Persian Girls

Nahid Rachlin spent her childhood in Iran under the Shah regime. In the following paragraphs that are drawn from her memoir Persian Girls, she introduces the reader to a hidden and risky world of bookstores in Tehran during that very period. Hence, she openly describes how she was “drawn to books, hoping to find answers to what I could not make sense of.” Ultimately, the desire to read leads to a desire to learn and to write. Managing to attend college in the US, Nahid Rachlin, however, has to experience that in a society were books are freely available and writers are free to exercise their profession, people can yet be bigots, too.