My Father’s Seders

A  Seder, meaning order, was always a disorderly affair in my family until my father took it in hand. Only he could tame the unruly troupe of relatives that gathered at my grandmother’s home in the final years leading up to the Islamic revolution of 1979. The source of the chaos was not simply the size of the crowd—which, with some thirty uncles and aunts, their children, and relevant in-laws—was considerable. Nor was it the result of the women in the family who were simply too exhausted by the first evening of the holiday to intervene.

After all, Passover usually occurred around Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, which marks the beginning of spring. The close timing meant that we incorporated some of the Persian holiday rituals into our Passover preparations—resulting in a spring cleaning of such industrial magnitude that it exceeded all halakhic requirements: Windows were washed; rugs, hung out on clotheslines, underwent serious beatings. Meanwhile, our dishes and utensils were subject to hag’ala as they were dipped into giant vats of boiling water to rid them of any traces of chametz. All that hubbub preceded the cooking the women had to do in a country where the convenience of Kosher-for-Passover products simply did not exist. By the time the eve of Passover came along, the women of the family were far too spent to worry about how the ceremony unfolded.

The source of the chaos was  really in what always began as banter between my father, the devout Jewish educator, and my uncles, the younger assimilated adults. Their successes in business had made them skeptical of a bygone world—and of my father as the most endearing symbol of that world. A slow simmering mischief, it began on cue with the first cup of wine: “Another year, another slavery show with Mr. Hakakian!”

To them, he was always Mr. Hakakian, since, at one point or another, they had all attended the Ozar Hatorah school, one of the leading Hebrew day schools in Tehran, which my father had headed for nearly forty years.

Unlike my uncles who had always only known the big capital, my father had been born and raised in a small city called Khansar, a place that, centuries earlier, had been home to some four hundred Jewish households. By the time of his childhood, however, less than a dozen Jewish families still lived there. Khansar is near Qom, the Vatican of the Shiite world, and it was particularly hard being a Jew in a sea of Islamic seminarians. My father had been among the first Jews to leave Khonsar for Tehran and attend university.

He had also been among the first Jews to serve in the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces as a second lieutenant and had insisted on keeping kosher. The diet had been a thorn in the side of the cadet who had to help him find animals he could shecht according to the dictates of halakha. From early on, and by necessity, my father was a Jewish jack-of-all-trades.

But his most valuable skill was the least visible. Having grown up in a country hostile to Jews, he had developed an uncanny ability to disarm people with his easy charm and erudition. Whenever he ran into an antisemite who controlled something he needed—toward the end of our time in Iran, for instance, his passport was held back by officials in the Ministry of the Interior—he would compose a couplet or a sonnet, depending on the seriousness of the matter. Verses flowed through his mind as easily as a boat on a waveless river. Why fight with an antisemite when you could rhyme him into shame?

It was this man who sat at the head of our Seders every year. He did not need to hold a siddur in his hand to daven, or consult a calendar to know what the parsha was this week (and what to say about it), or read a Haggadah to run a Seder. He had lived under the Iranian equivalent of Jim Crow and yet had managed to achieve so much despite all of the prejudice and restrictions. So he was certainly not about to let the hubris of a few newly minted secular Jews, who had barely ever set foot outside of north Tehran, get in the way of his holiday.

The simmering family banter always reached a boil with Ha Lachma Anya: “This year we are here; next year we will be in Israel. This year we are enslaved; next year we will be free.” And one or more of the uncles would inevitably chime in, “Oh, sure!” or “Watch me pack my bags!” My father always smiled and waved them away. If he would not let the arrogance of these young executives get in the way of celebrating his holiday, he was also not going to spoil theirs by telling them of the times he had known and the precariousness of the only country and life that they knew.

So he just kept on until he came to “if God had only brought us out of Egypt,” when he knew that not even he could stop the disorder. This was when, like all Persian Jews, we raised our scallions and began beating our relatives with them as we replied “dayenu!” The women, too, had gotten their second winds by this point and were chasing their seatmates, green stalks in hand.

This happy mayhem is my most vivid memory of our Passovers in Iran, before our world came undone, before we, too, had to leave. As it turned out, my cocksure uncles were the first to flee, and my equanimous father, who stayed behind to tie up the proverbial loose ends, left last. His crossing was the most arduous. Like his enslaved ancestors, Mr. Hakakian had to cross the desert on foot, but into Pakistan; his Moses, sadly, was a human trafficker.

Ever since then, we have been remembering our own Egypt, whose bondage still goes on. This year, as I watch the war between the country I was born in and the one I have adopted, I prepare for the Seder that my father is no longer here to lead.