Mark Arax’s ‘West of the West’

  We Nevadans hate to admit it, but California looms large in our lives. Not only does the nation’s most populous state border most of our west side, but it has a huge influence over who we are and what we do. Like it or not, the Silver State exists in the Golden State’s large and permanent shadow.
  For some Las Vegans, traveling to California is an integral part of their lives. Whether it’s for family, business or vacation, they are regulars on the Southland’s freeways. Not so much for me. I’ve lived in Nevada for more than 30 years, yet I probably can count my California ventures with my fingers and toes. Nonetheless, I find myself perpetually intrigued by the state’s cultural, social and political machinations. It’s an interesting place no matter how you look at it.
  Mark Arax’s new book, “West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State,” does a brilliant job of feeding my interest in California. A former Los Angeles Times senior writer, Arax is well-suited to the task of finding larger meanings within specific narratives.
  Employing a seamless blend of journalism and memoir, Arax travels far and wide across the state, including forays into the marijuana-growing country of Humboldt and Mendocino counties, the lefty-loopy world of Berkley and the suburbs of Los Angeles.
  But Arax’s focal point is the vast Central Valley, where he was born and raised and recently returned. Arax’s grandfather left Turkey in 1920, destined for a new life in America. He eventually found his way to Fresno, where the Arax family settled among a large population of Armenians. It is the hardscrabble agriculture and ethnic communities of the Central Valley that Arax believes best represent the real California. “I am bound to this place,” Arax writes. “You cannot separate me from it.”
  “West of the West” profiles everybody from the richest businessmen in Southern California to the poorest migrant farmworkers in the Central Valley. The most effective pieces are those in which Arax delves deeply into the lives of newcomers to California who are struggling to reconcile its reputation as paradise on Earth with the reality of living in a shack and trying to feed your family on less than minimum wage. Arax draws an effective parallel between the Okies who streamed into the fields of California during the Great Depression and the Mexicans who did the same thing in more recent decades.
  But there is much more to this book. Arax documents the anger, paranoia and discriminatory aspects of homeland security in the wake of 9/11, including the FBI’s overhyped bust of an alleged terrorist cell in tiny Lodi, Calif. Perhaps the most compelling chapter in the book profiles the Armenian family that built the well-known Zankou Chicken restaurant franchise in Southern California, and the dying patriarch’s murder of his mother and sister, after which he took his own life.
  Arax closes the book with a highly personal piece in which he discovers, after years of speculation and dead ends, the identities of the men who murdered his father in Fresno in 1972. In 1997, Arax wrote a book about his father’s murder and the subsequent investigation to find his killer. Several years later, police got a break in the case, and the two men who committed the crime were found. Arax struggles to come to terms with the relatively mundane realities of why his father was killed, which contradict the haunting theories that previously had filled the void.
  The many strengths of “West of the West” include solid reporting, taut writing and an author who has a firm grasp on his subject. Arax’s California isn’t about beaches or Hollywood or Disneyland. It’s about a mix of real people who live there, mostly not in the limelight. You can trust that when Arax writes about this subject, he knows what he’s talking about.