In the western region of Los Angeles a long boulevard stretches from the main local campus of University of California in the north to the residential quarters to its south. If visitors to LA make it to Westwood Boulevard at all, it would probably be for a visit to UCLA and its museums; or perhaps for a bite at Sunnin Lebanese Café, a joint eternalized in Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm where it stood for the fictional Al-Abbas Original Best Chicken. But the spot doesn’t feature prominently on most LA itineraries. In this regard, as in so many others, Iranians in America are unusual.
When I visited the city back in June, I spent much of my time flaneuring up and down Westwood. For Iranians like me, this strip of grocery stores and shops is the beating heart of Little Tehran or, as it is better known, Tehrangeles, one of the many ethnic neighborhoods of the city. (For the curious reader: Porochista Khakpour’s recent novel Tehrangeles is a brilliant satire, both humane and merciless in its treatment of the Westwood Iranians.)
Those who do come to Tehrangeles know it best for its kitschy little Kabab joints, but my primary destinations were the three Persian-language bookstores on the boulevard.
I started with Pars Books where an infamous sign on its shelves has long become the butt of internet jokes. “No Browsing Please,” printed on a slip of paper in English and Persian, and taped to a shelf. As independent bookstores struggle to compete with online mammoths like Amazon, their one saving costumer-experience is browsing through the shelves, cracking spines and inhaling that sweet old-paper scent. Is this the only bookstore in the world that bans browsing? Is It trying to put itself out of business?
The instagram joke never made me smile. Whatever the owner’s reasons for the bizarre prohibition, surely it had something to do with the death knell perpetually sounding for the book-selling business. In 2024, selling books out of brick-and-mortar is hard enough in most cases. But to do it in a foreign language spoken by a tiny portion of Americans? Curmudgeon or not the man must be godly.
The godly man in question, the burly bespectacled shop owner, is named Qasem Beigzadeh – I had stopped by Pars to see him.
“I’ll tell you about the sign,” he said, visibly annoyed. “Most people who enter this shop have no intention of buying a book nor are they interested in books at all. They are usually waiting for an order from one of the restaurants nearby and come here to kill time. People who don’t read don’t know how to browse, either. They pick up a book, rifle through it quickly and violently, they ruin it – and they never buy it. People of the book already know what they want, and they can ask permission to browse.”
Beigzadeh’s voice bristled with bitter frustration and who could blame him?
He is a flag-bearer of a wonderful but dwindling world, the world of Persian erudition in America. Things are hard enough without outsiders fingering the merchandise.
Around 1.5 million people of Iranian descent live in the US, and about half of them are in California. A particularly wealthy community, inhabiting nearby Beverly Hills, has become famous for their extravagant life-styles and silly over-the-top weddings, as seen in the popular sit-com Shahs of Sunset. But, unlike generational wealth, Persian literacy doesn’t pass so easily from parents to children.
Beigzadeh bucks the slouch towards ignorance. On the walls of his tightly packed bookstore, with shelves stretching from floor to ceiling, gasping with books, there are portraits of the modern Iranian literati: Ahmad Shamlou, our grand anarchist poet; Forough Farokhzad, our iconic lyricist; Nader Naderpoor, our masterful convention-breaking poet and a several dozen more. No name tags are necessary: those of us who come to Pars (on purpose, the browsing-capable cadre) know the faces by heart. But how many share that pantheon today?
In addition to running the store, Beigzadeh edits and self-publishes historical manuscripts, piles of which surround him behind his desk at the storefront. Among the volumes he has published in recent years is the History of Rostam (Rostam al-Tavarikh), a rare late 18th century chronicle composed by Rostam al-Hokama, a polymathic scribe of the early Qajar period In Iran. With a bitingly satirical narrative, Rostam tells the magnificent tale of how the grand medieval dynasty of Safavids was overthrown in the early 18th century by an Afghan invasion. This pivotal book has been long neglected, with one of its very few extant manuscripts languishing for decades in Prussia’s state library in Berlin. In modern times, it was first edited and published in 1969. Beigzadeh’s edition is a crucial update. How many will ever open its pages?
