I Confess: Revelations in exile

Description

This is a memoir by Sydney-based doctor and writer/translator, Kooshyar Karimi, who in 2000 managed to flee, with his family, certain torture and death which stalked him on a daily basis in his native Iran. Karimi's sin was his Jewishness and the fact that he helped desperate girls and women who had been raped, terminate the resulting pregnancies. Whilst many stories have come out of Iran in the last decade or so, nothing matches the grittiness of this portrayal of life in the crumbling alleyways and damp cellars of an Iranian slum district - the extreme poverty and desperation, the regular betrayals and compromises even within families, in the fight for survival. The memoir begins at his birth on the back seat of a police car in the sub-zero temperatures of a bleak and icy winter's night. It finishes with a nail-biting telling of his eventual escape across the border into Turkey, only to be pursued by his nightmares, for which he seeks a measure of atonement in the writing of this book.

Kooshyar Karimi was born in December 1968 in the slums of Tehran. At the age of six, Karimi was compelled to work to contribute to his family's survival and was only eleven when the Islamic Revolution upended his world. Amidst the post-revolutionary chaos and the bloodshed of the Iran-Iraq war, Karimi pursued his education through to medical school with a clear determination to avoid war, stay alive, and support his mother whilst pursuing his passion for reading and writing. By the age of 26, he was a published author, award-winning translator, doctor, husband and father. At this time, he began the research for his book, A History of Iranian Jews. This dangerous activity contributed to his being kidnapped by the Islamic Intelligence Service in the winter of 1998, tortured, burnt, and whipped over 65 days. He was then presented with an unimaginable decision...to spy for MOIS against his own people or to be tortured slowly to death. His forced cooperation was a significant factor in the arrest of thirteen Iranian Jews in March 1999, a case that caused an international outcry. To end this nightmare and escape his own imminent execution, Karimi called on a fateful connection from the past to flee his country across the border to Turkey. Months of anxiety and despair followed till he and his family were granted a refugee visa to Australia. He is now an Australian citizen, practising medicine full-time in New South Wales, and writing in his spare time.

'His story has the captivating yet disturbing quality of a tragic fable... A gifted storyteller for whom writing has become an act of atonement, Karimi skilfully captures both the everyday and the epic dimensions of his extraordinary life.' - Fiona Capp, Pick of the Week, Saturday Age, 8 Sept 2012