SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD K B7
beautiful books in various chapters that are
quickly abandoned for a larger survey of the
bittersweet disposition. Among the most
powerful of those threads is Cain’s descrip-
tion of her once-estranged relationship with
her mother, whom she learned to love despite
the pain they caused each other.
I will confess that I am vulnerable to the
quiet literature of interiority, to memoirs and
emotional explorations of pain and repair.
While “Bittersweet” is a noble and welcome
effort to expand the language of vulnerability
— and Cain remains a respected thought
leader — the book suffers from hopscotch
evidentiary support, a meandering structure
and a sustained mood of inquiry. For a subject
as relevant, that is indeed bittersweet.cultural conversation around sadness among
American readers, it would have been helpful
to be more precise in its purpose.
To focus on either the particularities of
American toxic positivity or the history of
darkness in 20th-century popular music
could have benefited the argument. Instead,
“Bittersweet” reads like a series of thought
bubbles shoehorned into book form. With its
blend of memoir, pop psychology, music
criticism and self-help, there is an undisci-
plined interdisciplinarity to “Bittersweet”
that fails to form a coherent and memorable
whole. The book buckles under the weight of
its ambitions, abruptly shifting among real-
world examples of melancholic personalities,
lived experiences and academic studies. It is
also accompanied by an online quiz to test
one’s own bittersweet tendency and a playlist
of songs — some of the less-appealing at-
tempts at accessibility.
There are seeds of several potentiallytion’s lingua franca as we come to terms with
structural failures in politics, education and
identity inequalities. This is reflected in the
success of author and podcaster Brené Brown
and the syndicated public-radio show “On
Being,” hosted by Krista Tippett. Feelings are
having a moment and deserve their prophets
and their literature.
“Bittersweet” is unfortunately not one of
those books. I am neither a psychologist nor
an academic, but I find the free-form method-
ology of psychological cartography here un-
convincing and suspect. It is not original to
suggest that melancholic music, sad films or
heavy art opens emotional pathways to
catharsis. For many cultures across the world,
juxtapositions between the dark and the light
have been central to their arts for centuries.
In Indian classical music, Spanish flamenco
and German orchestral composition, to name
a few, the bittersweet is paramount. For Cain’s
work to be successful at opening a newBook World
TITAN OF
TEHRAN
From Jewish
Ghetto to
Corporate
Colossus to
Firing Squad —
My
Grandfather’s
Life
By Shahrzad
Elghanayan
AP Books.
287 pp. $29.99BITTERSWEET
How Sorrow
and Longing
Make Us Whole
By Susan Cain
Crown.
310 pp. $28The songs of Nina
Simone, shown
performing in New
York in 1985, show
how pain and
suffering can often
open a path to
beauty.W
hy do sad songs lift the spirits? So
begins “Bittersweet: How Sorrow
and Longing Make Us Whole” by
Susan Cain, whose first book, “Quiet: The
Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t
Stop Talking,” was both a revelation and a
revolution in the field of popular psychology
when it was published in 2012. Cain, a former
lawyer, masterfully argued in “Quiet” that a
culture built for extroverts fails to under-
stand and appreciate the gifts of introversion.
The book liberated and celebrated the experi-
ence of inwardness amid the American obses-
sion with outward “likability” and charismat-
ic confidence. For Cain, the quiet remove of
the introvert belied a thoughtful form of
leadership in professional and personal life.
The book became a resounding success
with readers, book clubs, universities and
professional conferences, and transformed
Cain into an unlikely but essential thought
leader in a new era of self-help writing. Her
accompanying TED talk has been viewed
30 million times. “Quiet” remains an intelli-
gent, thorough and beautifully written work
of popular psychology.
Ten years later, Cain returns with a lyrical
exploration of a different mood. “Bittersweet”
is a biography and celebration of the “melan-
cholic” disposition in a culture fixated on
relentless positivity. It’s the ennui Cain says
she grappled with her whole life until she
began to accept its creative possibilities.
Suffering, loss and pain are not feelings
simply to be medicated or avoided but instead
to be processed, absorbed and relished.
Drawing on the music of Leonard Cohen,
psychological research and her own inheri-
tance as a descendant of Holocaust victims,
Cain delivers a book-length treatise on how to
live alongside pain. As with the songs of Nina
Simone or the writing of Maya Angelou, the
art of suffering becomes the book’s central
example to show how pain opens a path to
beauty. The bitter is the sweet.
Is “Bittersweet” musicology, a biography of
emotions, a heartfelt memoir or an airport
self-help work? The answer seems unclear
even after my second reading, but it certainly
draws on all those genres in a style that
mirrors the language of TED talks, gradua-
tion speeches and therapeutic podcasts. Cain
is a poetic writer, and she is self-consciously
publishing “Bittersweet” in a much more
emotionally raw and revelatory moment than
when “Quiet” was released. Vulnerability,
emotional agility, inherited trauma and self-
care are concepts that are now almost cliches
in mainstream discourse around mental and
personal health. The pandemic has only
deepened the urgency and volume of those
conversations.
