DR KOOSHYAR KARIMI’S GRIPPING ACCOUNT OF HIS ESCAPE FROM IRAN
Title: Journey of a Thousand Storms Author: Kooshyar Karimi Publisher: Penguin/ Viking RRP: $35
REFUGEE doctor Kooshyar Karimi chronicles a gripping account of his escape as a Jew from fundamentalist Iran to Turkey and then to Australia.
In Iran he could have been executed for the risks he took in terminating the pregnancies of rape victims and terrified women whose only crime was to give in to temptation outside of wedlock.
For many of those women, Karimi’s intervention was their only hope in a society in which families will murder their own daughters to preserve honour.
This book is a continuation of Karimi’s story of oppression, discrimination, fear and escape that began in his books I Confess: Revelations In Exile, and continued with Leila’s Secret.
In Journey of a Thousand Storms, he reveals his refugee story ends well – a result that readers are aware is not always the case, with many fugitives perishing at sea or finding themselves stranded in camps far from sanctuary.
As he grew up as a Jew in Iran, Karimi was the subject of bigotry even before his political views made him a target of the regime.
When Leila’s Secret was published, Karimi told the Bulletin how he had grown up in the slums of Tehran. His Mus- lim father had not told his mother he already had two wives until after they were married and had not given her any financial support as she tried to raise two sons.
In desperation she had agreed to occasionally sleep with her husband’s boss.
She detested the man but he had given her money to help her feed, clothe and school her boys.
Karimi was about 12 when he found out what she had done, and left school to work in a bicycle repair shop so he could “buy’’ back his mother’s pride.
When she found out she stormed into the shop, tears rolling down her cheeks, and shouted: “You promised me! You promised me you would become a doctor! To help people, the people of the slums, the poor people, and me. You promised!’’
Karimi returned to school and kept his promise, although his Jewish background almost prevented him from entering university. A prominent doctor, father of a friend, stepped in to overturn the block put up by Iranian bureaucracy.
It was around the time he tried to work to restore his mother’s dignity that Iran underwent the Islamic revolution of 1979. Although he was a child, Karimi’s memory of that time remains vivid.
“I remember a very colourful and happy life, but with the revolution everything immediately changed to black and white,’’ he told the Bulletin.
“Every kind of happiness and joy was punished.’’
It would be a hard-hearted person, therefore, to not be moved when reading how Karimi once again found happiness and joy on the other side of the world.
His experiences and observations make interesting reading. We are given an insight into the issues at play in the Middle East.
Readers are taken some way toward understanding why genuine refugees need our help and can make a powerful contribution to a nation that often forgets about the tolerance it claims to possess.