Accounts of Tehran in the thirties and forties?

July 30, 2013 9:49 AM

Anyone know of any contemporary accounts (in memoir or fiction) of Tehran in the thirties and forties available in English? I'm hoping for things by Persians of the time, but accounts by foreigners (especially British) would be welcome, too. Or (a boy can dream) any sort of daily life history of the time and place?

Because, of course, I'm planning a Day After Ragnarok campaign set in Tehran and don't want it to be full of inept orientalism.

posted by Zed to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

Oddly enough, Norman Swarzkopf lived in Tehran for a year in the mid to late 1940s. There is a chapter about it in his autobiography. I think he loved the place. (His father was stationed there.) I realize that's not the best source, but the book should be in lots of libraries and could give some sense of the city.
posted by Area Man at 10:10 AM on July 30, 2013

Check out Operation Ajax - an interactive graphic novel on iOS. Produced by my friend. Also free, I think.

Persepolis, another graphic novel, might also fit the bill.
posted by gnutron at 9:59 PM on July 30, 2013

Best answer: This is a question for a university librarian, really, or at least for the bibliography of a decent history book (like Ervand Abrahamian's History of Modern Iran). Find the Middle East subject specialist at a big library—in California, I guess UCLA would be the obvious place to start—and drop them an email. At the very least they should be able to put you onto bibliographies of mid-C20th Iranian literature in English translation.

For accounts by British travellers of the period, Freya Stark's The Valleys of the Assassins first came out in 1934; Robert Byron passed through on The Road to Oxiana in the 30s too. I don't know how much time these people spent in Tehran. But there must be loads more than that: I should have thought of Stark and Byron myself, but actually a google books search for 'Iran travel accounts 1930s' brought them both up... via the Lonely Planet guidebook. (I don't know if the poet Basil Bunting left any written prose accounts of his decade in Tehran during and after the war, 1942–52: wish he had.)

Here's a map of the Tehran area in 1947, from the historical maps collection at the University of Texas at Austin. I thought there might be some photos of Tehran in the 1940s in the Library of Congress; there are, but they all appear to be from a single trip in 1943 by the US Office of War Information photographer Nick Parrino, and mostly cover a Polish refugee camp and charitable visits by the wife of the US minister to Iran... But a more focused search of a couple of library websites after a bit of preliminary research would surely produce far more relevant historical images. They could make for a useful source.

Good luck!
posted by lapsangsouchong at 3:29 PM on August 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

And don't forget the 100,00 Polish soldiers and civilians there as refugees at that time. Eventually the soldiers formed the nucleus for the Free Polish Forces and transferred to the Western Theatre of Operations. Did that happen before the Serpent Fell? You tell me...
posted by seasparrow at 10:28 AM on August 9, 2013