Le Cahier d'Aziz

In the winter of 2004, Chowra Makaremi discovers a notebook containing a testimony written by her grandfather, Aziz Zarei, who had disappeared ten years earlier. In it, he recounts the fates of the young woman's aunt and mother in the early years of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1979, the February Revolution overthrew the Shah. A theocratic regime was installed, at the cost of a long kept secret gory violence, perpetrated against those who had the audacity to resist. Aziz's daughters, revolutionaries then opponents, were among them: Fataneh was executed in 1982, Fatemeh was killed during a massacre of political prisoners in 1988.

It is this notebook, presented and translated by Chowra Makaremi, which provides the main material for this book. It is this notebook, presented and translated by Chowra Makaremi, that provides the main material for the present book, together with letters from the two missing women and a story of the journey to find the notebook. Decades after the fact, those responsible for and carrying out these crimes have climbed the ladder of power.

This story ties up the lost threads of the violence that continues to plague Iran, but it also weaves together those of revolutionary resistance.

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