The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
then a waterzooi for himself, a bowl of cioppino for me, and a half bottle of
the Fumé.
“Maura runs the wine cellar and oversees the financial aspects of the
restaurant,” he whispered as she walked away. “I know she seems dour, but
she’s just a bit shy, and better suited to numbers than people. A wonderful
palate, though. So let’s hear your guess.”
“Well, I’d guess German, but you don’t look very German. I would also
guess that you would be a direct casualty, not a reverse one, whatever that
means, if you were German, Jewish, and the age you are.”
“Good. Sound reasoning, and correct.”
“I also might guess Swiss or Austrian,” I continued, “but the same reasoning
probably holds as with German. Hungarian, maybe?” He was a little
darker than me, with greenish eyes and gray hair: in Hollywood he could
have played a dozen different ethnicities. “Spanish? Turkish? Sure, I’ll guess
half Hungarian, half Turkish, but with something else thrown in.”
“As intelligent a guess as I would have expected from you, Mr. Tomm.
But—”
“Professor, could I ask you to call me Paul?”
“Of course. Paul. Born and raised in Tabriz, as a matter of fact.”
My geography got a little shaky east of Cape Cod and south of Baltimore.
“I don’t mean to flaunt my ignorance, but where is Tabriz?”
“In Iran, actually, though we usually call ourselves Persian, if you don’t
mind. When Persian Jews were forcibly converted, they were called Jadid al-
Islam, or new Muslims. For reasons lost to me, one of my forebears adopted
that moniker as our family name. Persia, rather than Iran, connotes the tolerance
and sophistication that once marked that part of the world, and I hope
will again.” He raised his glass and drank to his own statement; I hurriedly
tried to do the same but wound up slopping beer onto the table.
“So what do you mean by reverse casualty, then?”
“We were more or less run out of the country after 1948. It wasn’t
uncommon, you know, in those countries. One of history’s crueler ironies.
Israel was meant to give the Jews a safe haven in the world, a noble aspiration,
especially in light of what had transpired so recently. As a result, though, all
over the Middle East, Jews were made refugees from the cities—sometimes
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