Blyth Times

How to Raise An American

Myrna was featured on Fox News Channel this morning talking about her book, "How to Raise An American."

Strangers in a Strange Land

  Read a wonderful book called The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer.  I knew nothing about it when I picked it up at my local library.  But I was about to give a speech in Houston and since the book was in a paperback edition and looked fairly interesting I thought it would be a good plane read.   My speech in Houston was rained out because of the hurricane and so I let the book languish on my bedside table for several weeks.  But when I picked it up I found it beautifully written and very moving.

It is about a prosperous Jewish family in Iran right after the Revolution.  The father is imprisoned, because he is Jewish and well-to-do with some slight ties to the Shah.   The previously pampered mother is forced to cope without him.  The ten-year-old daughter and an older son, studying in America, try to understand the upheaval in their lives.  The author and her family fled Iran when she was ten, and one can only assume that they had many of the same experiences as the characters in the book.

The book is about a family whose whole world changes , who have  had  comfortable,  easy lives filled with beautiful clothes and good food, a luxurious  weekend house and vacation trips to marvelous places.   Very suddenly they  become strangers in a strange land that used to be their own.

I am sure  the current economic crisis will be almost as unsettling for many  people.  It will change their world and it will change them.   In the book the family  manages through the father's shrewdness and his acceptance of a new reality.  They lose a lot of shallowness and a lot of beauty as well.  But they are together and they survive.