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Whether it’s in a research lab, a Silicon Valley tech company or a classroom in Iran, Margaret Kahn speaks the language. Over the years, the Peninsula author has drawn on her wide-ranging career in linguistics and experiences living abroad to craft stories that explore the mingling of cultures between Americans and people from different countries in the area known as the Middle East.
“There are all these different Middle Eastern cultures, but you know, people from this distance often think those cultures are all the same. Of course, they’re incredibly different,” Kahn said in an interview with this publication.
Kahn, who divides her time between the Monterey area and Menlo Park, last summer published the book “Familiar Strangers: Stories from America and the Middle East,” which collects 11 of her short stories about the meeting of cultures.
She will read excerpts from her stories and discuss “Familiar Strangers” in a March 10 appearance at the Redwood City Library. She will be featured in conversation with Christine Campbell of Campbell Language Consultants and professor emerita of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center. Kahn will explore the inspirations behind some of the stories and answer audience questions.
Born in New York City and raised on the East Coast, Kahn majored in linguistics at Barnard College in New York and minored in writing. She said that although relatively few people were majoring in linguistics at the time, the subject gave her the foundation she was looking for.
“I wanted to be able to teach myself any language I wanted to learn, so I figured linguistics was the way to take that. And actually it’s worked out really well because I studied phonetics, which is very helpful for learning other languages,” Kahn said.
She received her master’s and doctorate in linguistics from the University of Michigan. Kahn lived in Iran for a year in the 1970s, prior to the Iranian revolution, where she taught English as a second language and studied the Kurdish language.
Her time in Iran became the basis for her first book, the 1980 memoir “Children of the Jinn: In Search of the Kurds and Their Country.”
Kahn went on to work in MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, and in the late ’70s she lived and worked in Egypt. She found her way to the West Coast in the early ’80s, where she worked on text-and-speech-related projects for a number of companies, including Hewlett-Packard, as well as organizations such as the Peninsula-based Sensory Access Foundation.
Kahn said she is fascinated by different cultures.
“Just the endless variation and the beauty of it. I think my year in Iran was one of the most vivid years of my life. It was probably one of the most difficult. But it was so vivid and that culture is so interesting, it is so intricate.
“And actually, I think, you know, a lot of traditional cultures are that way. Now it feels like it’s all endangered. We have more of a monoculture with social media and everybody knowing everything all over the world is very different,” Kahn said.
Although many of the stories in “Familiar Strangers” have been published over the years, Kahn wanted to publish a collection now, as some of the pieces appeared in magazines that may now be out of circulation.
“You have stories in periodicals, especially periodicals like ‘Ararat’ that no longer even exist and they’re not accessible and I wanted to put (them) out there so that they were accessible and all together,” she said.
The stories date back to the 1980s, and although Kahn has revised the writing, she has not updated the time frames for the stories, leaving them as time capsules.
“I re-edited all of them. I’m always rewriting. For me, writing is really rewriting, right? You can always make it better. I re-edited the second edition of ‘Children of the Jinn’ as well.”
Kahn’s stories examine both the tensions and common ground found, even within families, as people move around the world and cultures mingle. “Understanding the Enemy,” the first story in “Familiar Strangers,” looks at the strained relationship between a woman who survived the Armenian genocide and her adult daughter, who studies Turkish immigrant women in Germany and feels an affinity for them. As the Ottoman Empire, which later became Turkey, perpetrated the genocide, mother and daughter are at odds over the latter’s work.
“It’s partly a story about what happened to the Armenians. It’s partly a story about what happens between generations, because that figures a lot my stories,” Kahn said.
Something that has changed since she first wrote some of the stories, Kahn noted, is a greater awareness in the U.S. about cultures in the Middle East.
“If you’re going to present a story, you don’t want to have to explain too much. So you know, ‘show, don’t tell.’ But I think there’s a lot more known than there was when I first went to Iran. I mean, people didn’t know anything about the Kurds. I think that didn’t really come across to people until the Gulf War,” Kahn said. “But it’s a challenge to give people enough background so that you’re not constantly explaining things. You don’t want to do that, but you also want to make it understandable, and then I think it’s become a lot more acceptable to introduce foreign languages. It’s kind of a balancing act, but it’s what interests me.”
The short story for which the book is named found its way to a Peninsula stage in 2012, when The Pear Theatre staged an adaptation of Kahn’s story “Familiar Strangers.” The experience highlighted for Kahn some of her strengths and helped her further hone them.
“I learned more from writing for theater. I think I was always a sort of a character-based writer, and dialogue has always been my strong point. But I learned more about, you know, shaping a plot and more about dialogue. Working with theater, it’s very helpful and very fun, more fun than just sitting and writing by yourself,” she said.
Khan had a second play set to be staged in 2020 in the North Bay. The pandemic delayed the show by two years, but it was produced in 2022 by the Ross Valley Players. She has also written short plays that have received staged readings by The Pear, as well as San Jose’s City Lights Theatre, Broadway West in Fremont and others.
Kahn said she is working on a couple of books, including a comic novel set in Egypt in the 1970s.
Kahn will read from her works March 10, 6 p.m., at the Redwood City Library, 1044 Middlefield Road, Redwood City, with books available for purchase from Fireside Books. For more information, visit redwoodcity.org.
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