Khazrai GS '92 remembered as devoted teacher

Students and faculty of the Near Eastern Studies department will feel the absence of a gifted and beloved teacher as they begin the new year. Firoozeh Khazrai GS '92, a lecturer who taught Persian at the University, died at home on July 21 after a two-year battle with brain cancer. She was 46.

Family and friends gathered Saturday to celebrate Khazrai's life and mourn her passing at a memorial service at the Unitarian Church of Princeton.

"We are here today to honor the memory of a wife, a mother, a sister, a teacher, an artist and above all, a friend," her husband, Shadi Tahvildar-Zadeh, told listeners at the service.

"She left us only to become something even larger, a myth, a legend, a beacon of hope, a symbol of endurance and spiritual strength; and yet, she would have done anything, anything, to still be here today," he said.

Khazrai developed close relationships with her students, who were deeply affected by her death.

"She was very energetic and passionate about the subject and took an interest in her students, personally as well as academically," her former student Catherine Ambler '06 said. "We all miss her very much."

Khazrai's devotion to her students showed even through her illness.

"She would resume teaching her classes two weeks after brain surgery," said Andras Hamori '61, chairman of the department of Near Eastern Studies. "She only stopped last March, when the illness left her with no choice."

Khazrai showed the same resolve throughout her life. She grew up in a politically tumultuous Iran and wrote that the most significant event of her childhood was the imprisonment of her older brother, who was charged with opposing the Shah's regime. Despite the loneliness and isolation Khazrai suffered as the relative of a political prisoner, she immersed herself in the arts, especially music.

She came to the United States for a year during high school as an exchange student, but then returned to Iran to study music. Her education was interrupted in 1980, when Iran's fundamentalist Islamic government shut down all universities.

Despite the government's disapproval of music, Khazrai supported herself during this time by teaching piano lessons. She also continued to study music privately and volunteered at a music library, where she met her future husband, whom she married in 1983.

Iran's universities eventually reopened, but their music departments did not. Khazrai switched her major to English language and literature — one of eight languages she would eventually learn.

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Khazrai and her husband both completed their degrees in 1985, and they left Iran for the United States a year later. Khazrai resumed her musical studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, earning a B.A. in just one year. After earning an M.A. in musicology from the City College of New York, she came to Princeton in 1990 as a doctoral student in musicology.

Though she was a successful scholar and teacher, "nothing was more important for her than the wellbeing and physical and intellectual growth of her children," Tahvildar-Zadeh said.

Indeed, when Ambler was asked to describe her as a teacher, she mentioned her "beautiful children and wonderful husband."

In addition to working on her dissertation, "Orientalism in Nineteenth Century Russian Opera," Khazrai also found time to begin writing about Persian literature. In 1999, after the birth of her second child, Khazrai started teaching Persian at the University.

She would continue until her illness forced her to stop in March 2005, a year and a half after she was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the same cancer that killed Brad Zankel '06 earlier this summer.

"She was a warm, friendly, kind person, and a wonderful colleague," Hamori said. "Her modesty tended to conceal her many accomplishments as a musician or as a student of many languages."