Funny in Farsi : A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America | FIROOZEH DUMAS

Funny in Farsi : A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America | FIROOZEH DUMAS | One of the best books I've read this year

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Funny in Farsi : A...

	Funny in Farsi : A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America FIROOZEH DUMAS Villard, 2003 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 163 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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Funny, perceptive, perfect touch

I truly enjoyed this collection of stories, all written with a keen, perceptive eye, a humorous take on life, and a facility with words. I look forward to reading Laughing without an Accent.

Kazem, I hope that you read this review and are even prouder of your daughter!

One of the best books I've read this year

Funny in Farsi is one of the best books I've read this year. I laughed until I cried, and while laughing, I learned a lot about the Iranian-American and immigrant experience. The author is talented at using humor to poke fun at herself, her family, Iran, and America, and yet the reader comes away adoring her family all the more and appreciating both Iran and the USA all the more. I highly recommend her second book "Laughing without an Accent."

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I heard (about) it on NPR

I really enjoyed reading this book. My family, by birth and by marriage, is a family of immigrants. Heavily accented english is not strange to my ear, and while the accents I have heard may have been yiddish and Ukrainian (and most recently, Southern drawl here in Charleston), it is not that far a stretch to Farsi.

Things I enjoyed? The evident love and humor that pervades this family, the descriptions of traditions and foods, the opportunity to look at America through different eyes. I found myself telling my fifteen year old son about "Fritzy DumbAss" and we both really could relate- given the last name we have. Z in a name really throws people off; take my word on that. (My favorite massacare of our name was "Romannawhiskey". Makes one pause and wonder.) I also told him the story of her aunt who didn't go to college, but figured out how to cure the chickens that were dying. I told my mother (both her parents immigrated in the early 1900s) some of the stories involving thick accents and the fractured English. (One of my Grandmother's famous sayings was when she said in anger "In hell mit you!".

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