Simon Farzami, whose full name is Simon Rosenblum Farzami, was the adopted son of Abolhassan Hakimi, a diplomat and member of parliament during the Pahlavi regime. Mr. Hakimi, who is the brother of Ibrahim Hakimi, one of the prime ministers of Iran in the early years of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign, was born in Tabriz and was sent to Beirut to study as a teenager. At the same time as World War I, he met and married Marta Szostakowsky, a Jewish woman of Swiss descent who had lost her husband in the war, at the University of Beirut. Martha had three children from her first marriage. Simon was one of them. Abolhassan Hakimi and Marta went to Switzerland after marriage, and Abolhassan Hakimi started working in the League of Nations (as a diplomat of Iran and later as an independent employee of this international organization) and returned to Iran after the end of World War II.
