A Child of True Believers

"I survived Catholic school!" proclaimed a bumper sticker message that periodically appeared on cars some years ago. Said Sayrafiezadeh, author of When Skateboards Are Free (Dial Press, 2010) could logically show his own adaptation of that message, "I survived the Socialist Workers Party childhood." In fact his story even has a parallel with the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal that has been so well publicized in recent times. As a four-year-old, Said was the sex abuse victim of a Socialist Workers Party member in whose care his mother left him one evening. And when his mother reported it to the party, (but not to the police) a party representative blew her away saying, "Under capitalism, everyone has problems." She might as well have written to the Vatican.
But we are getting too far ahead of the story. Said has a much stronger identity than just that of a one-time sex abuse victim. The son of (an absent) Iranian immigrant father and a mother born "Martha Finkelstein," he was a prisoner of their particular political obsession Despite the vast cultural gap between the backgrounds of his parents, they had a common bond as "true believers," devotees of the Socialist Workers Party.
Said's father split when Said was a child, not to see his son for years - and then only during occasional brief and awkward reunions. During one such meeting, a dinner to belatedly celebrate Said's birthday, his father showed him a recent edition of the party's newspaper which he regularly talked around town. "How much does it cost?" The birthday boy asked. "It's a calculated question," Said writes, hoping his father would offer it to him in lieu of a more appropriate gift. "A dollar 50," his father says in a tone that clearly says, "you have to pay."
Because of his father's "normal" absence from his life Said has virtually no Iranian identity, save the fact of his name and his Middle Eastern looking face, both of which created serious difficulties for him when he was in seventh grade in 1979 when American jingoism and intolerance ran high because of the hostage crisis in Iran.
Unfortunately for Said, although his mother loved him in her fashion, she too contributed to his childhood of deprivation. Despite her college education, she chose lower paying jobs that she might otherwise have had, relegating the two of them to life in a series of cramped apartments. She also held onto a fantasy that Said's father would eventually reunite with her.
Said's mother also regularly dragged the boy to party meetings and weekend party conferences and importantly, inculcated the parties mythology as he was growing up.
Despite the neglect to which it Said was exposed, like the best of the genre, his memoir is a beautiful work of art that dispassionately describes a bizarre childhood with nary a hint of self-pity. A variety of scenes are likely to stay in my mind for some time: Said in Cuba as a 12-year-old during a weeklong visit in the company of party members, but without his mother. Said standing up before his middle school classmates for a show and tell sort of exercise, stating that he holds in his hand an article about a minority candidate for the presidency during the election which resulted in Khomeini coming to power. But he becomes tongue-tied and does not tell them that the candidate is his father.
"All happy childhoods are the same, but unhappy childhoods are not," Tolstoy might have written. There are numerous memoirs about bizarre and unhappy childhoods. Many are interesting even if they're not well written. Said's is more than interesting and it is beautifully written.