Said SayrafiezadehCritiques

Radicalism of any stripe tends to make people less compassionate - their ideology takes the place of real human relationships. This is shown in Sayarfiezadeh's memoir, as his dyed-in-the-wool communist parents are so self-involved and immersed in the world of the Party that they give little thought to how to raise their son. Amazingly, Sayrafiezadeh seems to emerge from the twin childhood traumas of neglect and indoctrination relatively psychologically unscathed. The narrator's politics seem to end up muddled - he has no strong opinion about communism; in fact, he doesn't even know what it is.

Excellent short stories, he has a great perspective on being a young American these days. Humor and sensitivity.

A lot of hope and heart beneath the surface bleakness.

This is a collection of short stories that focus on young men who are treading water in their lives, dealing with entry-level jobs, mothers dying of cancer and a general inability to have things go smoothly. But Saïd Sayrafiezadeh also fills these stories with ordinary pleasures and glimpses of hope; a man remembers when his mother buys him a shirt at Goodwill that gives him credibility at his new school or a young man stuck in a dead end job meets a girl he likes. Sayrafiezadeh doesn't mind making the reader uncomfortable or uncertain. He's writing about the working class, the marginalized and the discontented. And the stories are quietly perfect, from the clear and unobtrusive writing, to the way the author creates vivid settings within a single paragraph. This book reminded me of why I love short stories so much, that when they are well-crafted, they contain entire lives in single moments.½

This was a quick read. If you have ever wondered about the people who stand on streetcorners and sell the Socialist Worker, here's your book. I am currious about his mother's story.

I ended up liking this quite a bit. It needs to be read all together—the stories are not so much linked as forming a kind of wallpaper, a zeitgeist of an unnamed 21st-century mid-American town and an unnamed 21st-century war, from the viewpoint of a series of mid-level-achieving young white men. They have vaguely antagonistic relationships with other guys, vaguely aspirational relationships with women, not much in the way of ambition. I realize that doesn't make them sound particularly attractive as subjects, but that's pretty much the point—they're both real and allegorical at the same time.

The stories themselves are a bit myth-like, in the way certain male writers at the beginning of the last century would write about the war in stories that were close to parables, but not quite. The key here being that Sayrafiezadeh has good control over both his writing and his myth-making, and the collection as a whole added up to something interesting. I definitely want to go back and read his memoir now.

This is an evocative collection of stories linked by place and time, rather than by characters. I'm guessing Pittsburgh or some other rustbelt city in the 90's.
The last story in this collection blew me away. The baseness of Walmart is laid bare in the heartbreaking description of a photograph of a 10 year old shoplifter mounted on a "wall of shame" in the employee breakroom. It is an image I will not soon forget.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh hat eine amerikanische Mutter und einen iranischen Vater. Seine Eltern engagieren sich in der sozialistischen Arbeiterpartei. Nachdem der Vater die Familie verlässt, bleibt Saïd bei seiner Mutter in New York, die weiterhin in selbst auferlegter Armut lebt. Saïds Leben ist voller Widersprüche: Einerseits interessiert er sich für Skateboards und Videospiele, andererseits begleitet er seine Mutter auf Versammlungen der Partei und ist schon früh mit den Schriften von Marx und Che Guevara vertraut. Seinen Vater sieht er nur noch sporadisch, dieser kehrt zurück in den Iran, um gegen den Schah zu kämpfen. Humorvolle Erinnerung an eine schwierige Kindheit und Jugend, die geprägt ist von einer verbitterten Mutter, die ihre Ideale für nichts in der Welt eintauscht, einem abwesenden Vater und dem ideologiefreien Wunsch, seinen eigenen Weg zu finden. Geistreich und politisch.
Zu finden im Erdgeschoss: DR, SAYR

mj (18.3.11)

This memoir was painfully honest and suprisingly rather bleak despite the amusing title. The story of young Said's life as the child of two Socialists was leavened by humor but this reader for one wondered how any adults could so selfishly ignore the needs of their own progeny in favor of the abstract needs of the people. Neither of Said's parents appeared to be fit caretakers for this sensitive child, and his ability to survive and even thrive in that environment is a testimony to his strength of personality. This book is full of hard truths about prejudice, political agitation, and family dysfunction. Highly recommended!

