My Prison, My Home

July 13, 2009
December 30, 2006, was the night Esfandiari's nightmare began. Traveling by car to the Tehran airport, following a visit with her elderly mother, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., was robbed. The 67-year-old felt lucky, not to have been injured in what she initially thought was a simple snatching of her belongings, including her passport. A few friends warned of more dire consequences. Esfandiari (Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution
) did not realize that upon returning to her childhood home, she was entering a maelstrom, “fueled by the long-standing animosity between Tehran and Washington”—which contributed to her eight-month interrogation, four of which were spent in Evin Prison in solitary confinement. Most disconcerting was the shattering of Esfandiari's feelings for her native land: “I felt the country I had cherished all my life was no longer mine. I had loved Iran with a passion.... Yet these horrible people had made me feel alien in my own homeland.” In this engaging memoir, Esfandiari weaves together strands of her family and professional life, the problematic and complex history of American-Iranian relations, along with a reasoned eyewitness account of being held as a political prisoner.

November 1, 2009
Esfandiari (founding director, Middle East Program, Woodrow Wilson International Ctr. for Scholars; "Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution") refused to give up on her country of birth. Exiled from Iran, she continued to visit her elderly mother (a remarkable woman in her own right, who was born in Austria, made her home in Iran, and refused to leave). It was on one of those visits that Esfandiari, apparently the victim of competing security forces, was interrogated and jailed. Kept in solitary confinement for 105 days, this astute, introspective woman relied on spirit, memory, and self-discipline to survive grueling interrogations, debilitating living conditions, and dwindling hopes of release. Readers will be inspired by Esfandiari's courage and enriched by her informed evaluation of the political situation in Iran.Lisa Klopfer (LK), Eastern Michigan Univ., Ypsilanti

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2009
The founding director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Middle East Program recounts her absurdist imprisonment in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison.

For more than 100 days in 2007, Iranian-American scholar Esfandiari (Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution, 1997), a resident of Washington, D.C., was incarcerated in solitary confinement on bizarre, paranoid charges of aiding the American government in plotting to overthrow the Islamic Republic. While visiting her mother in Tehran during the holidays, the author was robbed in a taxi, then detained in her mother's home for months before being hauled off to prison. Apparently she was on the watch list of the fearsome Ministry of Intelligence, who grilled her about seemingly irrelevant information, especially two particularly irritating items: her marriage to a Jew and her job organizing seminars, lectures and conferences for the Middle East program at the Wilson Center. The interrogations were conducted over eight months by two different but equally odious men who tried to wear down the disciplined prisoner, catch her in inconsistencies and get her to admit that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government. Despite her imprisonment, however, she was treated relatively respectfully, given time for daily walks on the rooftop terrace and served the same food as that given to the prison guards. As part of her release, she was coerced into reading a televised"confession." In addition to the story of her imprisonment and her personal history, Esfandiari provides a brief history of Iran's tumultuous relationship with the United States.

Though the author left her home country after the 1979 revolution, the details of her incarceration shed light on the continued troubling aspects of this regime.

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