On the cover of the book published last year by Laleh Bakhtiar and her sister Rose is a photo of their mother in a stylish suit and pumps–perched atop a camel. Helen of Tus: Her Odyssey From Idaho to Iran tells the story of Helen Jeffreys, one of the first American-trained nurses to work in Iran. “Her father was the mayor of Weiser–it’s a small town near Boise,” says Laleh Bakhtiar, the 64-year-old production director of Kazi Publications, an Islamic book distributor on Belmont that specializes in translations of classical texts and poetry. “Her family had been pioneers in the west, but what she did was amazing.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In 1927, at the age of 22, Helen took a job at a hospital in New York, and in her first week there she met a 55-year-old medical resident named Abol Ghassem Bakhtiar. Before coming to the U.S. eight years earlier, he’d worked in Tehran for the Near East Relief Committee. He, like Helen, had grown up in a small farming community. He wooed her, says Bakhtiar, “by reciting Persian poetry for her. Firdawsi was the favorite. She was absolutely fascinated.” After a six-week courtship the couple eloped. Helen’s mother fainted when she heard the news.
Abol and Helen set up the hospital in a wing of their home. Decades later she wrote to her children, “As soon as I would fix up a room, Abol would use it to care for one of his patients–or one of his cadavers that he would bring home until it could be taken to the university to be used for pathology experiments by the medical students. The advantage was that we were never away from the children except when they were at school….It was kind of ‘Life With Father,’ Iranian style.”
Meanwhile Bakhtiar finished boarding school in Washington, D.C., then went on to study history at Chatham College. After graduating in 1960 she married Nader Ardalan, an architect of Iranian heritage who’d been raised in America. After the couple’s two daughters were born, Ardalan was offered a job building employee housing for the National Iranian Oil Company, and in 1964 the family moved to Tehran.
Bakhtiar has now written ten books. She wants the next one to tell her father’s story.
