Firoozeh Dumas
A warm, affectionate, and frequently hilarious memoir of growing up Iranian-American in Southern California. In 1971, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas's family moved from Iran to Southern California, with no first-hand knowledge of this country beyond her father's glowing memory 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 engineering 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 informercial 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 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 mystery), American traditions (Thanksgiving turkey--an even greater mystery because it tastes like nothing), and American culture (Firoozeh's parents laugh uproariously at Bob Hope on television, though they don't get the jokes, even when translated into Farsi). Funny in Farsi is above all 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. |