Whatever the specifics of Beigzadeh’s origin tale – and I’ve never learned what they are – I know that he and I are conversing about Safavid history in Los Angeles rather than in Isfahan or Shiraz, where Rostam al-Hokama lived and wrote. We are both exiles, driven out by the draconian Islamic Republic which came to power in 1979 and has driven out millions of Iranians over the years, because they were dissidents or because they saw no future in the homeland they loved.
Beigzadeh’s politics is not subtly communicated. On the door of his shop, there is an image of Iran’s traditional flag, the tricolor with a Lion and Sun in the middle. A sign around it says: “Regime change in Iran. No More Ayatollahs! Islamic Republic Must go!” On a window display, a sign congratulates human rights activist Narges Mohammadi for her winning of the Nobel Peace Prize as a “stern blow to the criminal regime in Iran.” Narges won her award as she sits in a jail in Iran, where she has been for much of her adult life. Those of us who oppose the regime often must pick between prison or exile.
For Iranians, this didn’t start with the Islamic Republic or the 1979 revolution. The arc of authoritarianism runs long and Iranian intellectuals have long had to live exilic lives, in their escape from tyranny: In turn-of-the-century Cairo and Istanbul, in Berlin and Paris of 1920s or in Moscow and Dushanbe of the Cold War era. And now in post-1979 London, Stockholm, Kuala Lumpur, Los Angeles, and Toronto.
Pars Books itself has been a setting for years of diasporic events. Here the grand dean of Iranian Studies, Professor Iraj Afshar of the University of Tehran, once held court for enthusiasts (he never became a full-on exile, always returning to Tehran, where he passed away in 2011.) Here Ebrahim Nabavi, the top satirist of the reformist era which took place in the early 2000s, once held regular book readings.
One could celebrate the wealth of iranian culture which has flourished in exile. There is reason to be proud. But our pride is laced with sadness. Tragedy colors our exiles. Perhaps the most important diasporic Persian writer of our times is Shahrokh Meskoob, a medievalist literary scholar who passed away in 2005, at 79, in his Parisian exile. Meskoob’s major works are studies of Shahnameh, the seminal poetic masterpiece written in the eleventh century. That text helped Iranians preserve a link with their ancient heritage after the centuries-long interregnum that followed the fall of their empire to Muslim invasions in the seventh century. But Meskoob’s oeuvre also includes forlorn published diaries about his long years in the West. They are the torturous records of a master who, penniless in the City of Lights, watched his homeland struggle from afar. Most of us today are luckier than Meskoob, able to make a decent living and to live fuller lives as worldly intellectuals, just as at home in the intellectual salons of DC as we were on Tehran’s Enqelab avenue. But that heavy cloud of estrangement, of worry for a suffering homeland, never quite leaves us.
On the shelves of Pars Books, I see some volumes by Meskoob and his comrade-in-exile, Hasan Kamshad. But the whole bookstore is organized in a way that’s less like a lively cultural hotspot and more like a museum of curiosities for those hankering to sate nostalgia. Prominently placed in the window displays are the large-print, campy books of the Shah, the monarch Iranians overthrew in 1979.
Look hard enough and you’ll also see the Winds of Change, a 2002 political tract by Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son and Iran’s last crown prince who now lives in Potomac, Maryland, leading a mostly quixotic effort against the Islamic Republic. It is not that Beigzadeh is a monarchist or a supporter of the former Shah. But these volumes appeal to those few knowledgeable enough to come asking. Nostalgia is what they want and nostalgia they shall get.
There are two other Persian book stores on Westwood.
Ketabsara, right across the road from Pars, offers calligraphic designs by the owner alongside its stock of books. A large picture of Mohammad Mossadeq, Iran’s last democratically-elected prime minister who was overthrown in a coup backed by CIA, MI6, and the Shah in 1953, broadcasts the store’s politics.
A few blocks down the boulevard is Kolbe Ketab (Persian for ‘Book Cottage’), the most welcoming of the three stores. It is fronted by Kikhosro Behroozi, once an anchor on Iran’s national radio. He and I talk for hours about books, about the state broadcaster before 1979, and his efforts to attract new generations of Iranian-Americans.
“Yes, people don’t always buy books, but I sometimes teach Persian to the new generation and that’s more than worth the while,” he tells me with a warm disposition and an eloquent speech still smooth from his radio days.
I tell Kikhosro about the most exciting volume I picked up at Kolbe Ketab: a Persian translation of A Trumpet in the Wadi, a well-know novel by Iraqi-Israeli writer Sami Michael about a love story in Haifa between an Arab Christian woman and a Jewish immigrant from Russia.
