NONFICTION
When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Poilitical Childhood, by Said Sayrafiezadeh, $22
Said Sayrafiezadeh learned early and often the sacrifices — and conflicting principles that come with being a revolutionary. His mother, a member of the Socialist Workers Party (and sister of “Bang the Drum Slowly” novelist Mark Harris) inflicted her ideology on her son at a young age.
In solidarity with the United Farm Workers, she forbade him to eat grapes, leading the 4-year-old Said to steal the fruit, with his mother’s tacit approval, while sporting his “Don’t Eat Grapes” button.
“I would stand leisurely in front of the mounds of grapes as if they were a buffet and I was considering my options,” he recalls in “When Skateboards Were Free.” The lesson, he explains, was ingrained: “desire + yearning = theft.” (For his mother, the calculus was more complex: “desire + yearning + theft = revolution.”)
Such complicated messages made for an unusual childhood. But refreshingly, Sayrafiezadeh looks back with wonder, even humor, at the many difficulties he faced in those years, the no-grapes rule being the least of them.
In one unnerving scene, his mother leaves him in the care of a man she knows only as a fellow party member, who sexually abuses him. Despite his mother’s strong presence, at the center of Sayrafiezadeh’s story is his father, an Iranian math professor and socialist who left the family when Said was an infant and whose infrequent reappearances are marked by political lessons and tough love.
But Sayrafiezadeh maintains a generous spirit throughout this eloquent memoir.
Nora Krug
Washington Post Writers Group
NONFICTION
My Father’s Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging, by Hannah Pool, $25
Hannah Pool, adopted by a British academic from an orphanage in Eritrea and raised primarily in Manchester, returned to the land of her birth to seek out her biological father and the rest of her family. She spent only two weeks there, so she was unable to delve into the country’s history and politics, or the lives and psyches of the numerous relatives she found, including a sister she never knew she had.
Nonetheless, the experience was a hugely emotional one, and though “My Father’s Daughter” provides a bit too much dithering introspection, it’s a significant and moving book.
Pool feelingly describes the jolt of meeting strangers whose features resemble her own. She’s humbled by the realization that the brother who went with her to the orphanage has since lived a life of profound deprivation, and yet she envies him his secure, unspoken sense of place and identity.
Her journey features a number of tartly entertaining cultural observations on how it feels to be a black person in England and a not-quite Eritrean in Eritrea, where the father who gave her up at birth reproaches her for the length of her skirt.
Some of the most telling scenes occur during a bus trip to her father’s village. She holds a baby while its mother, seated beside her and speaking only Tigrinya, nurses its sibling. “For the rest of the journey, the woman and I sit pretty much silently,” she writes, “occasionally swapping children as she feeds them in turn. It makes a pleasant change to feel useful, if mute and with a squirming child on my lap.”
