Losing Amoo Tezi: A Tribe is Mourning
Morteza Namdar was a banker, entrepreneur, and businessman of great repute in ancien regime Iran. But to us cousins, he was Amoo Tezi.
My earliest memory of him is of a tall, handsome and well-dressed uncle, my aunt’s husband, who exuded kindness and filled the room with his energetic presence.
As a young man, he had followed his brother to Germany some years before marrying Khaleh Mahin, my mom’s sister.
In his years studying abroad, he had developed a German love for discipline but was a soft irooni at heart.
He’d tell us kids to go to bed at late-night family gatherings but also remembered to bring us each a Sound of Music doll or Badedas bubble bath from his business trips to Europe.
Amoo Tezi loved and encouraged sports and activity for the kids. He cheered my love for sports and general boyishness. I have a fond memory of going horseback riding with him, trying to show off, and my horse taking off. He gave me a good lecture after that, but he boasted about my horsemanship in front of everyone else when we got back home. He had my back; that was Amoo Tezi.
They lived near us in Daroos in a beautiful house in a lush garden with a swimming pool. Together with my aunt, they turned that house into an oasis where many dignitaries, friends and family frequented. That was the first of many beautiful abodes around the world that Amoo Tezi and my aunt Mahin built together. From Tehran to Spain, Germany, Austria, California, and France, they lived a full life devoted to family and friends.
Ambitious and accomplished, he could never sit still and was always on the go. Hard-working and busy, he used the landline telephone in the way we use cellphones today: constantly. He was highly successful in business because he was forward-thinking and had a knack for developing projects.
Amoo Tezi was a people’s person. He thrived in friendships and relationships and hated being alone. Well versed in several languages, he had a zest for life and an optimism that reflected both the happy years of the post-oil-nationalization boom in Iran and his own personality. He made his fortune through his ability to gauge people and make life-long connections.
The best thing about Amoo Tezi was his kindness. Pure and simple. He had empathy by the oodles. Amoo was the kind of person who was genuinely, almost viscerally happy for other people’s happiness. He loved to help and did help many both morally and financially in that gracious way that very few possess. You know the kind of person who seems so happy to lend you money that he makes you forget he is lending it to you? That was Amoo Tezi.
I do not doubt that many of you reading this will remember and agree. He was in the business of lifting people.
So now that he’s gone, I know I’m just one of many of his tribe spread across the globe who will miss him and remember him with fondness.
Each time we lose one of his generation, the feeling of loss is heightened by something greater — a more collective sense of loss. It feels like we’re losing a piece of the culture that he embodied: that perfect coming together of Persian kindness and modern optimism. Today we lost a little more of that Iran.
