You Can’t Hold Me Down

You Can’t Hold Me Down: A Present Day Story of Ambition, Fulfillment, Survival, and SuccessBy Jawad Taherpoor

In this book Jawad Taherpoor has self-published his autobiography under the title, You Can’t Hold Me Down. It is about the struggles and adventures of a young and self-driven man who at the age of 19 fulfills his lifetime goal of learning English and obtaining a position as an interpreter for the United States forces in the battlefield of Afghanistan.
When the Taliban forces identify Jawad as a friend of the Americans, he has to run for his life. At the age of 23 Jawad first flies under the radar to Iran, and from there he pays the Turkish smugglers a small fortune to take him mostly on foot, to Greece hoping that there his application for a US special interpreter’s visa would be approved soon, as promised. He hopes that this way he could soon fulfill his next dream of going to America. However, things do not turn out as expected and instead, with the help again of the smugglers he ends up cold, hungry and broke at a refugee asylum near Hamburg, Germany. But Jawad is determined not to follow the fate of most refugees and within a year he moves to Frankfurt, Germany. There while still hoping and waiting for his SIV visa to come through, he does not sit idle. He prepares himself and against all odds, he makes it on his own in the refugee burdened world of Germany. However, Jawad now thirty-two years old, does not forget his own past struggles. While hoping and waiting, one of his goals is to give back by sacrificially helping those less fortunate refugees.