At bookshops, self-help shelves no longer
carry the sense of privacy or even shame I
once associated with my own small collection
when I first went searching for books to help
me grapple with my mother’s death 20 years
ago. Speaking one’s truth, along with radical
vulnerability and empathy, are my genera-In a relentlessly positive culture, a defense of melancholy moods
RENE PEREZ/ASSOCIATED PRESSPSYCHOLOGY REVIEW BY BILAL QURESHIBilal Qureshi is a culture writer and radio
journalist whose work has appeared in The
Washington Post, the New York Times and
Newsweek, and on NPR.crazy to leave everything behind. Surely their
disbelief made my mom even more reluctant
and sad to leave for a world so different from
what she was accustomed to in Iran.” But we
don’t hear from her mother about that sadness
or from her father on why he gave up on Iran so
much more readily than his own father; like
many of the book’s characters, her parents
remain vague.
The personal narrative sharpens as the
revolution coalesces. Elghanian’s letters reveal
a lonely man still trying to oversee his busi-
nesses and family affairs as the old regime
collapses, clinging to a Panglossian belief that
things will be all right. Elghanayan impres-
sively uses interviews and archival material to
reconstruct his time in prison and outline the
efforts in Tehran, Washington and London to
win his release. But, as she acknowledges, she
is distant from the world she is documenting.
As a granddaughter she tells of her sorrow and
outrage over what happened, but as a writer
she does not quite find a way to distill this
trauma.
Still, “Titan of Tehran” is an important
testament to the hopes and disillusionment of
Iranian’s Jewish community. Elghanian’s vast
wealth and ostentatious displays could easily
have marked him as a target, even had he not
been a member of a minority group, but
several charges against him were tailored
specifically, chillingly, to his Jewish identity.
In the United States, lawmakers compared
his execution to Kristallnacht and introduced
House and Senate resolutions condemning it,
infuriating Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and
exacerbating tensions between the two coun-
tries. In Iran, leading Jews visited Khomeini to
ask for assurances of their community’s safety,
and he issued an order to limit the executions.
But over the years the government continued
to persecute religious minorities and political
dissenters and isolate itself internationally,
and opportunities withered for many Iranians
regardless of religion. Between 1979 and 2016,
Iran’s Jewish population shrank by roughly 90
percent, with many resettling in Los Angeles,
New York, Israel and Europe.
As to the question Elghanayan set out to
answer, her grandfather’s own words reveal
that he didn’t see himself as an outsider. “I
haven’t done anything bad to Iran that anyone
would want to get me for anything,” he told his
family on a final visit to New York, during
which they begged him to stay. “Nobody needs
to worry about me.” Four months later, he was
arrested.At that point the Israeli chargé d’affaires
advised him to leave, and was “baffled... t hat
Habib felt as integrated as he did, that he had
that inbred feeling that no harm could befall
him in his own country.” But Elghanian’s
confidence was buoyed at the highest levels of
government, never mind that the govern-
ment’s behavior was increasingly erratic. After
Elghanian’s release the prime minister (who
two years later, in a last-ditch effort to save the
monarchy, would himself be arrested and left
to face the revolutionary firing squad) called to
assure him that everything would be fine. And
shortly afterward, Elghanian was invited to
the shah’s New Year celebration, where he
asked the monarch for clearance to import a
5,000-ton aluminum machine; the request
was immediately granted.
Multiple factors appear to have influenced
his decision to stay even as the political situa-
tion deteriorated. His earlier detention by the
shah’s government may have misled him into
thinking he wouldn’t be targeted by the revolu-
tionaries. The fact that he had been released
and rehabilitated once apparently made him
less fearful of arrest. And he felt a responsibili-
ty to keep his factories running and his em-
ployees paid, and to not abandon the Jewish
community that looked up to him.
He also loved his country and felt connected
to it. When his son, Elghanayan’s father, decid-
ed to move to the United States in 1976 in
reaction to his father’s first detention, Elgha-
nian wept, saying, “My dream was always that
after school, you’d come back and stay in Iran.”
At the time of the revolution he was also
mourning his wife, who had recently died and
was buried in an ancient Jewish cemetery in
Tehran where three generations of his family
lay.
Still, he was unequivocal about hustling his
family members out as the revolution gathered
steam, and he may have had inside knowledge
about when to do so. In 1978 he abruptly cut
short Elghanayan’s final summer visit and sent
her and her mother, brother and babysitter out
of the country on the morning of what turned
out to be one of the revolution’s bloodiest
massacres.
Elghanayan’s research is meticulous and
meticulously footnoted, but the book would
have benefited from fewer quotes from publi-
cations such as “American Plastic: A Cultural
History” or the Bureau of International Com-
merce’s “Survey of U.S. Business Opportuni-
ties,” and more multidimensional portraits of
her family members and herself.
