Samad Behrangi was an Iranian

Iranian peoples

The Iranian peoples are an Indo-European ethnic-linguistic group, consisting of the speakers of Iranian languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, as such forming a branch of Indo-European-speaking peoples...

 teacher, social critic, folklorist, translator, and short story writer of Azeri extraction. He is famous for his children's book, The Little Black Fish

The Little Black Fish

The Little Black Fish is a well known children's book written by Samad Behrangi.The story is told through the voice of an old fish speaking to her 12,000 children and grandchildren...

.

Life

He was born in Tabriz

Tabriz

Tabriz is the fourth largest city and one of the historical capitals of Iran and the capital of East Azerbaijan Province. Situated at an altitude of 1,350 meters at the junction of the Quri River and Aji River, it was the second largest city in Iran until the late 1960s, one of its former...

 to a lower-class Azerbaijani family. He finished elementary school and three years of secondary school before enrolling in a teacher training school, finishing the program in 1957. In the next eleven years, while teaching Persian in rural Azerbaijani schools, he attained a B.A. degree in English from Tabriz University.

Literary works

Apart from Children's Stories, he wrote many pedagogical

Pedagogy

Pedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....

 essays and collected and published several samples of oral Azerbaijani literature. His folklore studies have usually been done with the help of his colleague Behrooz Dehghani, who helped publish some of Behrangi's works after his early death. Behrangi also has a few Azerbaijani translations from Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

 poems by Ahmad Shamlou, Forough Farrokhzad

Forough Farrokhzad

Forugh Farrokhzād was an Iranian poet and film director. Forugh Farrokhzad is arguably one of Iran's most influential female poets of the twentieth century...

, and Mehdi Akhavan-Sales

Mehdi Akhavan-Sales

Mehdi Akhavān-Sāles , or Akhavān-Sāless , pen name M. Omid was a prominent Iranian poet. He is one of the pioneers of Free Verse in Persian language.-Life:Akhavan Sales was born in 1928 in Mashhad, Iran. He gave up an interest in music to appease his father...

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Death

Behrangi drowned in the Aras river and his death was blamed on the Pahlavi

Pahlavi dynasty

The Pahlavi dynasty consisted of two Iranian/Persian monarchs, father and son Reza Shah Pahlavi and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi The Pahlavi dynasty consisted of two Iranian/Persian monarchs, father and son Reza Shah Pahlavi (reg. 1925–1941) and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi The Pahlavi dynasty ...

 regime. According to Persian BBC News, Hamzeh Farahati who accompanied him at the time of the death narrates that the incident was just a common drowning and revolutionaries' allegations of governmental involvement originated from their need to fabricate a martyr.

Some of his works

• The Little Black Fish
  The Little Black Fish
  The Little Black Fish is a well known children's book written by Samad Behrangi.The story is told through the voice of an old fish speaking to her 12,000 children and grandchildren...
  
  
• Investigations into the Educational Problems of Iran (کندوکاو در مسائل تربیتی ایران )
• Oldooz and the talking doll
• Oldooz and the crows
• The Little Black Fish
• Talkhoon
• one peach and 1000 peaches

Quotations

"so easily can death call on me but I have to keep up living as long as I can. However, if I face the death some day_ that I will_ doesn't matter. What matters is the effect of my life and death on others'."

Sources

• Milani, Abbas. "Samad Behrangi," in Eminent Persians Vol. 2. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008, pp. 838–842
• Preface and backcover text from Samad Behrangi, Talkhoon va Chand Ghesse-ye Digar (Talkhoon and other stories), Behrangi Publishings, Tabriz, 1998, ISBN 964-90517-2-4.
• Sirous Tahbaz, Samad Behrangi va Mahi-e Koochooloo-ye Daanaa (Samad Behrangi and the Wise Little Fish).

External links

• Samad Stories
• Samad Stories: The Little Black Fish
• Samad Stories: 24 Restless Hours
• Samad Stories: The Little Sugar Beet Vendor
• Samad Stories: The Tale of Love
• Samad Stories: Talkhun
• Samad Stories: In Search of Faith
• Samad Behrangi's life. A biography by Professor Iraj Bashiri
  Iraj Bashiri
  Iraj Bashiri is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, USA‎ and one of the leading scholars in the fields of Central Asian Studies and Iranian Studies. Fluent in English, Persian/Tajik and several Turkic languages, Bashiri has been able to study and translate works otherwise...
  
  , University of Minnesota
  University of Minnesota
  The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
  
  ./ Samad Site/ Samad's life and the stories Samad Behrangi's death accident - from Hamzeh Farahati's memoir