Heart of Teheran

By: Story by Ben Pleasants | February 15, 2011 | Local

Majid Roshangar lives with his wife, Mahnaz, high up in the hills of Malibu overlooking the Pacific. He has lived there for 23 years and Malibu has brought him a great deal of pleasure and peace. True, in November of 1993, the roof of his house burned in the great fire and had to be rebuilt, but that is the price of beauty by the sea. All residents of Malibu understand the risk.

When Roshangar was told on PCH that he could not drive to his house unless he was a member of the press, he flashed his credentials in Farsi. He said he was the publisher and editor of The Persian Book Review. The police officer on duty let him through, and Roshangar helped save his house. He’s a Malibu veteran.

Says Roshangar, “The Malibu Surfside News featured a picture of our house on the front page. It was one of the first to be rebuilt.”

It was rebuilt by an Egyptian architect who was creating the new library in Alexandria, Egypt. The ceiling in his living room is 40 feet high with huge windows that bring in the outside light. Roshangar knows all about windows. His father was a glazier in Teheran. His home is filled with splendid Iranian paintings and drawings, some by his famous friend Ardeshir Mohassess, the satiric cartoonist who prospered in Iran under the Shah and then came to America to sell his work to The New York Times, New Yorker, The Nation, among many others. Along with Iranian paintings, Mahnaz, Roshangar’s wife, has created sculptures of every type.

Majid and Mahnaz and their two children are happy Iranian-Americans who love where they came from and are grateful for the opportunities they’ve been given in America. Both children have gone through university — their daughter is a dentist in Orange County, and their son is in the computer business.

Halfway up the high wall of his living room, there is a balcony where Roshangar keeps his core library, many of the books in it he published himself for the people of Iran while he was general manager of Persian Pocket Books Publishing House. It is where he edits his journal, answers correspondence and thinks about the life he lives in the U.S. and the life he left behind in Teheran.

Thinking back, putting things in historical perspective, Roshangar says the following about what he has brought with him as an Iranian editor and diplomat:

“I strongly believe that Iranian culture is a culture of minorities. From the dawn of history, Iran is one of the few nations that has been constantly attacked by foreign powers. First the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great attacked, then the Romans, then the Arabs. The Arabs ruled Iran for 200 years. Then came the Mongols, then the Ottoman Empire, then Tsarist Russia. Then came the British Empire, and in World War I and World War II, the Allied forces came. Constantly we have been occupied and attacked. I would say that if these minorities of Jews, Turks, Armenians, Assyrians, Baluchies, Kurds and the rest were not happy to live under the umbrella of the Persian culture, they could have created their own states and broken away. Why didn’t the Turks in Iran go and join the Ottoman Empire? What Iran offered to all of them was tolerance — tolerance for their religions, whether they were Zoroastrian or Christian or Jew or Muslims from all sects. The Sufis, too. Iran has always been a nation of many minorities.”

I ask him to recall his childhood in Iran. He grew up in the capital, Teheran.

“I come from a working-class family. My father was a glazier, and he was a hard-working man. As a high school boy, I went to work in his shop for the summer. I was witness to his work ethic. He worked very long and hard days. He would wake up in the morning before the sunrise. First, he would pray, and then he would sit down and read the poetry of Rumi. Then he would walk across the city a long distance to his shop. He would accept any order from small to large. He started doing repairs of broken windows. By the time I was in high school, he had a contract from the Louis Pasteur Institute. The French came to Teheran and established this institute. It was a large complex in the middle of Teheran not far from my father’s shop. It was several buildings and my father was responsible for all the windows and glass doors. He accepted the order and finished the whole project by himself. He did not want to give out parts of it to someone else. He told me, ‘This is a big project. They trusted me, and I have to do a meticulous job.’ He measured every piece himself. But he would also accept small jobs. In winter, when someone would come and complain about a broken window, he would go himself, even at night, and fix it.”

I asked Roshangar to recall the city of his childhood. He smiled.

“Teheran, at that time was a city with four gates: east, west, north and south. In olden times, people would come to the city and stop at one of the gates and be inspected before they were let in. In my childhood, there were no more inspections, but the gates were still in existence. One is still there today. The other three have been torn down as the city grew from one million to 16 million. The last time I visited Teheran in 2007, if I had been blindfolded and then taken into the city, I would not have recognized it. So many high-rise buildings. When I was a child, the city existed in two parts. One was the rich area and the other the poor one. It’s not unlike Los Angeles. I was born in a section of the city that was poor. My father told me that our house was across the street from a drainage ditch. Land at that time was almost worthless in the poor quarter. My first school was a mixture of boys and girls. School started in winter. I remember my mother taking me to get a smallpox shot before I entered school. It was a huge building in Teheran. It was called Teheran Politechnique. It later became the model for the University of Teheran. All the children had to come there. I was crying. I was lost. I have that memory. My mother found me. I was so happy.”

I asked him to remember his studies. School was a pleasure to Roshangar.

“We were taught reading and writing of the alphabet in the first grade. In the second grade there was the beginning of mathematics. By third and fourth grade, a little bit of text — some classical and folkloric stories. I loved the poetic stories. It was not boring to me.

Bookmarks: Page 1 of 4 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »