Roya Hakakian: We Are All Refugees

Jewish Lessons for a World on the Move

David H.— I am delighted to publish this essay by the acclaimed Iranian-born memoirist and poet Roya Hakakian, which appears in Jewish Priorities. Indeed since October 7, Jews around the world have felt more deeply “displaced” than at any time in our generation—and no one gives clearer expression to this sense than she.

Roya Hakakian is the author of a selected volume of poetry in Persian, For the Sake of Water, and three books of nonfiction in English, including the acclaimed Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown, 2005) and, most recently, A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious (Knopf, 2021).

New York Event: Join the author for a live Jewish Priorities event on March 3, 2024 at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan, featuring Adam Bellow, Ruby Namdar, Roya Hakakian and David Hazony. For information & registration, click here. Sponsored by Z3 Project.

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2023 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

We Are All Refugees

Jewish Lessons for a World on the Move

Roya Hakakian

There is a lot in common between a birth and a forced departure from one’s homeland. Both are journeys from a familiar place of comfort to a cold, blinding abyss into which the newborn and the newly-expelled pour pain and tears. This unchosen space—terrifying, disorienting—betrays all the senses. The ear cannot make out what it hears, if it hears at all. The eye, if it sees, cannot decipher the meaning of what it sees. And no scent, touch, or taste measures up to those of the past. 

It is lucky that we forget our births. But the same cannot be said of our departures. Of those who experience them, some try to forget while others can do nothing but relive them. When they reach a new land, much of what these immigrants eventually become will depend on how they choose to look upon this past. So, too, much of how they choose to redefine themselves, or whether they endure as a people, will also depend on how they reconcile with the memory of that departure. It is a trial of leviathan magnitude through which Jews have gone time and time again, not unscathed but intact. 

This experience, which has been quintessentially a Jewish experience, will become far more common in the next few decades. Climate change is expected to uproot nearly one-third of the world’s population. The pending crisis—and especially how to cope with its fallout—will offer the opportunity to history’s primordial refugees to guide future refugees on how to cross into a new land while remaining rooted in the values of their past. In this way, the two communities can engage in a new context and in a shared place—that is, in landlessness.

***

I know of the abyss. I entered it in 1984, and by 1985, it had disgorged me in America. The passage, originating in Iran, led to a year-long stay in several cities in Europe, an interlude that bore no resemblance to the Europe of tourism ads. We lived stacked together, a dozen or so women, in a tiny two-bedroom flat. The only reprieve I found from that chaos was at the standing section of the Vienna Opera House on weeknights, for ten shillings a performance. My ultimate destination, the Hasidic enclave of Brooklyn’s Borough Park, was also far short of any immigrant’s dream of America. 

My disillusionment was compounded by the quintessential fury and melancholy of most teens, though mine were somewhat more warranted than most. My brothers, who had resettled in the area along with several other Iranian Jewish families, could hardly comfort me as they were still reeling from their own displacement. Rather than adapting to America, they seemed to be dissolving themselves in it. They had adopted the religious practices of the local community, which required far more devotion and rigor than the Judaism they had previously exercised. Perhaps the discipline of orthodoxy filled some of the void that exile had left behind. Or perhaps they were trying to resolve their now-ambivalent feelings about Iran and Iranianness by fervently embracing their Jewish identities. Whatever the reason, it imbued them with enough self-righteousness to allow themselves to instruct me—the girl who had just fled the mandatory hijab laws—to not wear pants or sleeveless dresses, to which I unhesitatingly said, “So why did we leave Iran at all?” 

“Forget Iran!” I heard at every turn. But as unsettled and disoriented as I was, I knew that I could not do two things: I could not be the Jew they wished me to be, nor could I forget Iran. Soon I moved away to live on my own as a self-inflicted outcast. And since my critics, who thought me an inadequate Jew, had somehow convinced me that they were the custodians of Judaism, I felt like an outcast from Judaism, too.

