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A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America
Random House
January 2004
On Sale: January 13, 2004
224 pages
ISBN: 0812968379
EAN: 9780812968378
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
This new Readers Circle edition includes a reading group
guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled
Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.”
In
1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family
moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no
firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s
glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More
family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since.
Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of
Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a
sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling
for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during
the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully
mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the
effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous
American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a
girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second
wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman,
becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
In a
series of deftly drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple
with American English (hot dogs and hush puppies?—a complete
mystery), American traditions (Thanksgiving turkey?—an even
greater mystery, since it tastes like nothing), and American
culture (Firoozeh’s parents laugh uproariously at Bob Hope
on television, although they don’t get the jokes even when
she translates them into Farsi).
Above all, this is
an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power
of family love. It is a book that will leave us all
laughing—without an accent.
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