My wife and I met and courted in Iran while we were both in the U.S. Peace Corps. Our first date – I think it was in the late Spring of 1966 – was a walk through the grand bazaar in Tehran. It has now been bombed as part of the hostilities among the U.S., Israel and Iran.
We were already a couple when my dad came to visit a few months later. Jeanette and I took him to see the Golestan Palace, also bombed in the recent hostilities.
The bazaar was an area of businesses with open fronts and goods laid out on carts, much like some of what I remember from my childhood in Brooklyn, peopled by small businesses and shoppers. The Palace was a World Heritage site.
I can’t speak to why they were bombed or what may have been nearby. The pain of realizing that places dear in our memories no longer exist are trivial compared to the human toll. But we remember the many fine people we dealt with there. We learned the Persian way of bargaining and some of our prized possessions came from that bazaar. The loss of some of the sites since the time when we courted there bring home to us the pain and loss of this unnecessary war.
Our home is covered with pictures of the places in Iran we remember from the year of our time there together. I photographed Jeanette at the ancient capital of Persepolis, and other places without special names. And while we were back at our separate places of work, I photographed a folding table on the bridge of 33 spans in Isfahan and wrote on the back, your place is empty, a Persian expression for I miss you. I certainly did. She worked a day’s travel away.
I think of the craftsmen who made the gifts my wife brought me from where she lived in Iran. I think of the people who took care of her in the places where she lived. I think of the family with whom I lived – the Nehrirs, Hassan, Mary, and their children, Cambiz and Dariush. I think of the humor and difficulty when the boys and I tried to talk across the language barrier. I loved the gardesh in Shiraz, the late afternoon walk where everyone, it seemed, was on the streets and we greeted friends and enjoyed their company while striding on Khyaban-e-Zand, the main avenue of Shiraz.
I hadn’t taught before and the University had me teaching many subjects from law to history, economics, national development and sociology to English and some science courses. I think of my students who put up with a neophyte teacher. And the students in a summer program in the Marvdasht plain who understood perfectly when I was describing the existence of cannibalism in other parts of the world that they, and I, detested.
And I think of the Persian friends with whom I went out for kabobs, or joined for meals at the Peseshki or Medical School.
Here, we have many Iranian-American friends, some of whom were imprisoned by the clerical regime in Iran (but still care about Iran) and some who still have family there, a few of whom we met when they visited in the U.S.
War is a big problem, but rarely the answer. Killing is a problem, occasionally unavoidable, but rarely a way to prevent a problem.
The rules of modern warfare make common people pay the costs of their leaders’ misbehavior. With only occasonal exceptions, those who make war are immune from the bombs and destruction. Heaven seems to forbid that the real criminals be targeted, the people who actually make the decisions to plunge the rest of us in war. The world would be more peaceful without them. I would sooner see them pay the price than all the fine men, women and children who’ve had to pay the price in their stead.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran. He enjoys the help of his editor, Jeanette Gottlieb
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