Peripheral Visions

stories of what that year had meant to me, even as I kept trying to understand the changes in the interval: three wars, expanded territories, and new waves of immigrants. Vanni’s responses were different from mine at her age, more skeptical. Although she was only a year older than I had been, she filtered her perceptions through different experiences, including seven years of childhood in Iran. I was different too: whenever I tried to fathom how much things had changed, I was confounded by the problem of knowing whether the change was in myself or in the country.
    In 1956 Israel matched my youth. It offered me, as an American teenager, a model of commitment that I took away with me and treasured, so I was startled at the ways individual plans had been redirected, how different my friends’ lives had been from what they had firmly predicted. They still had the same intensity, but not the same innocent idealism. They commented constantly on the extent of changes, boasting and kvetching alternately, but that was a familiar pattern. I found that I responded to the same individuals I had liked thirty years before and to the familiar atmosphere of questioning and debate. It reassured me of a basic continuity across the years: that I was in some sense the same person I had been, and so were they.
    Israel had also offered me a vision of equality for women, but returning with my perceptions changed by progress and debate in the interval, I was startled to realize that, by 1988, even with a backlash under way, the status of women looked better in the United States—but how to be certain that the status of women had not also changed in Israel, perhaps for the worse, because of increasing numbers of ultra-Orthodox? I was puzzled at things I had failed to see during my first stay and unsure whether I had been too busy or inattentive or simply blind. Why, for instance, had I never climbed up to the fortress of Masada as a teenager? Simply because the archaeological excavations that led to opening the site, where Jews had fought to the death to preserve their tradition, had not been completed. Why had I never been to Yad Vashem, the vast holocaust memorial? I had, but most of it was built later, and preoccupation with the holocaust has intensified since.
    I returned again a year later and made a project of seeking out high school classmates from thirty years before, asking them to tell me the stories of their lives in the interval and pondering their experiences of continuity and change. Israel is not an easy site for research, for I found I had to answer five questions for every one I got a response to. Still, I was startled to realize how often, in this context where everyone spoke of change, families hunkered down, couples stayed together, and children settled close to their parents.
    Both Iran and the Philippines have gone through revolutions since we lived there, yet continuities keep emerging under superficial change, sometimes a long time later, like the forms of nationalism that emerged in the former Soviet Union after seventy years of Communist rule. Revolutions sweep individuals from positions of power but rarely sweep away the old concepts of power and how to use it, so patterns reassert themselves. The search for change is almost always the assertion of some underlying value that has been there all along, for men and women who set out to build something new bring with them their ideas of what is possible as well as what is seemly and what is comely. Social visions come like brides, dressed in hand-me-down finery.
    In Iran after the revolution, old themes resurfaced very rapidly. I had been with the students when they went through the buildings and took down all the portraits of the Pahlavi dynasty at our fledgling university on the Caspian, sharing their euphoria and sense of liberation. The removals left pale patches on the walls, but repainting was not necessary. Within weeks they were covered with portraits of Khomeini on the same scale. One common portrait of the ayatollah standing against the sky was virtually a remake of a favorite picture of the shah. From our first arrival in Iran, the prison at Evin had been pointed out to us as a symbol of the kind of political repression that must be changed, but once emptied it was quickly filled again with dissidents against the new regime. The rumors of corruption among the mullahs and even the members of Khomeini’s family sounded suspiciously similar to rumors about