“American hiker” Josh Fattal, imprisoned in Iran for 781 days, says even after his body was set free, his “mind stayed in prison for some time.”

By Michael Matza

NEW YORK - Sitting cross-legged in his Brooklyn apartment, Josh Fattal, the former Elkins Park man who was imprisoned 26 months in Iran, gingerly unfolds the worn page that was his detention diary.

Microscopic writing - to conserve the ink in purloined pens - covers the white space of the reused typed sheet. Redolent of trauma and resilience, the chilling souvenir was smuggled out in the spine of a book.

" 'Who am I?' " Fattal said recently, recalling the question he pondered alone at the start of his captivity five years ago. "Solitary confinement - the essence of prison, really - is taking your full, complex being and shrinking it down to a physical body warehoused in a cube."

The worst, he said, was his own mind, which antagonized him. He obsessed on the most fearful future possibilities and second-guessed every decision he'd ever made. "Hyper-critical of the past, hyper-fearful of the future," he said. "Which is where I had to be because the present was unbearable."

How Fattal, now 31, and fellow prisoners Shane Bauer, 31, of Minnesota, and Sarah Shourd, 35, of California, landed in that predicament, and what they learned in prison, underpin their just-released memoir, A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Eamon Dolan, $27), a riveting and, for some readers, exasperating account that weaves 116 vignettes from their three points of view into a unified narrative. The authors will read from the book and take questions at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, at the Free Library of Philadelphia; admission is free.

Forced to wear blindfolds outside their cells, "a sliver of light" is the slit they saw beneath the loathsome shields. It also alludes to daylight moving slowly across cell walls, marking another sunset.

Followers of international news may recall how the trouble began. Bauer, a freelance photojournalist, and Shourd, a language instructor, were living together in Damascus, Syria, when Fattal, an environmentalist, came for a visit in the summer of 2009. The three met as undergraduates at the University of California at Berkeley. Seeking a short, rustic vacation, they traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan, a part of the country that is frequented by tourists, known for the beautiful Zagros Mountains and generally free of the bloodshed common in southern Iraq.

At their hotel, they learned about the nearby Ahmed Awa waterfall. Lightly provisioned and without a map, they set off for the popular spot. Cresting a ridge on what they later learned is the unmarked border between Iraq and Iran, they were arrested. It remains unclear whether they crossed the border accidentally or only after armed Iranian guards waved them closer. The three friends have no doubt they were lured and trapped.

Accused of crossing the border intentionally to commit espionage, Fattal, Bauer, and Shourd were transferred to Tehran's Evin Prison. Headlines around the world called them "the American hikers."

A Sliver of Light makes a strong case that the psychological torment of prolonged solitary confinement is as torturous and inhumane as harsh physical mistreatment. It shows how the three, who were allowed to meet for one hour a day in a prison courtyard, relied on each other to dispel despair.

Shourd was set free after 14 months, most of it in solitary with a depression so deep she beat her knuckles bloody on a cell wall. Fattal and Bauer, who eventually shared a cell, were imprisoned for 781 days.

Fattal said this week that his body was free but his "mind stayed in prison for some time" until he "reconfigured how to relate to people" through a regimen of talk therapy and exercise.

In prison, said the Cheltenham High School grad, who became a bar mitzvah at Congregation Rodeph Shalom, he initially tried to hide his religious background and was haunted by the fate of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was Jewish and was killed in 2002 by Islamic extremists in Pakistan.

But Fattal's captors learned the truth within weeks and so he stopped trying to hide it. During a rare call home he used Hebrew words, baruch hashem - blessed is God - to convey to his parents not to worry.

The "Free the Hikers" campaign, which was started by their families and friends, secured meetings with President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It had support from Sean Penn, Cat Stevens, Muhammad Ali, Noam Chomsky, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Switzerland's ambassador to Iran Livia Leu Agosti, and other well-known figures.

But there was a chorus of criticism expressed in blog posts and online commentary. Some said the American hikers acted recklessly by trekking near the border of a sworn enemy, and that when they got in trouble they wanted the United States to spend diplomatic capital to bail them out.

As it happened, an envoy of the Sultan of Oman negotiated their release, and the sultanate paid $1.5 million - a sum recorded as bail, but widely viewed as ransom.

Today, Fattal is at New York University, pursuing a doctorate in history. He and his partner Jenny Bohrman, 32, on whom he had a crush since middle school, have a son, seven-month-old Isaiah Azad Fattal, whose middle name means "free" in Farsi.

To the people who ask why Fattal seemed to play with fire on a volatile border, he says, "I don't think I'll ever hike near the Iranian border again. I've paid dearly for that. People who have honest curiosity should read the book. People who are angry at me - well, I spent 26 months in prison after that hike. . . . If you can't let that go, then at what point is it appropriate punishment?"

—The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 20, 2014