By Kamran Nayeri, October 28, 2020
The last New Year's card I received from José taken with his son's family. Click the top right arrow to expand.
There comes a time if one lives long enough when we become witness to the loss of older family members and friends. In the past couple of years, I have lost three of my friends. This is how I remember them.
José Alshuler
For the New Year 2019 holiday, I did not get a celebratory e-mail from José Alshuler, my nonagenarian friend in Havana. For well over a decade, Josè included me in his New Year greetings emails which always had a photo of him and Mercedes, his companion. Then, in 2017, he included a photo with his son’s family, no Mercedes. He later wrote to me that Mercedes had died. Nobody wrote to me to tell if José too had died in 2018. But when I did not get a New Year email or no emails with a PDF of the Boletín of Sociedad Cubana de historia de la ciencia y la tecnología (Cuban Society of History of Science and Technology) attached, which José always sent me a copy, I understood that he also has died. He was well into his nineties. The last time I saw José and Mercedes was in May 2006, my last trip to Cuba.
I met José through a common American friend, Eugene Craig, who visited Cuba with me twice. Eugene was a socialist and a strong supporter of the Cuban revolution. One evening in our first visit to Cuba, Eugene proposed to visit José in his apartment on the Malaćon, officially Avenida de Maceo), a broad esplanade, roadway, and seawall that stretches for 8 km (5 miles) along the coast.
We took some pastry from the shop next to Hotel Habana Libre, a 25-floor tower at Calle 23 and Calle L, for José and his companion Mercedes, who were in their 80s and lived on the third floor of a small apartment building. Mercedes opened the door welcoming us in and guiding us to José study, a small room packed with books, a couple of chairs and a desk. Mercedes was petite and José a small man with grey hair and glasses. Mercedes who did not speak English always left us, returning once to bring us Cuban coffee in tiny cups with a lot of sugar on the side. Soon we were immersed in political discussion about the United States, Cuba, and the world. A physicist and a cadre of the pro-Moscow Partido Socialista Popular (People’s Socialist Party, PSP), José told us, he served as Ernesto Che Guevara's assistant, who was appointed as the Minister of Industry in February, 1961.
After his retirement, José was a leading member of Sociedad Cubana de historia de la ciencia y la tecnología. He took pride in articles he published in Cuban and international journals about the history of science and technology in Cuba and on disputes in history of science. He put me on the distribution list of their Boletín. I shared each issue I received with the U.S. Science for the People group to which I have belonged for the past decade.
Each time, I visited José in the subsequent years we discussed politics, and, of course, José spoke at length about Cuba’s revolutionary past and current politics. Each time, Mercedes brought us Cuban espresso served in tiny cups with plenty of sugar on the side.
The last time I saw José was in May 2006 when I attended the third Congress on The Works of Karl Marx and the challenges of the 21st Century (May 3-6). Alireza Nassab was accompanying me in that trip and he also came to meet José and was impressed by his flawless English and scope of knowledge. Alireza who was four years younger than me died of meningitis in 2011.
After my 2006 visit, I kept promising José (and my other Cuban friends) that I will soon return to Cuba. Alas, I became home-bound after finding colonies of feral cats on Darby Road when I relocated to Sebastopol in 2011.
José was a good friend and I enjoyed meeting him and our conversations. One thing I learned from José was that more than half a century after the PSP dissolved to merge with the July 26th Movement and the Student Directorate to found the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965 and a decade and half after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was still a partisan of both the PSP and the Soviet Union. I found the same attitude in my other Cuban friends who like José used to belong to the PSP.
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
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| Ismael lecturing |
In spring of 1983, I met with Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, an Iranian Kurd, in a restaurant in Manhattan for lunch. The meeting was arranged by David Weiss, a common friend and a founder of the Socialist Workers Party who was among those purged from it at the time. David thought Ismael who had an expressed interest in Trotsky and Trotskyism and I who had recently arrived from Iran and was a member of the New York branch of the SWP should get to know each other.
Ismael who had a bachelor’s degree in economics from Tehran University had made his way to New York in 1975 to attend graduate school. At the time we met, he was working on a dissertation at the New School for Social Research that was subsequently published as a book: Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser's Egypt (1989).
In the dissertation, Ismael contrasted the Soviet “theory” of non-capitalist development, which relied on bourgeois nationalist leaders like Nasser to advance economic development of countries in the periphery of world capitalist economy in close relations with Moscow, with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which called for a democratic revolution lead by the working class that would grow over into a socialist revolution, as a way to economically develop such countries. During lunch Ismael talked to me about the New School and urged me to enroll in the same economics program, a decision I am glad I made in good measure thanks to him. It served my purpose well. I was not aware of the New School, its history as an alternative intellectual center, and its economics program which included a couple of “Marxist economists,” including Anwar Shaikh.
Ismael was a motivated, intelligent, self-made young man from a very humble background. He was born in a Kurdish nomadic tribe that was forced to relocate by Reza Shah in the 1930s to Khorasan province in northeastern Iran from Kurdistan in the West. The tribe of herders migrated seasonally after green pastures.
