By Kerri Pepoy,Staff Writer
Firoozeh Dumas’ memoir is one of three finalists for a top humor award.

NORWAY – Iranian-American author Firoozeh Dumas will visit two Oxford Hills schools this week to speak with students about writing, the Middle East and her best-selling book that humorously chronicles her family’s experiences as immigrants in America.

She is the author of “Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America.” The book was on the San Francisco Chronicle’s and Los Angeles Times’ bestseller lists, and is one of three finalists for the 2005 Thurber Award, the top prize in literary humor. The winner will be announced in November.

Dumas will be at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School on Wednesday to discuss her book with students and talk about Middle Eastern culture. On Friday, she’ll visit Hebron Academy to hold writing workshops for students and demonstrate Middle Eastern art, cooking and culture. She also will speak at a public event at 7 p.m. Friday in the school’s gymnasium.

Dumas’ book was required summer reading for Hebron Academy middle and upper school students. Faculty, staff, alumni and parents were encouraged to read the book.

Dumas was born in Abadan, Iran. In 1972, at the age of 7, she moved to southern California with her parents and 14-year-old brother. Another older brother had gone to Philadelphia a year earlier to attend high school and live with Dumas’ uncle and his American wife.

Like a first love

Her father, an engineer with the National Iranian Oil Co. who had been assigned to consult for an American firm, had lived in the United States as a graduate student and talked about the country “with the eloquence and wonder normally reserved for a first love,” she writes.

The book contains funny, touching, and sometimes sad accounts of her family’s adjustment to American life. She recounts how a washing-machine repairman told her and her mother to use “elbow grease” to remove a stain left by a leak, prompting them to embark on a futile search in a hardware store.

Dumas was astonished that “land of the free” meant something beyond the essential freedoms Americans hold dear. “In our homeland, people who taste something before they buy it are called shoplifters. Here, a person can taste something, not buy it and still have the clerk wish him a nice day,” she writes.

As a young girl, she reveled in Girl Scouts, Butterfingers candy bars, Halloween, “The Brady Bunch” and free toys in cereal boxes.

There were difficult times too. Dumas recounts the hostility she felt from many Americans after Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and took 52 Americans captive, an ordeal that lasted 444 days. Her father simultaneously lost his job and his Iranian pension was cut off, forcing him to sell their belongings.

Dumas, who went on to college, marriage and motherhood, lives in northern California with her husband and children.