The Rose Hotel: A Memoir of Secrets, Loss, and Love From Iran to America
In this searing memoir, Rahimeh Andalibian struggles to make sense of two brutal crimes: a rape, avenged by her father, and a murder, of which her beloved oldest brother stands accused. Her journey, eloquently and intimately told, is a tribute to the resilience of families everywhere.
Andalibian takes us first into her family’s tranquil, jasmine-scented days of prosperity in Mashhad. Iran, where she and her brothers grow up in luxury at the Rose Hotel, owned by her father. In the aftermath of
List Price: $ 26.00
Price:
A deeply-touching tale and a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit,
0
Was this review helpful to you?
|A family riven by the Iranian Revolution,
Rahimeh is just 5-years-old when the story begins, one of five children of Baba and Maman. She lives an idyllic life, pampered and protected by her loving parents. “The borders of my life were defined by two buildings — home and hotel – edged by trim topiary hedges,” she writes. “How often I skipped for joy along that driveway from one pleasure dome to another.”
As the narrator, Ms. Andalibian doesn’t let the reader know more than she knows at any given age. Growing older, she lets us in on more of her story and her understanding of it. In the aftermath of the revolution, the family escapes first to London and then to Los Angeles, where they must begin again in poverty. The family is resilient and finds its place in the Iranian community, her father starting a business that leads pilgrimages to Mecca. But the events of their last days in Iran — and the secrets left buried — affect each family member in different and destructive ways — depression, resentment, drug abuse and alcoholism, broken marriages, failed businesses and bankruptcies, outbursts of rage and violence. “Because we did not mourn our losses or talk openly about what had happened, the festering wound — the secret — got buried deep within our family, like a land mine,” she writes. “It was only a matter of time before it would explode.”
It was particularly interesting to me to read of the Iranian Revolution from the point of view of an observant Muslim family who were just as horrified as the global community by the corrupt new government that abused its power in the name of religion. Here in America, the news was all about the fifty-two U.S. embassy workers held hostage in Tehran for 444 days. We didn’t hear much of the suffering of the Iranian people themselves. My lasting memory of the time is the day we went into New York for the ticker tape parade honoring the returning hostages.
Ms. Andalibian’s tale is a riveting one, marred for me only by the relentless foreshadowing with which she ends almost every chapter in the book. (“Just when we believed life could not get any worse, it did”; “Maman’s predictions were to be proven terribly correct”; “The next crisis took an unexpected form, shapely and blonde.”) And some events she retells seem incongruous; for example, she writes of her father having to employ torturers to extract stolen family money from an extortionist, yet her mother apparently collects a debt owed the family simply by asking. But these are small points, and nothing that detracts from the power of Ms. Andalibian’s story.
0
Was this review helpful to you?
|A must read,
0
Was this review helpful to you?
|