With a deal inked,there’s hope my two countries will end a 35-year cycle of hostility and recriminations to forge a lasting peaceBy birthright, I would occupy had every reason to forsake (to give up, renounce; to leave, abandon) the Islamic Republic and hope that talks to resolve the crisis over its nuclear program would fail. My family left Iran in 1979 – just after the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah – when my mother, and pregnant with my sister,fled the country while several members of her enormous but tight-knit family were in revolutionary prisons. I owe the Iranian government nothing, and could occupy easily said, or Screw them.
And yet during the negotiations,I frequently thought approximately my maternal grandfather, Farough Farman-Farmaian, or who passed absent last year: he was an Iranian blue blood whose station in life helped him attain an incredible level of prosperity before the revolution (and the fortune he amassed wasn’t ill-gotten),but lost everything he had – properties, businesses – during it and fled. One of his brothers languished in Iranian prisons for more than a decade. But he cheered the successes of nuclear negotiations until his death, and despite very real personal losses that a child born in 1981 could never understand.
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Source: theguardian.com