By the time Ismael was eligible to attend primary school, he was left with his aunt in Mashad, the provincial capital, to pursue his studies. He was then sent to Tehran to live with relatives to attend high school. After finishing high school, Ismael passed the difficult entrance examination to attend Tehran University, majoring in economics. He paid his way through college by tutoring high school graduates who wanted to take the college entrance examination. In 1975, after taking his bachelor’s degree he went to New York to do graduate work in economics and eventually enrolled in the New School. Upon graduation, Ismael was recruited as an assistant professor at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He retired in 2011 as a full professor. He published three books and many articles in economics.
In the early 1990s, Ismael was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma but through perseverance, his wife’s care, and the excellence of Mayo Clinic's treatment was cured.
Ismael’s early flirting with Trotsky did not lead to becoming politically active but he did take a “leftist” position as a professional economist making him an outsider in the conservative Drake University’s economics department.
Soon after he retired, Ismael came to visit me in Sebastopol. I had noticed that in recent years Ismael had moved to support a wing of the Islamic Republic. In particular, he supported Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his 2009 presidential reelection bid as a "conservative" against two “reformist” candidates. Aside from the mistake of taking sides in the rivalry among clerical capitalist regime factions, Ismael took the side that opposed the Green Movement that protested the dubious claim by the government that Ahmadinejad had won the election. Tens of thousands of Iranians protested this decision in the street. From then on, Ismael was increasingly openly supportive of a wing of the Islamic Republic typically known as the “conservatives.” When we briefly discussed this in his visit it seemed to me that Ismael had bought into the bogus nationalist claim by Ahmadinejad that he wants to chart a course towards "economic independence" for Iran. Ironically, this was exactly the claim repeated by many “anti-imperialist” governments that Ismael had refuted in his own dissertation arguing for Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution!
After Ismael returned to Des Moines where his second wife was ill with cancer, I never heard from him again. I think he was offended by my criticism of his newly held views regarding the Islamic Republic. Regardless, our paths had diverged.
Still, it was sad news when thinking of him I Googled his name and found that he had died at age 74 in Iran of cardiovascular disease on September 20, 2019. He was buried in his hometown, Boovanloo village, Shirvan. Ismael had recently married for the third time.
Parviz Omidvar
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| Parviz at the women's marches January 2017 in southern California. Photo: LaDan Omvidvar |
On October 9, 2020, I received an email from LaDan Omidvar that her father Parviz Omidvar had died in a hospital shortly after midnight on Sunday, October 4.
I knew Parviz who was thirteen years my senior since 1999 but only from afar through our email communications. Ismael had introduced us when I was looking for help to translate “In Defense of History,” by John Bellamy Foster from the edited volume In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (1996). At the time, I was planning to publish the inaugural issue of a Farsi journal named Barrasi-e Sosialisti (Socialist Review). Parviz who at the time lived in Des Moines graciously accepted the task and provided me with a fine translation in a short time. Although, I was unable to get the inaugural issue off the ground for lack of enthusiasm by some of its early supporters, I was able to get Parviz’s translation of Bellamy Foster’s essay published in a Farsi socialist journal with due credit to Parviz.
From then on Parviz and I became emails friends. When in April 2009 I began to publish and edit Our Place in the World, Parviz was on my “friends list” to whom I periodically send a notice informing them of the new posts. I usually add a short concluding paragraph in which I share some of what goes on in the natural setting I feel lucky to live in adding a recent photo of wildlife or landscape.
Parviz was always writing to me with very kind remarks and encouraging me in what I have been doing. In this, he was without exaggeration unmatched even compared to friends I have known for a lifetime and I know care very much about me and what I do. It was not me but Parviz who was special. It was not just his literary talents and skills but his view of and approach to the world which was always with so much kindness and respect.
I had an opportunity to exchange emails with Parviz in early July. He wrote back to me on July 7:
“Dear Kamran,
“Thanks for thinking of us. I'm glad your life and that of your cats is almost normal. That's precious.
“I (83) have been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and have been receiving chemotherapy since early in March.”
This was a shocking news. I think we both understood the gravity of his situation. Yet, Parviz added that he is being taken care of at home by his wife, Maryam Khanum ("Khanum" is the Farsi word meaning "Lady," expressing respect) and daughter, LaDan. He concluded: “My mind is at rest, and our lives are ‘COVID 19’ normal.”
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I am at peace with the loss of loved ones and my friends, human and non-human. Still, each time someone I know and care for dies, I sink into deep sorrow, which I consider a natural human reaction. Sometimes it hurts more if I lose someone very close to me with whom I have spent a lot of time on daily basis. These happen to be cats, I fall in love with them easily. I also consider that natural. They touch me on a daily basis so our relationship develops more.
Life is myriad of relations with other beings animate or inanimate, human or non-human, close or far. The loss of Parviz made me realize that I can be deeply touched by a man who I never had the fortune to meet in person and grieve his loss. That is also part of what we celebrate as life itself.
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