The Bathhouse

March 31, 2003
As human rights abuses involving women in the Middle East continue to be exposed, Moshiri's prison novel (her second, after At the Wall of the Almighty) about a 17-year-old Iranian woman seized at the beginning of Iran's fundamentalist revolution provides a poignant but brutal reminder that the problem is anything but new. The story begins when police come knocking at the door of the unnamed narrator in search of her brother Hamid, a leftist political activist. Though she has nothing to do with her brother's activities, the girl is arrested. After a few horrific days in a woman's prison that once was a popular bathhouse, her release appears imminent. But when she goes in search of food for an abandoned baby, she is accused of trying to escape. As a permanent resident, she becomes the victim of Brother Jamali, the brutal warden, who delights in psychological terror tactics and beatings. What she and her fellow prisoners most fear, however, is execution; at greatest risk is a female doctor whose values are decidedly modern. The girl eventually learns that Hamid has been captured, and during a brief visit with her brother she learns that he is about to be killed. Moshiri's novel is based on interviews with several Iranian women who endured similar ordeals, and the starkly simple tale she tells is convincing in tone and substance. Though very little of her past is revealed, the narrator is a vivid character, an ordinary student with a stubborn, rebellious streak that enables her to endure the horrors of prison. Moshiri's impressive novel works at two levels, telling a compelling story while bearing witness to a brutal period in Iranian history.