I'm not usually one for stories involving politics but I really enjoy memoirs so I read it anyway. It was actually really good and I had a hard time putting it down. It really did surprise me and I have actually recommended it to a few people already.

"When Skateboards Will Be Free" is an intriguing memoir about being raised in an idealistic family, that is a little misguided in their priorities. The author describes his politically-charged and dysfunctional childhood in an honest and almost childlike manner. He is not afraid to share his funny and sometimes disturbing experiences, even when he writes about himself. This is an excellent book. I highly recommend it.

Said Sayrafiezadeh was the third child of two members of the Socialist Workers Party who grew up living alone with his mother following the departure of his Iranian father. But what kind of childhood do you have when your mother is a committed communist and you live in capitalist, imperialist USA? The answer - a childhood filled with protest marches, self-denial of consumer goods, a series of dilapated homes, no grapes or skateboards and a ingrained ability to trot out the party line.

Once Said asked for a skateboard - a measly $11 skateboard. His mother did not buy him one because when the revolution came all skateboards would be free. That little story is the essence of this sad, miserable tale of a childhood dominated by the author's parents political manifestos. His mother's bookshelves were lined with the entire works of the Communist canon but they never had been read. Late in life, as he relates a conversation with his girlfriend, he realises that he cannot distinguish between Communism and Socialism, although political slogans are branded into his brain. Ironically he now works for the Marta Steward corporate empire, somewhat at odds with the political ideas of his childhood.

A large portion of the book is devoted to the author's father, a mathematics professor who left the States to return to Iran where he attempted to spread the socialist work and who was a candidate for the Iranian presidency following the departure of the Shah. He comes across as an uncaring man who only infrequently communicates with his son.

Ultimately though, you feel a tremendous amount of sympathy for Said and indeed for his mother. Late in her life, she makes the enornmous decision to leave the Socialist party, but it is clear to see that life has passed her by and she appears as a tragic, lonely figure. In fact the whole memoir (subtitled A Memoir of a Political Childhood) is incredibly poignant. There is a dark humour present, but overall it is quite grim.½

This is a memoir by Said Sayrafiezadeh (pronounced say-RAH-fee-ZAH-day), son of a Jewish mother and an Iranian father, members of the Socialist Workers Party who had three children. Said was the youngest, and when he was only nine months old his father abandoned him. His older siblings soon went off with the father, and he was left to be raised by his ideologically-obsessed, ascetic mother who raised him in strict accordance with the denial preached by party principles. Said’s mother was convinced that their struggles and sacrifices would lead to The Revolution. But it wasn’t clear to Said what The Revolution would mean. When he worked up the nerve to ask his mother for an $11 skateboard, she told him “Once the revolution comes, everyone will have a skateboard, because all skateboards will be free.” Did that suggest it was good to want materialist things after all?

In the meantime, they lived in abject poverty, and his mother denigrated those with money as “rich asses.” This created more confusion for Said: his mother's brother was Mark Harris, author of Bang the Drum Slowly, and a nice man whose offers of pecuniary help were refused. Was he a "rich ass"?

Their lives were determined by "political correctness." There was an elementary school right by their house, but Said's mother had him take a very long round-trip bus ride everyday to a black school (where the white kids would be separated out anyway as "scholars" so that they never interacted with the blacks). His mother would not permit them to buy grapes, but Said could steal them. His mother would fill her knapsack with towelettes from the doctor’s office. “Any crime against society is a good crime,” she would tell him.

Her bookshelves were filled with party tomes that never had their spines cracked, and she could no more explain to Said the substance behind the slogans than he could explain it later in life. Nevertheless, the slogans came to his mind automatically; they had become a part of him, even without any understanding. They were a part of his ties to his family.

Said’s father Mahmoud, absent and uncaring, with his constant rejections of Said, nevertheless held a fascination for him. Said never even knew what to call him, and so he never called him anything. Since the publication of this book, Said's father does not speak to him at all, presumably because of the exposure of his abandonment and mistreatment of his family, as well as (probably) his failures as a would-be revolutionary.

Other reviews point to the humor of Sayrafiezadeh’s memoir, but I had trouble seeing anything but pain and abuse. I thought it was one of the saddest stories I ever read.½