Highlighting: “Monavar’s Journey – Bridge to Hope,” by Regina Monavar Tessone, self-published, 2022. 312 pages. ISBN-13: 9781638373063.
(Courtesy of Regine Monavar Tessone)
On February 1, 1979, Regine Monavar Tessone recalls running through the Mehrabad airport with her parents and three brothers to board the last flight out of Tehran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution. The pilot announced as they entered the aircraft, “You are the lucky ones! The airport is now closed and the Ayatollah Khomeini has arrived.”
In an intimate memoir, Monavar (a Farsi name meaning light) recreates the life of her Persian Jewish family before they fled Iran and her own adventures in their new home in America. Always buoyant (her maiden name Omid means hope), she describes reuniting with her mother’s family in Brooklyn, visiting Israel and serving as a volunteer, falling in love with a non-Persian Jew, and becoming a successful fashion designer. Her story, at once personal and paradigmatic, reflects her nostalgia for the homeland of her youth and her embrace of the opportunities of her adopted homeland in the United States as a successful Iranian-Jewish immigrant.
“Monavar’s Journey is a beautifully written moving memoir that sheds light on Iranian Jews’ lives during the Pahlavi era and the Revolution: lifestyle, food, religion, education, Muslim-Jewish relations, and so much more. It impressively offers an account of immigration, adjustment, and daily life in the new home, abroad—all as sensitively portrayed by Regine Monavar Tessone, said Daniel Tsadik, Author of “Between Foreigners and Shi’is: Nineteenth-Century Iran and its Jewish Minority.” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Today, Monavar Tessone is an Iranian American fashion designer. As a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, she founded Aqua Modesta, a unique line of modest women’s swimwear and sportswear that attained worldwide success. Her initial professional goals achieved, she wrote this memoir to fulfill a lifelong dream: to share the story of her family’s incredible escape on the last flight out of Tehran. She resides with her husband and children in New York and Jerusalem.
