The New Criterion

Written by an author with an unusual name and ethnic background (American Jewish and Iranian), When Skateboards Will Be Free is a remarkable and moving memoir of growing up with politically obsessed parents. For the most part the Iranian father was physically absent, having abandoned the author and his mother when the boy was only nine months old. He was, nonetheless, a powerful presence in the life of a child who longed for paternal attention and contact.

The memoir is a parable of how political commitments and preoccupations deform and destroy personal relationships and depersonalize the individual beholden to them; more generally, it is a meditation on the problematic relationship between the personal and political (or private and public) domains. At last the memoir is a penetrating and authentic account of a political subculture more typically portrayed with an excess of nostalgia and sympathy. The author writes:

my father is a member—a comrade—of the Socialist Workers’ Party. He is a leading comrade… . The responsibilities he chooses to undertake include, but are not limited to, editing books, writing articles, giving speeches, teaching political classes, attending book sales, demonstrations, rallies, meetings, conferences, picket lines … .

My father believes that the United States is destined … to be engulfed in a socialist revolution. All revolutions are bloody, he says, but this one will be the bloodiest of them all. The working class … will … usher in a new epoch—the final epoch—of peace and equality. This revolution is not only inevitable, it is imminent.

His mother explained that “the separation from my father was only temporary and, once the socialist revolution had been achieved, he would return to us.” She too was “a committed member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, pursuing the revolution with a ruthlessness and zeal that crushed whatever stood in her way.”

How are people, some people, capable of such devotion and compartmentalization, persistently overlooking the gulf between their grandiose social and political ideals and the cheerful indifference they display toward actual human beings, including members of their own family? It certainly helps if they convince themselves that even the most intimate personal problems and pains result from faulty social arrangements, especially systemic social injustices. Thus, one of the themes defining the author’s childhood was his

mother as a victim of the world, at the mercy of those more powerful than she, and by extension I was also at their mercy, as were [sic] each and every worker who was unfortunate enough to have been born under capitalism. “The roots of suffering are in the capitalist system” she would explain. “We must do away with capitalism in order to do away with suffering.”

This conviction also explains the title of the book. On one occasion when he asked his mother to buy him a skateboard she said, “Once the revolution comes, everyone will have a skateboard, because all skateboards will be free.”

These upbeat views of the future coexisted with and were, arguably, nurtured by “living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism, and bitterness.” As in the case of the religious true believers, the bliss of future gratifications compensated for the deprivations here and now. There was, however, an important difference: the poverty of these political true believers “was intentional and self-inflicted.” They believed that “there was nothing more ignominious than to succeed in a society that was as morally bankrupt as ours.” If so, these people differed from the far more typical social critics of our times—including the tenured radicals and opulent Hollywood celebrities—who have little difficulty reconciling their comfortable existence with the rampant injustices and inequalities they believe surround them and deplore.

The narrator’s visit to Cuba (organized by the Socialist Workers’ Party) and initiated by his mother did little to solidify the political loyalties his parents so assiduously nurtured. Cuban restrooms compared very unfavorably to those in America. The latter were clean, well lit, and had both toilet seats and paper: “How absolutely happy I was to be back in the United States. How thankful. And while I thought this, I knew—as I have many times in my life—that this was the wrong thought to be having.”

Somewhat miraculously, the narrator’s life was neither determined nor ruined by the beliefs and ways of life of his parents. While bitter about the lifelong neglect by his father, he appreciated the attention and efforts his mother could spare for him when the pursuit of the public good permitted. He was well aware that she was ruining her life with futile and wrongheaded political commitments and marriage to a man who had no difficulty placing the political ahead of the personal aspects of life and was afflicted by a congenital incapacity for normal human feelings. Notwithstanding his father’s dire assessment of the state of the world, “these thoughts do not distress him in the way they distressed my mother… . Instead he is invigorated by them. The revolution will come, certainly, and when it does, all will be well.”

The understated, powerful, and sometimes humorous reflections of the author illuminate the tight bond between moral indignation and scapegoating which seem to lend meaning and purpose to the lives of some people. Somewhat counterintiutively, many of the most idealistic individuals harbor the deepest convictions about the presence and power of evil in the world, their faces “etched with that familiar outrage over injustice.”

While the book does not try to answer the question why some people are consumed by causes and commitments at the expense of their personal lives and relationships, it seems to suggest that idealistic political pursuits have a compensatory aspect: the personal tends to become subordinated to the political whenever private or personal satisfactions elude the individual, for whatever reason.