[interestingly, the way that the SWP functionary's way of handing accusations of sexual molestation are exactly the same as the Catholic Church's.]
April 1, 2009 / New York TIMES Books of The Times ‘Das Kapital’ as a Boy’s Bedtime Story By DWIGHT GARNER [WHEN SKATEBOARDS WILL BE FREE A Memoir of a Political Childhood By Saïd Sayrafiezadeh 287 pages. The Dial Press. $22.] I wish this book had been called something else. There’s nothing wrong, exactly, with the title “When Skateboards Will Be Free.” It’s been borrowed, in fact, from one of this memoir’s many endearing moments. But the title isn’t evocative of the book’s delicacy and discernment, its free-floating humor and overlapping ironies. It’s as if Isaac Bashevis Singer had decided to give “Enemies: A Love Story” a title like “My Bad” instead. I also wish Saïd Sayrafiezadeh had a surname that is simpler to pronounce. (Try this: say-RAH-fee-ZAH-day.) Because it’s one that you may want to remember and be able to speak aloud, if this exacting and finely made first book is any indication. In “When Skateboards Will Be Free,” Mr. Sayrafiezadeh recounts, as if he were telling a peculiar bedtime story, the tale of growing up with (and without) his parents, ardent members of the Socialist Workers Party. They were convinced that social revolution was just around the corner in the United States. All they had to do was struggle. And sacrifice. And wait. Growing up in Brooklyn and Pittsburgh in the 1970s and ’80s, the author was a good little revolutionary, at least on the outside. When asked by a friend’s father, during the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran, what he thought of the situation, the author automatically replied (the caps are his): “I SUPPORT THE STRUGGLE OF THE IRANIAN WORKERS AND PEASANTS AGAINST U.S. IMPERIALISM.” This is not how you win friends and influence people in Pittsburgh. The humor and pathos of quotations like this one emerge from the fact that the author had almost no idea what he was talking about. There’s additional humor because we already know that, as an adult, Mr. Sayrafiezadeh went to work for Martha Stewart. The Socialist Workers Party was not and is not, in so many words, a cult. And Mr. Sayrafiezadeh’s memoir is not exactly about brainwashing. But it is the story of a boy who came to realize that he was “following a peculiar set of rules.” “They were, of course, the correct rules,” he continues, “but they had set me in opposition to the rest of the world, where my right was everyone else’s wrong, and where my wrong was everyone else’s right, and where I would be helpless in ever being able to distinguish for myself which one was which.” Mr. Sayrafiezadeh’s Iranian-born father, Mahmoud, a “leading comrade” in the Socialist Workers Party and a man who would later run for the presidency of Iran, abandoned his American wife and their three children when Saïd, the youngest, was 9 months old. In the family’s hothouse political ethos, Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh “was not just a man who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice but to abandon me.” The urgency and “massive workload” of revolution always came first. The author’s long-suffering mother, Martha Harris, grew up middle class in Mount Vernon, N.Y. The sister of the novelist Mark Harris, who wrote “Bang the Drum Slowly,” she dreamed of becoming a writer as well. (Both were born Finkelstein, with Mark Harris changing the name first because he thought it sounded less ethnic. She followed suit.) Then she met the author’s father and dedicated her life to the Party, thus “denying herself a sexual or even a personal life” as she remained married for decades to a man she never saw so that he could continue to live and work in the United States. The author’s two older siblings were shipped off at early ages to live with their father. “When Skateboards Will Be Free” is really a table set for two. It’s the sad, strange ballad, as quirky as a Martha Wainwright song, of Mr. Sayrafiezadeh’s life with his mother. “We were poor, my mother and I,” the author writes, “living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.” At times their deprivation, he notes, “entered the realm of the absurd.” His mother, for example, would fill her knapsack with towelettes from the doctor’s office. “Any crime against society is a good crime,” she would tell him. This book’s title? It comes from a moment when the author works up the nerve to ask his mom for an $11 skateboard. “Once the revolution comes,” he is told, “everyone will have a skateboard, because all skateboards will be free.” Mr. Sayrafiezadeh’s mother’s life was consumed by work for the cause, an existence defined by an endless round of meetings, leafleting and peddling subscriptions to the party’s newspaper, The Militant. “To suffer and to suffer greatly was the point,” the author observes. “There was nothing more ignominious than to succeed in a society that was as morally bankrupt as ours.” At times the author is a pint-size class warrior. When he plays video games at a local Pittsburgh pizza shop, he imagines that “my weapons were the weapons of Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Jack Barnes. And the ships that came to kill me were piloted by Jimmy Carter, Andrew Carnegie” and all the world’s capitalist fools. At other times he is a typical American boy, longing for the materialist things he can’t have. There is a hilarious set piece here about his longing for grapes during the Cesar Chavez-led boycotts of the 1980s. Over the course of this memoir, his disenchantment with the party and what it has done to his family begins to float, like scum, to the surface. He is molested by a party member, in a scene he typically underplays. (When his mother reports the molestation, a party functionary shrugs and says, “Under capitalism, everyone has problems.”) He comes to realize the poignancy of The Militant, which resembles a high school newspaper. “It’s a newspaper aspiring to be a newspaper aspiring to world revolution,” he writes. His mother ultimately quits the party after realizing that she has thrown her life away while working as a secretary and supporting the cause. In “When Skateboards Will Be Free,” Mr. Sayrafiezadeh writes with extraordinary power and restraint. My evocation of Isaac Bashevis Singer above was not an accident. This writer’s prose has some of Singer’s wistful comedy, and a good deal of that writer’s curiosity about the places where desire, self-sacrifice and societal obligation intersect and collide. Mr. Sayrafiezadeh is amazingly even-handed and even somewhat nostalgic about his blasted childhood. “There was something attractive, alluring,” he admits, “about being in the presence of men and women who had committed their lives to uncovering the hidden, unspoken secrets of the world.” Try it again: say-RAH-fee-ZAH-day. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
