By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — We Jews, especially, know the story of immigrants who have come to America seeking economic opportunity. We recall how the older generation tried to hold onto the mother tongue, but how the younger generation quickly embraced English and American ways. We know that every generation of immigrants, from every country, faced like situations.
But in some ways, the story of the Iranian-Americans is different from other immigrant and refugee groups. To a large extent, those who immigrated had already attained the status of professionals in Iran, and were well within the middle class. Many of them already had the successes that other immigrants could only dream about. For such Iranian-Americans the dreams were more conservative, to be able to hold onto the attainments of their previous life that were so violently ripped from them by the Iranian revolution led by the ayatollahs.
There always has been some measure of prejudice against the newcomer in the United States, but for the Iranians, it was perhaps even tougher. The country that they had fled had imprisoned Americans in its Embassy, and the humiliation it handed America was highlighted in the media on almost a daily basis. “Go home, Iranians!” was a popular sentiment and some Americans– many in fact — could not differentiate the Iranians they saw chanting slogans and burning American flags on television from the Iranians in their midst who had come to America to escape all of that. Prejudice against Iranians became so pervasive that the immigrants began referring to themselves not as “Iranians,” but as “Persians,” hoping to thereby lessen the loathing they might otherwise experience.
In the PBS Documentary, The Iranian Americans, scheduled to be shown at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 18, filmmaker Andrew Goldberg presents to us the quandary that Iranian-Americans found themselves in — not able to go back home to the totalitarian government of the ayatollahs, and not fully accepted in the the United States where they were free, but also intimidated.
While the film points out that America drew Iranians of many religious backgrounds– Zoroastrians, Bah’ai, Jews, Muslims, Christians — it does not really differentiate the experiences of these various subgroups. We know that Jews tended to emphasize their Jewish identities, rather than their Iranian ones, perhaps because Jews long have been accepted in the United States. Did members of the other religions feel constrained to do the same? And what of the Muslims, whose co-religionists had come into power in Iran and were ruling it under Sharia law? How did they cope? Perhaps exploration of these questions will form the basis for a future documentary.
What we do learn is that Iranian-Americans feel a great deal of ambivalence about truly belonging. They are proud to be Americans and of the achievements of fellow Iranian-Americans who rose to such positions as mayor of Beverly Hills, California; U.S. assistant secretary of state, and NASA director for Mars explorations. On the other hand, many long to return to Iran, to smell again the scents of the trees by the Caspian Sea, the generous helpings of aromatic foods, and most of all to be with extended family — who in Iranian custom are as close as brothers and sisters.
While watching the documentary, I couldn’t help but think about the Jews who were exiled during the biblical period to Babylon and who vowed, as in the 137th Psalm, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right arm lose her cunning.” Home is not only where our attainments are.
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com