THEY SAID THEY WANTED REVOLUTION

A journalist pays tribute to her Iranian activist parents, who risked everything to bring down the shah of Iran.

Toloui-Semnani, a Brooklyn-based writer for VICE News Tonight, was only 3 years old in 1982 when her father, Faramarz, was taken away by Revolutionary Guards in Tehran and imprisoned. In the late 1960s, Faramarz and the author’s mother, Farahnaz, had relocated to Berkeley, California, as university students, and they were active in the leftist movements to bring down the loathed, corrupt regime of the shah. When they returned to Iran, they were swept up in the chaos of the Iranian Revolution. Spurred to write this memoir after Farahnaz’s death in 2010 and the birth of her own child, Toloui-Semnani movingly re-creates the courageous activism of her young, idealistic parents, who were immersed in increasingly violent demonstrations while they attended school and worked in Berkeley. This book, writes the author, is “not just my effort to uncover why my parents chose the paths they did; it’s also an exploration of how their choices influenced my own and of this question: How will my choices, made years ago, shape this new person about to be born? This is a memoir of my parents. It is an examination of our per­sonal and political history. But it is also my own meditation on how we continue like threads stitched across decades, connecting generations.” As part of her pilgrimage in writing the memoir, Toloui-Semnani visited significant places in her parents’ lives, combining those experiences with intricate research in archives and via interviews with surviving friends of her parents. Though occasionally moving, the final section—pages of diary entries and letters between the author and her mother over the years—is overly sentimental and drains some of the narrative energy from the text. Still, the book is both richly reflective, informative, and tender in its characterizations.

A generous and heartfelt search for personal and familial identity.