Foreigner

Nahid Rachlin, Novelist Who Explored the Iranian Psyche, Dies at 85

One of the first Iranian novelists to write in English, she examined the clash between East and West. Her debut novel, “Foreigner,” provided insight into pre-revolutionary Iran.

Ms. Rachlin’s debut novel, “Foreigner,” was published to critical acclaim the year before the Iranian revolution of 1979. Courtesy New York Times and W.W. Norton & Company

by Rebecca Chao, New York Times

Nahid Rachlin, an Iranian-born writer who defied her parents’ expectations of an arranged marriage, instead winning a scholarship to study in the United States in the 1950s and becoming one of the first Iranians to write a novel in English, died on April 30 in Manhattan. She was 85.

Her daughter, Leila Rachlin, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was a stroke.

Ms. Rachlin’s debut novel, “Foreigner,” published to critical acclaim the year before the Iranian revolution of 1979, depicts the slow transformation of a 32-year-old Iranian biologist named Feri from a woman living a comfortable but unsatisfying suburban life with her American husband to an ill-at-ease visitor in Iran to an indistinguishable local after she abandons her job and her spouse and resigns herself to wearing the veil.

“There is a subtle shift in ‘Foreigner’ that is fascinating to watch,” Anne Tyler, who won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, wrote in a review for The New York Times in 1979, “a nearly imperceptible alteration of vision as Feri begins to lose her westernized viewpoint.”

“What is apparent to Feri at the start — the misery and backwardness of Iranian life — becomes less apparent,” Ms. Tyler continued. “Is it that America is stable, orderly, peaceful, while Iran is turbulent and irrational? Or is it that America is merely sterile while Iran is passionate and openhearted?”

The critic Albert Joseph Guerard called “Foreigner” “as spare as Camus’s ‘The Stranger’ and with some of its enigmatic force.”

In a 1990 lecture, the Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul, who received the Nobel Prize in 2001, noted that “Foreigner,” “in its subdued, unpolitical way, foreshadowed the hysteria that was to come” for Iran — the popular uprisings that forced out the repressive Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was backed by the United States, and ushered in a theocratic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Ms. Rachlin grew up steeped in those contradictions. In her hometown, Ahvaz, Iran, the local cinema featured American films even as the mosque across the street “warned against sinful pleasures,” she wrote in a memoir, “Persian Girls” (2006).

While attending college in Missouri, Ms. Rachlin wrote in her memoir, she discovered that though she had escaped the “prison” of her home country, she felt utterly isolated in America. Courtesy New York Times Tarcher.

Her own home “was chaotic, filled with a clashing and confusing mixture of traditional Iranian/Muslim customs and values, and Western ones,” she wrote. “None of us prayed, followed the hijab, or fasted.” But her parents insisted on arranged marriages for their children and reserved higher education for their sons.

Ms. Rachlin’s second novel, “Married to a Stranger” (1983), explored post-revolutionary Iran. Reviewing it in The Times, Barbara Thompson said it depicted, “better than most factual accounts, what was happening in Iran that made the Ayatollah’s theocracy possible.”

Nahid Bozorgmehri was born on June 6, 1939, in Ahvaz, the seventh of 10 children of Mohtaram (Nourowzian) and Manoochehr Bozorgmehri. Her father was a prominent lawyer and judge. Three of her siblings died in childhood.

At 6 months, Nahid was given by her mother to her Aunt Maryam, her mother’s widowed sister, who longed for a child after years of infertility.

But when Nahid was 9 — the age at which girls in Iran could legally marry — her father, most likely concerned that her more traditional aunt would follow that custom, retrieved her. (Perhaps he understood the consequences, having married Nahid’s mother when she was 9 years old and he was 34.)

The separation devastated Nahid.

Feeling “kidnapped,” Ms. Rachlin wrote in a 2002 essay for The New York Times Magazine, she had a strained relationship with her birth mother and would never call her Mother.

Over time, she grew close to her older sister Pari, who fought their father over her pursuit of acting and her resistance to arranged marriage — battles she lost.

Determined to avoid such a fate, Nahid implored her father to send her to America to attend college, like her brothers. She enlisted her brother Parviz to persuade him: She was first in her high school class, and her writing showed promise. Her father adamantly refused.

But as political tensions escalated — both Nahid’s outspoken feminist teacher and the bookseller who sometimes slipped her banned literature had disappeared — her father, who had resigned his judgeship after interference from the government, feared a servant or neighbor might tattle about Nahid’s stories and her “white jacket” books to the Savak, the shah’s notorious secret police.

When Parviz found her a women’s college near St. Louis, where he was studying medicine, their father allowed Nahid to apply, hoping his headstrong daughter would cause less trouble abroad — though not without stipulating that she return home after graduation to marry.

While attending Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., on a full scholarship, Nahid discovered that though she had escaped the “prison” of her home, as she wrote in her memoir, she felt utterly isolated in America.

“Late at night I turned to my writing, my long-lasting friend,” she wrote. She had quickly developed fluency in English — though she had taken only hasty lessons in Iran before her departure — and had begun writing in her adopted tongue about the difficulty of feeling neither Iranian nor American. “Writing in English,” she said, “gave me a freedom I didn’t feel writing in Farsi.”

She majored in psychology and, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1961, resolved not to return to Iran. She curtly informed her father in a letter; he would not speak to her for 12 years.

With only $755, she took a Greyhound bus to New York City, where she picked up odd jobs — babysitting, waitressing — and, to maintain her student visa, enrolled at the New School, where she met Howie Rachlin. They married in 1964.

Their daughter, Leila, was born in 1965. In addition to her, Ms. Rachlin’s survivors include a grandson. Mr. Rachlin died in 2021.

After a few years in Cambridge, Mass., where Mr. Rachlin studied for a psychology Ph.D. at Harvard, and then in Stony Brook, N.Y., where he taught, they moved to Stanford, Calif., in the mid-1970s. There, on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, she worked on “Foreigner.”

Her novel would never find a home in Iran. Censors blocked its publication in Farsi, arguing that Ms. Rachlin’s descriptions of dirty streets and hole-in-the-wall hotels suggested a failure of the shah’s modernization plans. Her literary agent, Cole Hildebrand, said as far as he knows, none of her books were ever translated into Farsi.

In 1981, Ms. Rachlin received devastating news: Her sister Pari had died after a fall down a flight of stairs.

For decades, Ms. Rachlin could not bear to write about the tragedy; she did not turn to the subject until her memoir, in 2006. “Yes, dearest Pari,” the last line of that work reads, “it is to bring you back to life that I write this book.”

Ms. Rachlin’s other works, all of which explore Iranian social and political life, include two short-story collections, “Veils” (1992) and “A Way Home” (2018), and three novels, “The Heart’s Desire” (1995), “Jumping Over Fire” (2006) and “Mirage” (2024).

Her last novel, “Given Away,” which will be published next year, is the story of an Iranian child bride. It draws from the life of her birth mother, who gave birth to her first child at 14.

The mother-daughter connection featured prominently in Ms. Rachlin’s work, and in her life. She dreamed of living near her Aunt Maryam, whom she always called Mother, but Maryam felt that life in America would be too jarring and preferred to stay in Iran. With her own daughter, however, Ms. Rachlin found the tight mother-daughter bond that had always eluded her.

“Even in our rare disagreements,” Leila Rachlin wrote in an email, “she would gently reassure me afterward, ‘We’re still best friends, right?’”

Via New York Times