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mother could get pregnant and produce grandchildren, preferably sons. Instead, a year later, I was her firstborn, a girl.
Baba: My Father
    Like my mother, my father is also the oldest child from a second marriage. My paternal grandfather’s first wife had the familiar fate of so many women of the era who died in childbirth. He had to find a wife quickly to take care of the newborn and two older children. He chose Tavous, who was fifteen years old at the time and a divorcée. She was young with strong legs and arms for hard work and wide hips perfect for giving birth to eight children.
    Then, when my father was eighteen, his father died of a simple infection and left him with the responsibility of his mother and seven siblings. As the great rabbi and the communal judge for the Jews of Shiraz, my grandfather had earned the unquestioned respect of both Jews and Moslems. He forgave his fees for weddings and circumcisions if the families were poor. Slaughtering the cows as the community
shokhet
, he let go of his earnings if the animal proved to be unkosher due to lesions in its lungs, recognizing the loss of the poor butcher who unknowingly had bought the unusable animal. My paternal grandfather felt honored that, like his father and grandfathers before him, he had been chosen to serve and guidethe Jewish community. Therefore, after an emotional day during which the community closed down to take turns carrying his coffin from the ghetto to the cemetery, after the boys from the Jewish school walked in front of his coffin with lit candles singing
Tehilim
, after the seven days of
shiva
, when everyone brought food and comforted the young widow and her children, all that was left to my grandfather’s family was the respect, love, and the devotion of those who had known him.

    Baba at the time of his marriage
.
    Members of the Jewish community kept reminding my father that he was a grown man with great responsibilities, that he had to sacrifice his needs to safeguard his mother and seven siblings. Once, as he ate an ice cream sandwich by a kiosk, a distant relative spotted Baba and hit him on the head, saying that my father was stealing food from his own sisters and brothers. Leaving a movie theatre, he was admonished by a communityelder for his selfishness. Baba learned to let go of his individualism and to see himself as the core of the family unit, whose sole job was to keep them together, and to help them succeed where he could not himself. Later my father expected his own children and wife to live by the same principles of selflessness. We had to exemplify community standards and meet the expectations of the extended family.
    My father’s problems were exacerbated when his mother Tavous started showing signs of emotional breakdown after her husband’s death. Periodically she struggled to catch her breath, fainted, and had to stay in bed for days. There was no one to run the household. The attacks, many of which I witnessed myself, continued throughout my grandmother’s life. I think a modern term for them would be anxiety or panic attacks. She was left a pauper in her mid-thirties with a huge debt accumulated by my grandfather’s lengthy illness. With eight hungry children, the youngest only a toddler, Tavous had every reason to be panic-stricken.
    Baba approached a few friends and relatives for financial help, but they rejected him. Instead, they suggested that he should apprentice the young boys to shopkeepers and peddlers. Baba refused. Two of his sisters were married very young, partly to alleviate the back-breaking expenses. My father himself had given up his dream of becoming a physician. He decided the younger brothers would fulfill his dreams for him, and no sacrifice to accomplish this would be too great.
    My father told me of his struggles to find a job to pay off the debts and feed the younger children. His eyes teared when he remembered betrayals by family members and kindness from strangers. A Moslem man