattan College, Hofstra University, Yale University, Hunter College, University of Iowa, and Southampton College.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Bennett Cerf Award, Columbia University, 1974, for short story "Ruins"; Doubleday-Columbia fellowship for creative writing, 1974-75; Wallace Stegner fellowship, Stanford University, 1975-76; National Endowment for the Arts fiction grant, 1979; PEN syndicated fiction project prize, 1983; Yale University, New Haven, CT, associate fellow.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Foreigner, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1978.

Married to a Stranger, Dutton (New York, NY), 1983.

The Heart's Desire, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 1995.

Jumping over Fire, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 2006.

OTHER

Veils: Short Stories, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 1992.

Persian Girls: A Memoir, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to Elements of Fiction, edited by Jack Carpenter, W.M.C. Brown (Dubuque, IA), 1979; A Writer's Workbook, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1987; The Uncommon Touch, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1989; Stories from the American Mosaic, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1990; The Confidence Woman, edited by Eve Shelnutt, Longstreet Press (Marietta, GA), 1991; and Lovers, Crossing Press (Santa Cruz, CA), 1992. Contributor of stories to periodicals and literary journals, including Crazy Horse, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Literary Review, Redbook, Shenandoah, Four Quarters, Confrontation, and Ararat; contributor of essays to periodicals, including Natural History and the New York Times magazine; contributor of reviews to Newsday and the New York Times.

Stories have been translated into the Iranian language.

SIDELIGHTS:

Nahid Rachlin, the most published Iranian author in the United States, was born in Abadan, Iran, but spent the early years of her life in Tehran. At the age of nine months, she was taken by her grandmother to be raised by her mother's sister, because her mother, who already had four living children, had promised her childless sister that the next child would be hers. Rachlin's childhood was one of fun, freedom, and acceptance, surrounded by the love and devotion of her mother-aunt and other members of her extended family. Rarely did she see her true parents, for whom she naturally developed little affection. However, circumstances led to her father arriving unexpectedly and taking her back at about the age of seven.

In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS), Rachlin related the shock, pain, and sadness of being yanked away from the only true mother she had ever known and having to adjust to a strange place and a rigid lifestyle in a home where her biological mother was cool and aloof. She begins her story remembering how, coming home from high school, she would search out her older sister, Pari, and read to her whatever story she had written that day while she should have been listening to a lecture. Her stories expressed real-life events or perceptions she had experienced. "Pari always responded not to the story itself but to the anguish that the story expressed," writes Rachlin. "She listened not so much to my story as to me. I remember the intensity of my desire to express my feelings and reactions to what went on around me, and equally matched eagerness to hear her reassuring voice. I was also an avid reader. I would read some of the passages to her and she would say, ‘You could do that.’" To this day, Rachlin wonders whether she would have become a writer had her sister not encouraged her.

By the time she was halfway through high school, Rachlin began reading anything she could obtain, using the stories to transport her into other peoples' lives through their emotions. She was reading translations of Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, and Balzac; writing sketches and stories; and dreaming of escape from a life destined for an arranged marriage right out of high school—the type of life that eventually caused Pari to slip into manic-depression, divorce, the loss of custody of her only child, and several months each year spent in a psychiatric institution.

Rachlin began pleading with her parents to let her join her two older brothers, who were by that time living in the United States. Although hesitant, her father finally agreed because she was the only one of his daughters who read and did well in school. Her brothers obtained a significant scholarship for her at Lindenwood College, where she studied psychology and devoted time every day to her writing. Only after marriage and the birth of a child, however, did she feel she could justify taking time out of each day to write fiction. She began taking writing courses at Columbia University, during which time she wrote three one-page sketches—all fiction based on personal experiences in her homeland during her youth—that were published in a small literary magazine.

Rachlin's first return to Iran, twelve years after she had left, inspired her first novel, Foreigner, written on a Stegner fellowship at Stanford. Her second novel, Married to a Stranger, recalls the deteriorating marriage of her second sister and her own adolescent dreams. Reviewing the book for Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Saideh Pakravan noted that Rachlin is the direct descendent of people living in a culture where telling stories at home in the family setting was a way of life. These storytellers, often a parent or a nanny, engaged their rapt audiences with fascinating sagas about events that shaped peoples' lives and destinies. "Reading anything Rachlin writes is like sitting at the foot of a storyteller of yore," commented Pakravan. "Except, having lost the innocent rapture with which children listen, we also observe the sleight of hand, and wonder how Rachlin manages to hold us, how her restrained writing can exercise such pull. There is no answer, unless it lies in the very lack of artifice."

