![]() ![]() I learn that my real mother-in-law, Abdul-Kareem’s biological mother, is only my father-in-law’s first wife. I am too shocked to speak, too shocked to question what these three women might mean for my future. ![]() Among them, not one but three mothers-in-law. When we land, 30 relatives await our arrival. I did not know that this would be our final destination. We marry in a civil ceremony in Poughkeepsie with no family present.įor our honeymoon, we travel around Europe with a plan to stop off in Kabul to meet his family. Little did I know then how right they would be. They warn me that no good will come of this union. “There is no other way for us to travel together in the Muslim world,” he says. The author Phyllis Chesler with her husband in 1959. Then, when I express my desire to travel, he asks me to marry him. Instead, we stay up all night discussing film, opera and theater. My dad worked door-to-door selling soda and seltzer.īut none of this matters. I am Jewish, raised in an Orthodox home in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the daughter of Polish immigrants. He wears designer sunglasses and bespoke suits and when he visits New York City, he stays at the Plaza. We meet at Bard College, where he is studying economics and politics and I am studying literature on scholarship.Ībdul-Kareem is the son of one of the founders of the modern banking system in Afghanistan. I am only 18 when my prince - a dark, older, handsome, westernized foreigner who had traveled abroad from his native home in Afghanistan - bedazzles me. I was held in a type of captivity - but it’s not as if I had been kidnapped. I came as a young Jewish bride of the son of one of the country’s wealthiest men. I did not enter the kingdom as a diplomat, soldier, teacher, journalist or foreign aid worker. ![]() In her 14th book, “An American Bride in Kabul” (Palgrave Macmillan) out early next month, she shares for the first time the story of the five months she spent, as a young bride, held prisoner in a Afghan household. Phyllis Chesler, 72, is a feminist scholar and a professor emerita of psychology and women’s studies at City University of New York. ![]()
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