memoir – Mythili G. Rao

Muslim/American: Storytelling

Tomorrow night at The Greene Space, I’ll be hosting a conversation with three particularly brave and brilliant Muslim-American New Yorkers who have each made tremendous journeys– with their families, and alone; across the world, and deep into their own hearts.

Sadia Shepard is the author of The Girl from Foreign: A Memoir, in which she investigates her grandmother’s childhood among the Bene Israel, the small Jewish community she belonged to in Mumbai before converting to Islam when she married.

Comedian and performer Alaudin Ullah has been featured on HBO, Comedy Central, MTV, BET and PBS. His one-man show “Dishwasher Dreams” is the story of how his father, a Bengali steamship worker, landed in New York in the 1920s.

Kenan Trebincevic was born in a town called Brcko in what today is Bosnia and Herzegovina to a Bosnian Muslim family in 1980. He came to the United States in 1993 while his country was in the midst of war, went to college in Connecticut, and became an American citizen in 2001. He is the author of a memoir, The Bosnia List.

UPDATE: Video of the event is now online! http://livestream.com/thegreenespace/events/4083076

Our Diaries, Ourselves

I reviewed The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits and Ongoingness: The End of a Diary Sarah Manguso– and reflected on my own diary-keeping habits– over at The Los Angeles Review of Books. The essay starts like this:

TODAY I DUG OUT an old diary from one of the large cardboard boxes that my husband and I never unpacked after our last move. It’s a spiral notebook with a multicolored cover. Thin lines of text, written in a black Pilot Precise pen, fill its pages, and my handwriting is narrow and mostly neat. The diary begins in the spring of 2005, a few months before I moved to New York. Flipping through it, I hoped to find some observation from my first hours, days, or weeks in New York — some early impression of the city that might foreshadow how the place would shape me.

A Fort of Nine Towers

I reviewed A Fort of Nine Towers by Qais Akbar Omar in today’s New York Times Book Review. A snippet:

The collective memory of prewar life repeatedly saves Omar and his family. The bloodthirsty horticulturist drops his threats when he realizes he is menacing the father and son of his beloved boxing instructor. The leader of the tunnel diggers is none other than their old gardener’s assistant, a hardworking teenager and Omar’s partner in kite-fighting; upon finding his old employer’s son and grandson in captivity he orders their immediate release. Omar’s retelling startlingly transforms each horror into a reminder of what lies beneath the rubble: an openhearted, hospitable community of generous, gregarious people, “one minute laughing and the next minute shouting” and always fiercely loyal to their kind.

Hot Reads: Winter Journal, Summer Lies, Falling in Love with Joseph Smith, One Last Thing Before I Go, Penelope

Get them while they’re hot! I reviewed new books from Paul Auster, Bernhard Schlink, and Jonathan Tropper this week, as well as a wonderful debut novel from Rebecca Harrington and an unconventional memoir about Mormonism by Jane Barnes for Newsweek/The Daily Beast.