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The Little Black Fish and Other Modern Persian Short Stories
By Samad Behrangi. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1987. 128 pp. $7.00 (cloth).
"No, it's a lie, don't believe it. Samad isn't dead. Samad is alive."
When Gholam Sa'edi wrote this in the introduction to the first edition of Samad Behrangi's work in 1976, Behrangi had already been dead for eight years. Clinging to the spirit of hope which shines through these sometimes dark and disturbing stories, Sa'edi still carried the torch of Behrangi's message: Things are bad but we can make them better.
For Behrangi, this belief turned his tragically short life into a mission to educate a enlighten. He wandered from village to village in the northern Iranian province of Azerbaijan, giving books to poor villagers, telling their children stories, and teaching them how to read and write.
The stories in this volume, in fact, are the teaching tales whose first audiences were peasants and townsfolk, and you can still feel the rapt attention they must have captured. Sadly, however, despotism, revolution, and war have since drowned the voices of Iranians like Behrangi. His peculiar yet fascinating mix of criticism and optimism now seems like a...