Rachlin prefers to write in what Pakravan called the unobtrusive voice of a powerful storyteller about her past. She commented in CAAS: "It has to do with a desire to bring into the present a reality which is no longer represented in my present life. The differences between the Iranian and American cultures are so vast that in order for me to have adjusted to the American way of life I have had to, without always being conscious of it, suppress much of my own childhood and upbringing. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night with a nightmare that my past has vanished altogether and I am floating unanchored. I get out of the bed and begin to write. Then it is all with me again."

Rachlin commented: "I have always written fiction rather than nonfiction because I feel that only fiction can convey the complexity of character and situation that I see around me. I think that the purpose of fiction in society is to provide models for alternate courses of life—not so much as a guide for action but as a vehicle for understanding people. Foreigner, my first published novel, for instance, seems autobiographical because of many parallels in the protagonist's life and my own life (a young woman coming to the U.S., marrying an American and then returning home for a visit). "The same with my second novel, Married to a Stranger, which is about a young woman in Iran, yearning to break through the rigid traditions around her."

According to Barbara Thompson in the New York Times Book Review, "Rachlin captures the range of forces that were brought to bear on personal relationships in the changing political and social setting of the last years of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's reign. She shows us not only the tranquil inner courtyards with sweets and gossip exchanged by the fishpond, the flower bedecked bridal chamber, but also the political, social and religious factions contending for primacy in the streets outside." Carolyn See described it as "a woman's novel in a very particular sense," in the Los Angeles Times. "The reader has the feeling that these are the facts, ma'am; perhaps the real facts of one ordinary relationship, matter-of-factly described against the larger background of a country ripped by war and revolution. But it's the single human beings who are important here; that is, perhaps, what makes it a woman's novel."

The Heart's Desire, the material for which again came from Rachlin's personal experiences, centers on an Iranian-American couple dealing with cultural issues in a post-revolutionary Iran. "The plot immediately reminds one of Not without My Daughter, the controversial novel (also made into a film starring Sally Field) about an American mother fighting to save her child from an abusive Iranian husband in a country basically described as an insect-infested black hole," wrote a reviewer for Iranian.com. The reviewer also commented that Rachlin's uncomplicated style is a "blessing. Instead of trying to solve literary riddles and metaphors and hallucinating in magical realism, the reader is left free with a clear head to grasp complicated human and cultural issues."

Jumping over Fire is also set in the 1970s during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The narrator is Noor Ellahi, daughter of an American mother and Iranian father. The blonde Noor uses the name Nora and favors American culture. She lives with her parents and brother Jahan, who enjoys the freedom of a male, in a company compound in southern Iran, constructed by Iranian American Oil Co. for their employees, like her father, who is a radiologist at the company hospital. The streets of the enclave are named as though they were part of an American suburb, the theater plays American classic films, and many of the residents are American or English. The Ellahis, who follow no religion, live a privileged life, cared for by servants, until revolution threatens and they flee to America. Nora and Jahan, who is adopted, have been lovers, and they intend to go out on their own together in the United States, but he is unable to adjust culturally, and they go their separate ways. "A deeply flawed family, and the people of many nationalities who touch their lives, is seen with a clear but forgiving eye," noted School Library Journal contributor Christine C. Menefee.

In Persian Girls: A Memoir, Rachlin recalls the details of her childhood, her early years with her aunt, her return to her family, and the loving support she received from Pari, who died an early death. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that "this memoir gives American readers rare insight into Iranians' ambivalence toward the United States."

Rachlin told CA: "Ever since I was a teenager I found that writing, giving shape to some of the events of my own life and of those around me, created a sense of peace in me. I hope that my books will make people aware that important human emotions and desires are universal. I hope to alleviate some of the stereotypical pictures people have of cultures like Iran."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Rachlin, Nahid, Persian Girls: A Memoir, Jeremy P. Tarcher (New York, NY), 2006.

PERIODICALS

Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, fall, 1992, Marilyn Booth, review of Veils: Short Stories, p. 52; spring, 1994, Saideh Pakravan, review of Married to a Stranger, p. 53.

Booklist, March 1, 2006, Donna Chavez, review of Jumping over Fire, p. 67.

Internet Bookwatch, May, 2006, review of Jumping over Fire.

Literary Review, fall, 1996, Thomas Filbin, reviews of Married to a Stranger, Veils, and Foreigner, p. 172.

Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1983, Carolyn See, review of Married to a Stranger, p. 20.

New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1983, Barbara Thompson, review of Married to a Stranger, p. 14; November 29, 1992, Laurel Graeber, review of Veils, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, April 20, 1992, review of Veils, p. 19; October 2, 1995, review of The Heart's Desire, p. 66; August 7, 2006, review of Persian Girls, p. 45.

School Library Journal, August, 2006, Christine C. Menefee, review of Jumping over Fire, p. 145.

Seattle Times, July 21, 2006, Michael Upchurch, review of Jumping over Fire, p. 137.

World Literature Today, spring, 1996, Nasrin Rahimieh, review of The Heart's Desire, p. 463.