Once upon a time, a dark-eyed, merry girl grew up in a city walled-in and defended from hot-blooded tribesmen. She bought trinkets at the bazaar and marveled at whirling dervishes. During a great war, she hid within the cloister of a harem and, peeping through the lattice, saw her own people marched in as slaves in chains.
Elizabeth Yoel Campbell is not a character in an Arabian Nights’ tale; she was born in 1915 in the country she knew as Persia, now Iran, near the borders of Turkey and what is now Azerbaijan. Late in life, she began writing down stories of her childhood and her people. “Although I am not quite 80 years old,” she explains, “I have yet experienced life as it must have been lived in the middle ages.” Campbell, with the assistance of her niece, Charlottesville resident Carolyn Karam-Barkley, then turned these stories into a magical, engaging book, Yesterday’s Children: Growing up Assyrian in Persia.
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Campbell is the oldest daughter in a prominent family of Nestorian Christians, a sect that claims a lineage dating back to the apostle Thomas. Ethnically, she is Assyrian, a descendant of the same Assyrians who conquered Mesopotamia during Biblical times. A deep consciousness of her ancient heritage informs the book, even when the author is relating memories of a happy childhood spent with loving parents and mischievous siblings.
During the course of Campbell’s life, traditions gave way to modern upheaval. Two world wars brought danger and deprivation. She saw the leadership of Iran change hands from Shah to Ayatollah. Campbell and her family were eventually forced out of Iran by the political and economic changes that culminated in the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini to power. From her safe harbor in Australia, she observed what she calls, “Iran’s headlong plunge into the dark ages.”
The tales told in Yesterday’s Children are the kind of intimate family memories normally shared around a holiday table. Campbell writes from the point of view of the child she was—intelligent, charming, fiercely loyal and curious. This approach could be cloying, but Campbell layers enough bitter with the sweet in her swiftly moving prose to keep the reader engaged and enchanted.
