U.S. company to publish woman’s memoirs on Iran-Iraq war

TEHRAN,Feb.5(MNA) -- A book that chronicles the life story of an Iranian woman during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war will be printed by the U.S. publishing company Mazda in the near future. The Persian version of “Red Olive: Memoirs of the Iran-Iraq War” has previously been published by Iran’s Sureh-Mehr. Mohammadreza Ghanoonparvar, a professor of Persian literature at the University of Texas at Austin, translated it into English, the Sureh-Mehr Publications announced in press release on Saturday. The book covers an interview with Nahid Yusefian, who lost her husband during the war, which also maimed her son. The interview conducted by Qasem Yahosseini. “What characterizes her memoir is her honesty in telling her story,” wrote Mazda Publishers in description of the book on their website. “As is inevitable in interviews, the reader will find some instances of repetition, which the editor has rightly decided not to alter in order to show the natural flow of Nahid Yusefian’s narration of her life’s story. “What is remarkable about her is that she comes from a very unremarkable, humble background. Her father was an ordinary railroad worker who eventually became a railroad engineer, but he was determined to have his seven children - all girls - educated, a fact that was fairly uncommon among lower income working class families in Iran in the middle decades of the twentieth century, especially in the 1950s when Nahid began her schooling. “Like everyone else in the working classes in Iran, the main concern of Nahid’s parents during her formative years was economic survival, and their persistence eventually paid off, to the point that all seven daughters received a higher education. “As Nahid mentions early in her memoir, in the wake of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, all her sisters and her parents immigrated to the United States; but Nahid herself was determined to stay in Iran with her husband, a decision that cost her dearly with the loss of her husband, the maiming of her son, and the ill-effects on the health of her daughter and herself.”