***

Certain scenes—an exceptional dogwood in the neighbor’s yard, a street musician at the entrance of the supermarket—occur and reoccur, yet we pass them by, looking but not seeing. Wisdom, too, can be within our reach but go untouched. Some twenty years after that jarring American beginning, the publication of my first book in English—a memoir of coming of age in revolutionary Iran—took me on a tour that also included countless synagogues and Jewish community centers throughout the United States. On many occasions, I would have to sit through Shabbat services prior to my talk, listening to the scripture I had not heard in many years. Then one day, hearing the words I had heard so many times before, I felt a stir within: zecher litziyat mitzrayim—“Remember the exodus from Egypt.” 

Nothing about any prayer had ever touched me in the past. It had simply been synagogue noise to me before. But now that I was in its presence after so long, I was hearing it afresh. Those three words, in particular, seemed to be addressing me. Again and again, they appeared with a stubborn insistence that was reminiscent of my own. They were repeated with a certain compulsion, at times irrelevant to whatever other lines that had come before or after. Remember your departure! Departure overshadowed the other words now to make the origin of the departure, Egypt, nearly irrelevant. This command to remember rang far more as an invitation into the abyss. And I thought that perhaps by having narrated the tale of my own exodus, I had, in fact, followed that command. Through writing, the printed form of remembering, I had obeyed. And the act had returned me to the community I had left and placed me among those who had kept their covenant to remember. So devoted had they been—the stubborn members of the most ancient book club—to this divine task that they read the same book over and over again for centuries. Even the course of their worship was choreographed around the Book, the record of their past. During every service, the congregants rose to their feet when the Book came into view. They reverently passed the Book to that day’s honoree whose privilege it was to carry it, press it to his chest tightly as if it were a living thing made of flesh and blood. The honoree circled the sanctuary, while others reached to kiss the Book. Someone lifted the Book, like boastful champions holding up a prize, and turned in every direction, then marched a proud march to an ornate arc, dressed the bejeweled Book in elegant fabric and shelved it for the coming week. 

There I was, not the writer, but a writer among book-worshiping people. I had written of my exodus, as those ancient writers had written of that original. I had remembered my departure from my Egypt. Therefore, I was a Jew.

***

It is counterintuitive, and yet, remembering is, in fact, a way out of the abyss. It acknowledges the loss, which is the first step to making peace with the past. Remembering leads out of the abyss because it grants one the chance to “return,” albeit only in the mind, to the moment when one had been denied the right to stay.

There is only one way to be exiled from a country, but a hundred ways to return and replant oneself in it—through literature, art, and music, as so many displaced Jewish artists, writers, and intellectuals have done throughout history. So, too, one can return through recounting and recording the individual tales of one’s departures. 

To pen one’s exodus story is to shape history according to one’s will. The pain of exile is always compounded by the fact that those who drove one out become the tellers of the history of the events that led to that departure. We, who have fled authoritarian regimes, know well how history, like every other aspect of life and culture, comes under assault by the tyrants who must deface, reform, and rehabilitate all things to suit the needs of their own narrative. For the authoritarian, the only form of historiography is a twisted form of a Greek narrative. It is always the account of a bleak time under a formidable evil, which a hero—the Leader—battled against and conquered. The authoritarian is incapable of telling the stories of the non-heroic, ordinary people—of those whom he could not tolerate, and thus, were forced to flee—of the exiles. On the other hand, Jews, the ancient escapees, have had to be the historiographers of ordinary and powerless people, or else large swaths of their history would have vanished. 

If fleeing has a conceptual antithesis, it is writing. Writing is the undoing of a hasty escape: It is to tether oneself in the record, to an account, so that one can be known, seen, and heard. It is to upend everything that the authoritarian leader wishes to do. It empowers the very people whom he had to keep insignificant in order to rule them. It is to give voice to those whom he expelled and entered an unknown land over which they have no mastery. It is in writing that one lays claim to the past, the first step to belonging. 