Of her father’s sudden decision to emigrate
to the United States and abandon his business-
es and a house he had just built, she writes:
“My dad remembers everyone thought he wasgrate into the broader social, economic and
political landscape. The rise of Reza Shah, a
Western-looking king, subsequently cemented
the country’s movement toward secular rule.
The son of a poor tailor, Elghanian grew up
in a neighborhood of narrow alleys beside an
open garbage dump. But his family valued
education, and he and his brothers attended a
school that provided a modern trilingual edu-
cation, and were taken under the wings of
uncles building up small import-export busi-
nesses between Iran and Europe.
The savvy, outgoing Elghanian saw an op-
portunity in 1935 when Reza Shah banned the
veil. “The women who were used to wearing a
veil would still not come out of the house
without covering their hair,” he told a friend.
“So I decided to sell hats.” He started ordering
them from Paris and opened his own shop in
the bazaar. After World War II, he and his
brothers saw another opportunity and
brought some of the first plastics machines to
Iran; they soon had factories producing but-
tons and combs, and quickly ascended to
opulent wealth and elite social position in the
rapidly modernizing capital.
Some of the family emigrated to New York,
where Elghanian sent his sons to boarding
school (and held a black-tie bar mitzvah for
one of them at the Waldorf-Astoria). El-
ghanayan wonders why he didn’t decide to
move there too. “Did life in Iran just fit his
personality more?” she asks. “Might his deci-
sion have been influenced by the unspoken but
lingering anti-Semitism that he saw in the
United States?”
The latter question is left unexplored, and
the former makes sense only in hindsight.
Before the revolution there would have been
little reason for Elghanian to leave Iran: He
was a highly respected community leader who
had established charitable foundations,
served on the Chamber of Commerce and as
the head of the Central Jewish Board of Teh-
ran, built some of the capital’s first high-rises,
and helped forge connections between Iran
and Israel.
His life there was not without setbacks. In
1975, Elghanayan writes, “to divert attention
from the government’s own ineptitude... a nd
to let Iranians think he was fighting inflation,”
the shah arrested thousands of merchants.
After declining to fund some pet projects of the
royal family, Elghanian was detained by the
secret police for alleged price-gouging and
sent to a provincial city under house arrest for
several months. Friends and family exerted
influence, and a “surprisingly independent”
court found him innocent; the finance minis-
ter privately told the family that Elghanian had
been scapegoated, and he was quietly released.O
n March 15, 1979, Habib Elghanian, a
leading Iranian Jewish industrialist, was
arrested in Tehran by his country’s new
government.
Scores of his peers had already fled Iran as
political protests swelled and then toppled the
monarchy; revolutionary committees were
now detaining people associated with the
deposed shah’s regime. Elghanian had assets
and family abroad and multiple opportunities
to leave. Even after the new government for-
bade him to exit the country, the Israeli ambas-
sador offered him a seat on one of the last El Al
flights out, no ticket or passport necessary.
Elghanian told his older brother and sister-in-
law to get on the plane; he stayed put.
In “Titan of Tehran: From Jewish Ghetto to
Corporate Colossus to Firing Squad — My
Grandfather’s Life,” journalist Shahrzad El-
ghanayan endeavors to understand why her
67-year-old grandfather stayed behind. She
was 7 when, two months after his arrest, the
government announced that he had been shot,
on charges that included “friendship with the
enemies of God,” “corruption on earth” and
“spying for the Zionistic State of Israel.” He was
the first prominent civilian and member of a
minority religious group to fall victim to Iran’s
bloody post-revolution purges.
The news chilled Iran’s Jewish community.
If a well-known entrepreneur and philanthro-
pist such as Elghanian could be tried with no
counsel and executed, then the country’s
80,000 to 100,000 Jews were on shakier
ground than many had imagined.
Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East
Side, Elghanayan was haunted by her grandfa-
ther’s decision not to leave; it was, she writes,
the impetus for her desire to reconstruct his
life. “Why had he stayed in Tehran during the
Iranian Revolution — when he could have
easily been with us, his family, in New York, or
in London with his brother, or in Israel, the
country created so that Jews in a position like
his had a place to go? Was he simply like the
integrated German Jews who felt at home in
1930 s Germany? Was there more to his story?”
Elghanayan travels the world to talk with
her grandfather’s friends, relatives and busi-
ness associates, and pores over books, news
articles, letters, photos, videos and journals.
She learns that his birth and death were
bookends to an extraordinary sweet spot of
openness and opportunity for Jews in Iran.
Jews had lived there since before the arrival of
Islam and had survived centuries of discrimi-
nation. When Elghanian was born in 1912,
about 50,000 lived in ghettos in Iranian cities.
Just six years earlier, equal rights for minority
groups were enshrined in a new Western-style
constitution, paving the way for Jews to inte-Amid revolution, her Jewish grandfather refused to leave Iran. Why?
HISTORY REVIEW BY TARA BAHRAMPOURTara Bahrampour, a Washington Post staff writer,
is the author of “To See and See Again: A Life in
Iran and America.”