TEHRAN – Dar al-Hadarah, a Beirut-based publishing house, has recently purchased rights to the memoir of Iranian prisoner of war Mehdi Tahanian.

The rights to the book “All My Life at Thirteen” were sold to the Lebanese publisher based on a deal with Tamass Literary in Tehran, which was established in 2014 to implement a new way of selling the rights of Persian books to overseas publishing houses.

As an Iranian volunteer, Tahanian was captured by Iraqi forces during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war when he was at the age of 13.

In a video released by Iraq in 1983, Tahanian, held in Iraq’s Camp Ramadi, refused to give an interview to an Indian journalist until she wore a hijab.

In its negotiations with Tamass, Dar al-Hadarah expressed its hope that the Arabic translation of the book would come to bookstores in Arab countries by 2021.
 
Golestan Jafari has written the book based on interviews with Tahanian, and the original book was published by Sureh-Mehr in 2016.

Another part of Tahanian’s memories of life in captivity was published in “Imam Khomeini’s Little Soldier”, which Payame Azadegan published in 2018 based on interviews with Tahanian by writer Fatemeh Doostkami.

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, has praised “Imam Khomeini’s Little Soldier” in a commendation published shortly after the release of the book.

“The story of this brave, intelligent and patient adolescent in the [Iraqi] prisoner of war camps is one of the wonders of the Sacred Defense. The story of a thirteen or fourteen-year-old boy who first experienced the war, and then fielded resistance against the cruel Ba’th forces with his amazing behavior and spirit, and was triumphant in both,” the Leader wrote in the commendation for the book.

“In this book, the signs of wickedness and vulgarism in the behavior of the Ba’th forces are more obvious than other similar books that I have read so far,” he noted.

Photo: Front cover of Iranian prisoner of war Mehdi Tahanian’s memoir “All My Life at Thirteen”.

MMS/YAW