Off the Shelf
Book Review by Judith Umbach
The Last Days of Café Leila by Donia Bijan
In The Last Days of Café Leila, Donia Bijan tenderly tells the story of Noor, a woman caught between the traditions of her father in Tehran and the new ones of her daughter, a California child. Noor and her brother were sent as teenagers to California to keep them safe as the Shah’s reign fell and the Ayatollah’s regime rose. Confused and somewhat resentful, Noor nevertheless made a life for herself. During her career as a nurse, she fell in love with one of the doctors, a rare swirl of emotion in her circumspect life.
The traumatic events of Iran’s political upheavals are mostly a distant backdrop to Zod, Noor’s father and the proprietor of Café Leila. His premises are a vibrant community centre for diners, friends, and officials. He cooks traditional dishes, learned from his mother, whom he watched and helped for many years. He learned how to be hospitable from his father, whom he also helped from childhood. Hospitality proves a great skill while quietly swaying in the winds of political oppression and anger.
When Noor discovers that her father is dying, she finally ignores his demands that she not visit Tehran. She abruptly packs up her resentful teenaged daughter, Lily, and flies to the Café. While she tries to recreate the life she remembers, Lily sulks. As an American child, she does not have the automatic respect for her mother that the Iranians expect. She has no respect for the strictures on women. As she gradually abandons her sulking, she seeks to prove that women are equal to men in all ways. She disastrously involves her only friend, the kitchen boy, in a wild plot to board a plane to Europe, where she is sure her father will rescue her. During their fleeing, she is calamitously side-tracked by a young woman who has just been attacked with acid! Lily brings her back to the Café, being incapable of navigating a hospital with no Arabic.
Noor is forced to think hard about her relationships with her father and her daughter, and with the people who have worked at the Café for their whole lives.
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