Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey:

A Book Talk with author Mikhal Dekel

in conversation with Salar Abdoh

March 5, 2020

Division of Interdisciplinary Studies

25 Broadway, 7^th Floor

Auditorium, 6:30 pm

Most Polish Jews who escaped Nazi extermination survived as refugees in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Blending memoir, history and travelogue, Tehran Children follows their odyssey. Mikhal Dekel traverses the globe in these refugees’ footsteps, visits archives, locations and people in Uzbekistan, Poland, Russia, Israel and (through a proxy) Iran, meets with former refugees and current residents, and pieces together not only the story of her father and hundreds of thousands of survivors like him, but of the geopolitical shifts that their arrival had put in motion in the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Along the way she converses with Polish nationalists, Russian oligarchs and human rights activists, Iranians, Korean Uzbeks, and Israelis, painting a story of interlinked and divergent histories, of death and survival, of hospitality and cruelty, and of the politics of twenty-first century memory and historical amnesia.

Mikhal Dekel teaches English at CCNY and directs the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts. Her book Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey was published by WW Norton in October 2019. She is also the author of The Universal Jew: Modernity, Masculinity and the Zionist Moment from 2011 and Oedipus in Kishinev from 2014. Since its publication, Tehran Children has been or is due to be featured in the New York Times, C-Span, Journal of Foreign Policy, the NY Daily News, The Guardian, and the BBC, among other venues.

Salar Abdoh is an Iranian novelist and essayist who has authored The Poet Game and Opium. He has also edited and translated the anthology Tehran Noir, and his last book was Tehran At Twilight. He was a writer for the theater troupe Dar a Luz and correspondent for the National Geographic documentary, Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS. He lives in Tehran and New York City where he teaches Creative Writing in the MFA program at the City College of New York. His forthcoming book is Out of Mesopotamia.