which is not a memoir but a story of the tragedy of a Persian family torn in different directions politically.
Ebadi left Iran the day before the June 2009 presidential elections to attend a seminar in Spain. When the seminar ended four days later, she said she realized that Iran had changed and she decided not to go back.
Now 64, she hasn’t seen her husband in more than two years. She lived at first in London, but now makes her home in Atlanta, with one of her daughters.
Ebadi’s husband and sister have spent some time in jail since she left Iran in what was widely assumed to be an effort to pressure her into silence. She was a lawyer who ran a human rights center in Tehran, but most of her colleagues have been arrested and remain in jail and her office has been closed.
Ebadi appears to have been made immune to arrest by the 2003 award of the Nobel Peace Prize. But before that, in 2000, she spent 23 days in jail, accused of “disturbing public opinion.”
Her new book, released April 30 by Kales Press, tells the story of three brothers—real people she knew as a young woman through her friendship with their sister. It is a familiar story known to all Iranians where the brothers go three different ways; one joins the Shah’s army and becomes general; another becomes a leader of the Tudeh (Communist) Party; the third goes to seminary and becomes a cleric.
In the traditional Persian story, the brothers go their separate ways with a purpose. From within those three different bastions of power, each can protect the others as the political winds shift, and also protect their family’s interests.
But Ebadi’s story is different. Each brother is a true believer in his cause. Each is trapped in a “golden cage” of his own making. In the end, each suffers tragedy. One is killed in the revolution. The others flee Iran. One is killed abroad, presumably on orders of the new Islamic Republic.
The subtitle of “The Golden Cage” is: “Three Brothers, Three Choices, One Destiny.”
In interviews promoting the book, Ebadi said, “Reading history books can be tiresome, and many people don’t enjoy it. So, I decided to relate part of the history of Iran through the story of this one family I have known for a long time.… Of course, this isn’t just the story of one family. In a microcosm, it’s the story of the whole country.”
The ideology each brother puts his faith in become a cage that keeps each from the others—and from reality. That, says, Ebadi, is the natural result of uncompromising ideological thinking.
She quotes their sister as saying, “It’s as if each one of them has locked himself in a golden cage—beautiful, strong and as safe and secure as any ideology. But it’s still a cage and they can’t see out of it to communicate with each other.”
Ebadi says, “My book shows that we must not allow ideology to become a prison that stops us from accepting anyone outside.… Fortunately, the Iranian people have reached political maturity; they now realize this.”