When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood

by Said Sayrafiezadeh

Book Overview

"The revolution is not only inevitable, it is imminent. It is not only imminent, it is quite imminent. And when the time comes, my father will lead it." With a profound gift for capturing the absurd... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385340680
• ISBN13: 9780385340687
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Dial Press
• Length: 287 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.5"
• Age Range: 15 to 18 years
• Grade Range: Grade 10 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

A Vivid Memoir

Said Sayrafiezadeh's When Skateboards Will Be Free is a painful memoir about a child whose parents were self-absorbed revolutionaries. His book reveals quirky parents whose separate lives revolved around the Socialist Workers Party. He paints a vivid picture of the party's campaigns from the vantage point of a child dragged to meetings, street sales and demonstrations. Most vivid is his take of the SWP's annual summer schools and conventions at Oberlin College, where the party's children roamed the grounds and buildings, stuffed themselves at the all-you-can-eat cafeteria, and watched the rallies where members responded to the promissory speeches with sustained clapping, cheering, feet stomping and big collections. Like all children, Said desired his parents' love and attempted to incorporate their values even when those were fiercely at odds with the world around them. Like many of us from dysfunctional families, Said could not understand the dynamics that drove his parents and ended up having to raise himself. As someone who was a member of the SWP during much of this period and who has a walk-on part in his memoir, I find the story deeply moving and profoundly true, although written from the point of view of a child who couldn't understand everything he saw and heard, and gets some parts wrong. Every child wants the family to be happy together, and for those of us whose families split apart for one reason or another, we didn't want that to happen and, as a result, feel extraordinarily alone. Not only did Said's "Pop" leave when he was a baby, but then his sister, and later his brother became part of another household, of which I was a member. Outside of the wonderful summer days of Oberlin and the kids he played with after school, Said remembers his childhood in gray tones: his life was a series of worries. Would he take the right side? Would he say the right thing? Would he fail the expectations of his parents? Of course most of us do, in one way or another. Said's memoir also took my breath away because the adults in his life did not protect him when he needed them to do so. He perceived his parents as campaigning for justice and equality yet failing to nurture him. His memoir shouts: the political is personal too! Some have expressed doubt that he was sexually molested; as if they simply can't believe that party cadre could do such things. I mentioned that to a woman who's been a socialist almost all her life; she told me that as a child another party's leader molested her. In my case it was a nice next-door neighbor. Said never became an activist, nor even explored radical politics, as he eventually admits to his girl friend. And although his life choices are different from my own, I could identify with his attempts to emerge out of the increasingly sectarian shadow world of the SWP and find his way into adulthood.

I Hope To Read More From Him

I just finished this well written and sensitive book. Not being qualified to comment on it's literary merits, nevertheless, the story is beautifully and enjoyably told. Many Americans of my generation (I'm 66) will identify with the life struggle to make sense of the world in a strictly sectarian way and the impact that has on a family. He tells the story warts and all. Excellent book.

Keen-eyed, deeply-felt

This is a powerful memoir on many levels. For me, it functioned as a child's eye view of a certain political type, the type who destroy their humanity in the name of serving humanity. It is told with utter and chilling clarity. The book is not without its difficulties. If his parents destroyed their humanity in the name of their grouplet, they also weakened their child's sensitivity to the human suffering his parents were supposedly struggling against. Thus, the book opens with the author proudly recalling how he got around his mother's support to the UFW grape boycott, which he seems to have identified with his parent's party. He practically gloats at the apathy of the common people towards the boycott. But given the crushing abuse he suffered as a child in the name of politics, who can blame him? The author is also disturbingly incurious (to say the least) about his Iranian heritage. (His father was a well-known figure in the Iranian exile community, particularly its left wing.) But, again, given his father's absence in his life, it's hard to fault him. Also, in all honesty, it should be said that the cult of suffering which afflicted his mother and, to a lesser degree, his father, was not cultivated by the party. Indeed, the party's Iranian exile allies in particular lived a rather opulent existence on the whole. That being said, the author is to be given the highest praise for having had the strength to have emerged from a youth of imposed emotional and economic deprivation and be able to look back on even its most horrible moments with unflinching clarity. He has not only written a fine book, but performed a valuable service to those who sincerely want to make this world a better place--if they will listen.

A Personal View of a Political Childhood

This is a moving memoir of a childhood deeply-scarred by parental neglect due to a misguided focus on political suffering to the exclusion of all else. The writing is captivating, engaging and amusing, even in the midst of the personal pain caused by the author's mother because of her total devotion to the Socialist Worker's Party to the neglect of the care of her own son, as well as the subjugation of her personal goals and desires to her extreme view of the necessary commitment to the cause of social justice. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh remembers his childhood with surprising compassion for both his mostly-absent Iranian father and his depressed Jewish-American mother, especially given the trauma that was inflicted upon him as a child and as a young man by their chance encounter with, and subsequent devotion to, the Socialist Worker's Party. He poignantly paints a vivid picture of what it is like to grow up as an outsider, of not belonging because of the apparently voluntary extreme deprivation that his mother inflicted upon both herself and him in an effort to identify with the suffering of the masses, of not belonging because of his parents' political idealism and his childhood misperceptions of them, and of not belonging because of his Iranian heritage during the difficult 2 years of the Iranian hostage crisis of the early 1980's. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh tells his story with wit, honesty and insight. This book is highly recommended, and a good read.

Roll over Dave Eggers...

...and tell Tobias Wolff the news. This is an astoundingly good memoir, and simply a flat-out great piece of writing. Don't let the subtitle sway you -- this is not a political tract, beyond that fact that in every family there is indoctrination. It's just that in this author's remarkable case, the indoctrination was outwardly about politics, but inwardly about emotional deprivation and the justifications that are created to support it. But far from being bitter or sensational, the book is gripping, wry, unbelievably fine-tuned and emotionally satisfying. SS's insights into his childhood, his outsider status (culturally, politically), his parents...it all rings true, and the author's fate ultimately suggests that there is hope for us all. If, like me, you tend to discount all one-star reviews as uselessly negative, and all five-star reviews as indiscriminately fawning and inflated, I ask you to consider that in this case the five stars are, in fact, fully deserved.