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Simon “Sion” Ebrahimi  is a retired Iranian Jewish accountant and author who was held hostage for many months in his office in Tehran during the Iranian revolution. Simon’s office was located across the street from the U.S. Embassy. In November 1979, when the embassy was taken over by armed revolutionary thugs, Simon and his partners were also held hostage inside their offices by his armed employees. Now in his seventies, he resides in Los Angeles and has penned a fictional, multi-generational family saga loosely based on his family’s life in Iran.

Please tell everyone a little about yourself, Simon

Simon: I was born and raised in Jewbareh, the Jewish ghetto of Esfahan, Iran. I studied management and finance in England before returning to Iran, where I was a partner to an international accounting firm. In 1979, I was taken hostage by my employees at the same time as the American Embassy compound was overtaken by the Islamic Republic. I left Iran with my wife and two daughters after the revolution to settle in Los Angeles, California. For over fifteen years, I was the editor of Shofar, a monthly magazine published both in English and Farsi by the Iranian American Jewish Federation, with an international readership of about fifty thousand. I have also had popular television and radio programs in the Persian media.

When did the writing bug bite, and in what genre(s)?

Simon: Although I was an economist by profession, writing had always been the passion of my life. I began with short stories and ended up writing a multi-generational family saga of five generations of Iranian Jews. Veiled Romance is the last of the five generations; the other four are waiting in the line.

When you started writing, what goals did you want to accomplish? Is there a message you want readers to grasp?

Simon: For as long as I remember, I’ve been writing. Once you commit your feelings and thoughts to paper and people read and appreciate it, you’ve already accomplished your goal. Iranian Jews have over 2500 years of history in Persia which is unknown to many. If you’re curious about the life stories of a Jewish minority in Iran, you are my reader.

Briefly tell us about your latest book. Is it part of a series or stand-alone?

Simon: The novel Veiled Romance begins as Leila Omid writes her memoirs from an Iranian prison. As she struggles to survive in hellish conditions, she sets down the story of  how she was educated in the United States, where she met and fell in love with Cyrus, a fellow Iranian Jewish student. Separated for years, they were reunited in Tehran and their love was rekindled, but when the revolution erupted Cyrus was taken hostage by Islamic fundamentalists and … Well, please go to my website (www.Simon-Writes.com), read the first two chapters of the book and if you’re interested, buy the book (either on the site or Amazon) and read the rest.

What’s the hook for the book?

Simon: An Iranian young, American educated, brilliant woman, in love, writing her memoirs from Islamic Republic jail.

How do you develop characters? Setting?

Simon: By making them learn from their experiences. Setting? What better than having been taken hostage during the American Embassy hostage taking in Tehran (which is what exactly happened to me.)

Who’s the most unu

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Here’s a word where the etymological authorities appear to be at odds.

From The American Heritage Dictionary: “hostage, noun; a person held by one party in a conflict as security…etymology: Middle English, from Old French, probably from host…”

And from John Ayto’s Word Origins: “despite its similarity, hostage is not related to any of the English words host.”

The Oxford English Dictionary appears to come down on the same side as Ayto while Merriam Webster looks as if it agrees with American Heritage. Everybody agrees though that the roots of the word go back to Latin.

Although I’m sure both American Heritage and Merriam Webster had all kinds of etymological information to back up their opinions, they show less of it than does the OED and John Ayto and so the non-association between hostage and host appears from my vantage point to be the more credible.

Both sources walk us back through French into Latin where the word for hostage was obsidem or obsidatus. The OED explains that when hostage first appeared in Old French, where we got it from, there, as in Latin, it didn’t have an “h” in front of it; it was ostage.

In those very olden days a hostage wasn’t someone taken in a terrorist attack.  Instead, powerful men gave their subordinates and often family members in hostage to someone with whom they had made a deal. When the conditions of the deal were fulfilled—say, pay money or move your troops—the hostages were released.

In the mean time the hostages were still important people and had to be treated as befit their station in life.  The OED speculates that the “h” in hostage got tacked on because this old style of hostage got associated with a whole family of words that arose out of the Latin hospitem meaning both “host” and “guest” as well as “stranger” and “foreigner.”

That Latin hospitem gave us hospitality, hospital as well as host so that if you were required to show hospitality and be a good host to your ostage you might start calling them a hostage instead.