Diana Abu-Jaber - The Language of Baklava

Table of Contents

PRAISE FOR DIANA ABU-JABERS The Language of Baklava

Hauntingly beautiful.... Vivid characters abound.... [A] beguiling and wistful Arab-American memoir [that] offers a poignant glimpse of the immigrants dueling nostalgias.... Abu-Jaber holds us with the trademark sensuousness of her language [and takes] us on a journey not only of the senses, but of the heart.

St. Petersburg Times

Charming.... Affecting.... Fascinating.

The Washington Post Book World

A real treat. Serving up yummy recipes... as side dishes to vivid stories of Jordanian life.... Full of amusing memories and savory descriptions of smells and tastes. Cond Nast Traveler

I recommend The Language of Baklava to anyone who eats. Whether Diana Abu-Jaber is Jordi-American or Ameri-Jordanian, she is the Ambassador of Big Heartedness.... The prose will knock you flatter than pita bread.

Patricia Volk, author of Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family

A marvelous tale of immigrants, food and family.

New York Post

Diana Abu-Jaber revels in the stories her father told her while she was growing up, which centered on cooking and eating but turned out to be about something much larger: grace, difference, faith, lovethe same qualities that inform this passionate memoir.

Elle

Memorable.... Hysterically funny.... Quite simply a delight. Like an artist who paints in vivid colors, the author has a gift for descriptive language, dialogue and characterization.... Sometimes her language approaches a kind of divine poetry that one rolls on ones tongue and reads again and again. San Diego News

Riveting. Ms. Magazine

Abu-Jabers memoir-with-recipes reads like the best of novels. Certainly Budher fatherranks as one of the most charming, funny, maddening and heartbreaking characters in contemporary literature.... So funny and intelligent and sensuous, it begs the distinction between reading and devouring.

Michelle Huneven, author of Jamesland

Appealing.... A sensory fantasia.... [Abu-Jaber] has succeeded in transforming what could be a clichd immigrant-family saga into a poignant and often funny coming-of-age storyand enticing me into the kitchen. Noelle Howey, Saveur

An intensely intimate story... [with] many laugh-out-loud moments.... The gustatorial prism through which Abu-Jaber offers her life story makes even the most ordinary events into visceral experiences. Syracuse New Times

[If you] liked Ruth Reichls Tender at the Bone youll love [ The Lan guage of Baklava].... Wise and funny. Northwest Palate

A joy to behold. In vibrant and moving and piercing recollections, each one rendered with love and care, we get a glimpse into what it truly means to be a family, and what it means as well to be an American. Not to mention the recipes are to die for.... This is a book I wont forget. Period. Bret Lott, author of Jewel

DIANA ABU-JABER

The Language of Baklava

Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of Crescent , which was awarded the 2004 PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction and the Before Columbus Foundations American Book Award and was named one of the twenty best novels of 2003 by The Christian Science Monitor . Arabian Jazz, which won the 1994 Oregon Book Award, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She teaches at Portland State University and divides her time between Portland and Miami. Her website is www.dianaabujaber.com.

ALSO BY DIANA ABU-JABER

Arabian Jazz
Crescent

FOR MY PARENTS,
PAT AND GUS ABU-JABER

Foreword

My childhood was made up of storiesthe memories and recollections of my fathers history and the storybook myths and legends that my mother brought me to read.

The stories were often in some way about food, and the food always turned out to be about something much larger: grace, difference, faith, love. This book is a compilation of some of those family stories as it traces the ways we grew into ourselves. I believe the immigrants story is compelling to us because it is so consciously undertaken. The immigrant compresses time and spacestarting out in one country and then very deliberately starting again, a little later, in another. Its a sort of fantasyto have the chance to re-create yourself. But its also a nightmare, because so much is lost.

To me, the truth of stories lies not in their factual precision, but in their emotional core. Most of the events in this book are honed and altered in some fashion, to give them the curve of stories. Lives dont usually correspond to narrative arcs, but all of these stories spring out of real people, memories, and joyously gathered and prepared meals.

I offer my deepest gratitude to the friends and family I write about in these pages and give thanks to everyone who knows that each of us has a right to tell our stories, to be truthful to our own memories, no matter how flawed, private, embellished, idiosyncratic, or improved they may be. I also offer apologies to anyone whose experiences I may have shared and recorded here without asking permission. I offer up these memories in hopes that others will feel invited or inspired to conjure up and share their own. Memories give our lives their fullest shape, and eating together helps us to remember.

ONE

Raising an Arab Father in America

Its a murky, primordial sort of memory: a cavelike place, bright flickering lights, watery, dim echoes, sudden splashes of sounds, andhulking and prehistoricTV cameras zooming in on wheeled platforms. A grown man in a vampire costume clutching a microphone to his chest is making his way through rows of sugar-frenzied, laugh-crazed kids. He attempts to make small talk with the children through a set of plastic fangs. Hello there, Bobby Smith! He chortles and tousles a head. How are you, Debbie Anderson! Im sitting in a television studio in a row full of cousins and sisters, not entirely sure how I got herethis was my aunt Peggys idea. Shed watched The Baron DeMone Show for years and finally decided to send away for studio tickets.

He stalks closer and closer: I can see tiny seeds of sweat sparkling along his widows peak. He squints at our oversize name tags: Farouq, Ibtissam, Jaipur, Matussem... I see his mouth working as he walks up our row of beaming, black-eyed kids. Eventually he gets to me. Diana! he cries with evident relief, then crashes into my last name. But apparently once this man starts going, he must see the thing through. He squints, trying to sound it out: Ub-abb-yuh-yoo-jojee-buh-ha-ree-rah... This guys a scream! I cant stop laughing. What an idiot! Ive got green eyes and pale skin, so evidently he feels I must speak English, unlike the rest of the row. He squats beside me, holds the big mike in my face, and says, Now, Diana, tell me, what kind of a last name is that?

This guy slays me! I can barely stop laughing enough to blast, English, you silly! into his microphone.

He jumps, my magnified voice a yowl through the studio, then starts laughing, too, and now were both laughing, but at two different jokeswhich must happen quite a bit on childrens programming. He nods approvingly; they love me and my exotic entouragelater well be flooded with candy, passes, and invitations to return to the show. But at the moment, as the Baron stands to leave, I realize Im not quite done with him yet. I grab him by the back of his black rayon cape and announce on national television, Im hungry!

Im six and Im in charge; the sisters are just getting around to being born. Bud, my father, carries me slung over one shoulder when he cooks; he calls me his sack of potatoes. Mom protests, pointing out safety issues, but Bud says its good for me, that itll help me acclimate to onion fumes. I love the way his shoulder jumps and his whole back shakes as he tosses a panful of chopped tomatoes over the flames while the teeth rattle in my head.