I gasped at a prominent display of a book by the legendary Michael (I hate the bland English way of writing his name, it should be pronounced MEE-Khaw-EEL). Before he passed away in Haifa this past April at the age of 97, a renowned symbol of the Israeli left who spent years in the communist movement first in his native Iraq, then in Iran (where he was in exile) and ultimately in Israel. He had long been an activist for Arab-Jewish solidarity there. The novel had been translated into Persian by Roshanak Daryoush, a veteran author known for her courageous translation of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (Following Ayatollah Khomeini’s infamous fatwa against the book, its Japanese translator was killed in 1991 while attempts were also made on the lives of its Italian and Turkish translators, both in 1993.)
Kikhosro told me that the book had been published in the early 2000s by a left-leaning association of Iranian Jewish intellectuals in LA. Sami Michael was a natural choice. According to him, the group once held regular events. Of all the stereotypes about the Persian Jewish community in LA, publishing novels by communists and organizing left-leaning talks is not what first comes to mind. It’s a subculture few know about.
My haul was rich: from the three stores I had hunted and gathered an eclectic dozen or so books. A few had been published by major publication houses in Iran. I got one by Amirhossein Cheheltan, probably our best novelist writing in Persian today and one by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who wrote novels before he turned into one of Iran’s best-known filmmakers.
But my favorites were exilic volumes. Often self-published, often clumsily and without the standards of design, layout, and editing I expect from a professional Tehran publisher. I got two doorknob volumes by Younes Parsa Bonab, a veteran Maoist historian whose 2004 magnum opus covers the history of Iranian political parties from 1905. I got the memoirs of Homa Sarshar, the grand dame of Iranian journalism and an intellectual icon for Iranian Jews (she even appears in The Shahs of Sunset). And a memoir by a retired spy from Iran’s secret service during the Shah.
I wonder how long Pars Books, Ketabsara, or Kolbe Ketab will continue to be in business?
There have already been a few casualties.
In 2017, Tehrangeles’ iconic Ketab Corp, both a bookstore and publishing house, closed down sending a shiver of horror through its devoted clientele. Its owner, Bijan Khalili, founded the shop in 1981 just after escaping the revolution. The place was a mecca about which I heard much but never got to visit. His was the first Persian bookstore in LA (if we don’t count an earlier Iranian-Armenian store in Glendale which sold some books alongside groceries.) Ketab Corps shutting its door was the end of an era, widely reported as a sign of the demise of diasporic Persian publishing.
Exactly thirty years ago, another Persian bookstore in LA met a more dramatic end. Khaneye Ketab closed down when its owner, Niusha Farahi, a Marxist poet, self-immolated in 1987 to protest the visit of then-President Ali Khamenei (today’s Iran Supreme Leader) to the United Nations in New York.His suicide note declared he was burning himself to death to protest, “butcher Khamenei” getting a podium at the UN as well as the policies of President Reagan and the Iranian monarchists who were his political rivals in Iranian diaspora politics.
Like the dour diaries of Meskoob, these stories remind us that exile is tragic even when it is rich. The future isn’t always bright.
I left Tehran in 2008 and have acquired a nostalgia for the Iran of my childhood. In Westwood, the restaurants and markets deepened the pang as much as the bookstores did. I munched on a brain and tongue sandwich that tasted just like home, and gobbled up what was probably the best Kebab Koobideh known to man in Taste of Tehran. I salivated over that feast sitting across from a dear friend, a Jewish Iranian writer born in the U.S., who is descended from an Iranian Jewish MP. Such a meeting would not be possible in Tehran today.
I also visited Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary, a small cemetery with a dizzying population. Its headstones are something of a Who’s Who of modern Iranian politics, culture, and industry. All happen to share their graveyard with some of the greats of American cinema. Just steps from Iranian singers Hayede and Mahasti or the renowned writer Nader Naderpour rest, for example, Billy Wilder, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe.
Walking along the quiet plots I marveled at the juxtaposition. Is it tragic or is it beautiful? Are we rich in cosmopolitan heritages that span the globe, or hungry for a home which has been destroyed? If we could raise the dead and ask them, what would they say?
Both. I think they’d say both.
