Concealed by Esther Amini (Greenpoint Press)
Esther Amini is a first-generation Jewish Iranian-American writer, painter and psychotherapist. She was the first woman in her family to learn to read and write and later go on to university. Concealed, her remarkable memoir, is a frank and richly detailed account of her own coming of age in New York, and also a recounting of her parents’ journey from a secret life in Mashad, Iran, to the risky openness of 20th-century USA.
Known as crypto-Jews, the Amini family, along with countless others in their community, lived a life of dangerous duplicity. To the outside world, they were Muslim, adopting the chador, the names, rules and the way of life of Islam. In secret, and often literally underground, they held fast to the Jewish religion, circumcising their sons, studying Torah and slaughtering their own meat. Fearful of their daughters being pursued by Muslim men for marriage, they would often betroth them to cousins at an early age. Esther’s mother, Hana, was 14 when she married her father, Fatulla, 20 years her senior.
Though not cousins, they were nonetheless entering into a traditional Mashadi marriage. They were also seriously mismatched. Hana was a flamboyant force of nature, vibrant and impetuous, who endured a long and challenging life with Fatulla, a taciturn, almost silent patriarch. While his fear of the outside world bordered on paranoia, Hana always dreamed of America and its promise of freedom. Because she didn’t have the means to leave, and divorce was unheard of within the community, their marriage was volatile.
Amini found it hard to understand her own childhood. Her father’s insistence on silence, borne of living a secret life, left Esther almost mute as a child. And she had to conceal her love of books.
Later, she wondered about “genetic coding” and whether trauma can be passed from generation to generation. Her father did not want her to be educated and her mother was conflicted. But, with the support of her two elder brothers Albert and David and through sheer force of will and determination, Esther attended university, though the pull of strong conditioning led to an arranged but short-lived marriage. After undergoing psychotherapy, she trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and remarried, finding personal and creative fulfilment.
Concealed is deeply moving, as Amini begins to understand what her parents and hundreds of other Mashadi Jews had endured. There were massacres and forced conversions to Islam. Jews lived in Eidgah, a ghetto, and were a “public secret”, a charade. Hana tells Esther “when hatred and prejudice boiled over, stoning and beheading returned.”
Mashadi Jews eventually fled to Palestine, via India; the USA; Europe and the UK. Today, they are scattered across the world.
This is a landmark book, uncovering the history of a scarcely known Jewish community while bringing to life an unforgettable family. Shocking at times as family secrets are revealed, it is also very funny. Amini is a gifted storyteller. After the global success of Unorthodox and Shtisel, and the growing interest in little-known Jewish communities, Concealed could even find its way to Netflix.
Sipora Levy is a freelance writer, whose family came to the UK from Mashad, Iran in the early 20th-century
