Raphael’s Son — so called by a deranged moth­er in order to estab­lish his legit­i­ma­cy in the Soley­man fam­i­ly — has many ene­mies, espe­cial­ly since the eco­nom­ic melt­down of 2008 revealed that his Ponzi schemes defraud­ed many in the Iran­ian Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of Los Ange­les. His dis­ap­pear­ance and sus­pect­ed mur­der opens the far-rang­ing nov­el of com­plex rela­tion­ships between sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of the Soley­mans, a Los Ange­les fam­i­ly of a long and hon­or­able sta­tus in Iran. Between the mys­tery of Raphael’s Son, The Lumi­nous Heart of Jon­ah S. recounts his family’s sto­ried exis­tence in Iran, their hasty escape from Iran dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion of the 1970s, and their even­tu­al reestab­lish­ment in the sun­ny clime of California.

Head­ed by Aaron, the broth­er of the late Raphael, the Soley­man fam­i­ly has to con­tend with the bit­ter anger of Raphael’s wid­ow, whose claims to the Soley­man for­tune for her­self and her son are the recur­ring fac­tors in the nar­ra­tive. Raphael and oth­er fam­i­ly mem­bers are endowed with cer­tain phys­i­cal pecu­liar­i­ties that fig­ure into the plot and bring an ele­ment of the sur­re­al, woven into the story’s structure.

Author Gina B. Nahai paints the recon­sti­tut­ed Iran­ian Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Los Ange­les (and, by exten­sion, New York) as a refugee com­mu­ni­ty seek­ing to hold onto their mem­o­ries by asso­ci­at­ing exclu­sive­ly with one anoth­er and speak­ing in Far­si, the Per­sian lan­guage. Their con­ven­tions con­tin­ue to dom­i­nate their lives and the fear of fall­en aabehroo con­tin­ues to influ­ence their behav­ior. Only Angela Soley­man, the bril­liant, high­ly edu­cat­ed but unmar­ried and social­ly inept daugh­ter of Eliz­a­beth and Aaron, takes chal­lenges these con­ven­tions in her blog, ​“The Pearl Cannon”.

Nahai, her­self an Iran­ian Jew, brings the many cus­toms and con­ven­tions that seem to rule behav­ior into the nov­el. The author’s satir­ic point of view is occa­sion­al­ly quite unkind to the Iran­ian com­mu­ni­ty that she obvi­ous­ly knows well: she con­sid­ers their empha­sis on appear­ances, mon­ey, and fam­i­ly con­nec­tions shal­low and out­dat­ed. Nahai defines aabehroo, with no Eng­lish equiv­a­lent, as a con­stant fea­ture of the Soley­mans’ lives: ​“allud­ing to the impres­sion that oth­ers hold of an individual’s virtue and respectabil­i­ty.” The threat of loss of one’s aabehroo comes up repeat­ed­ly through­out the sto­ry as the impe­tus behind a character’s decisions.

By the end, though the iden­ti­ty of the epony­mous Jon­ah S. is revealed, solv­ing the mur­der doesn’t seem to mat­ter much. Nahai’s wit enter­tains through­out the nov­el, and The Lumi­nous Heart of Jon­ah S. is a fast-paced read, inter­est­ing for the his­to­ry of the peri­od of the rev­o­lu­tion and sub­se­quent relo­ca­tion of the Jews of Iran.