Tea at Trianon: Jewish Refugees in Iran

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, February 5, 2021

Jewish Refugees in Iran

From Iran Wire:

Mikhal Dekel’s Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey, published in October 2019, is located at the crossroads of memoir and historical narrative. Dekel’s research into a largely forgotten aspect of World War II began as an attempt to understand the life of her own father. This personal point of departure led Dekel to embark on a thorough archival study spanning Europe, central Asia and the Middle East, from pivotal historical moments such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 – the infamous non-aggression agreement between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany that allowed them to divide occupied Poland up between them – to the most intimate of experiences and relationships.

In this way, the story of one man has now become the story of many. Tehran Children reconstructs a history that had up until this moment been overlooked: one that took place on the margins of widespread accounts of Holocaust survival. Those Jewish refugees who passed through Tehran on their journey to liberty did not experience anything like the horrors of German occupation and genocidal racism but other, lesser-known horrors. (Read more.)