Rita Yahan-Farouz

As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.

The Bukharan neighborhood of Jerusalem in the 1920s Naftali is a wealthy trader and a middle-aged widow whose all his former wives have mysteriously passed away and he is afraid to remarry with a belief that he has a curse on him. The matchmaker presses and the old woman coaxes and finally carries Flora, a 24-year-old virgin, but not to infect her with a curse, he avoids any physical contact with her. The plot gets complicated when Flora gets hurt as a result of her relationship with the fabric merchant, and Naftali, who can't bear the shame, turns his anger on his young wife.