In telling the story of the past, we tell of what we saw. But in how we tell it, we tell the story of who we are. To remember—accurately, truthfully, is to post a “You Are Here” sign inside the labyrinthine edifice that exile is. If lost, one can always return to one’s origin to find a way forward. To remember is not all about the past. It is, more importantly, a way to create a blueprint for future generations.

The Bible is, among other things, a catalogue of the many divine miracles that God performed to save His chosen people from lethal dangers. But surviving is not enough to carry a nation for more than 3,000 years. It has been through the act of remembering that Jews have performed the other essential, albeit mortal, miracle that has made it possible to endure, and thrive. At our New Years, when there is every reason to look to the future, drink, and be merry, we turn solemn to reflect upon the bygone year. We review our conduct and resolve to do better. To not be afraid to look back is to stare into loss and failure. A grim exercise, yet how else can one redeem oneself? 

The greatest experience of loss in Jewish history occurred in 70 C.E. After the fall of the Second Temple, the Jewish tradition had every reason to disappear. But rather than turn away from it, the people stared into the ruin to find a way out of it. In thinking about how to rebuild, the notion of a divine experience so overshadowed the rest that the place of that experience became irrelevant. Thus, a new way of worship came into being. When we could no longer go to the High Priest or offer sacrifices, we educated ourselves, addressed God on our own, and let prayer be our sacrifice. We adjusted all of our practices and tradition to the new reality of our homelessness. We understood that we must claim the abyss to get through the abyss. 

As we scattered around the world, we had to reconcile with the notion that each one of our communities would make a history separate from the rest. Our lives separated, our experiences diverged, and, inevitably, our narratives multiplied. Yet, despite all the variations, we remained one people. We chose to be bonded not in the sameness of our stories. Insisting on uniformity would have been impossible under the circumstances. It would have also been against the spirit of a tradition that has always fostered debate and viewed opposing opinions not as a threat but an opportunity for reflection and growth. Ultimately, it is not in the sameness of our stories that we have remained one people, but in the experience of shared brokenness, of our common ruptures. 

In one of the many Jewish community centers where I was a guest speaker, the child of a Holocaust survivor once commented, after my talk, that my family, Jews of Iran, had, in fact, been driven out of our homeland just as the Jews of Europe had been driven out of Europe during World War II. It pained me to object to her, knowing that it was the affection she felt for me and for what she had heard that she was mistaking for kinship. But I did object. I said that we had left not because Iran turned on its Jews as Europe did during the war. We left because Iran turned on itself. Jews were not the chief targets in post-revolutionary Iran. Indeed, secular Muslim Iranians faced a far greater threat than Jews ever did. Iran ceased to be home to most of its citizens, except for observing Shiite Muslims. Everyone who could leave, did. Religious minorities, including the Jews, who, according to the new post-revolutionary constitution, were no longer equal citizens, had an easier time applying for asylum. I told her, no, the cause of our departures was not the same, nor do we need to streamline our narratives to feel connected. Our ancient tradition would not have endured as long as it has if it could not afford the variety of the narratives of all its separate communities. We do not need to edit our histories or tweak our narratives to fit an overarching script. We remain a people, in part, because no matter the causes, we all have and continue to cross borders. 

The secret of our survival as one people will become more staggering as future generations cross borders into new lands in search of habitable lands. The future refugees of the world will wonder how they can retain their identities in the face of the loss of their homelands. That is when our values and commitments will become scrutinized, and possibly embraced. 

It is we who can show that their rupture from their homelands does not need to destroy them as a people; rather, it may be an opportunity to reconfigure their traditions to adapt to the new circumstances. When the world struggles with displacement, we have the opportunity to guide the bereft to rise from the ruins and to build a more reliable home in the mind. We will then become the chosen people once more, chosen to help another generation through their abyss and see them through their painful births.