Salma Abdelnour - Jasmine and Fire: A Bittersweet Year in Beirut

A Food & Wine Reading List Pick
An Afar Magazine Summer Reading Pick

Jasmine and Fire takes readers on an unforgettable journey to home, family, and identity. Along the way were also treated to glorious meals, political analysis, and some stirring reflections on the nature of becoming a global citizen. Salma Abdelnour is a wonderful host to a region that so many readers long to understand and connect with on a newer, more profoundly meaningful level.

D IANA A BU- J ABER , author of
Birds of Paradise and The Language of Baklava

Salma Abdelnour captures the flavors of Beirutthe familiar mixed with the exoticin her yearlong search to rediscover her culture, with recipes that will let you experience the sublime flavors of Lebanese cooking no matter where you are.

D AVID L EBOVITZ , author of The Sweet Life in Paris

This is a sweet, heartfelt book by a writer who finds herself both insider and outsider at the same time. Salma Abdelnour beautifully evokes the mood of the city she left as a child and the memories brought back by its wonderful food. A delicious read!

M OIRA H ODGSON , author of
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

A year in Beirut allows Salma Abdelnour to ponder everything from family and love to loneliness, home, and the strategy necessary to consume several extraordinary meals in one day. Frank, contemplative, and confiding, Jasmine and Fire makes for a delicious and absorbing investigation of a fascinating place.

M ICHELLE W ILDGEN , author of
Youre Not You and But Not for Long

Salma Abdelnour writes with grace, intelligence, and wit about what it means, in this day and age, to call a place home. Jasmine and Fire gives readers the lucky chance to follow this foodie writer on a raconteurs movable feast from Houston to New York to Beirut and back again. This is the perfect summer book for vacations virtual and real. Just be sure to pack a snackyou dont want to read this book hungry.

V ERONICA C HAMBERS , author of
The Joy of Doing Things Badly and Mamas Girl

A few names and identifying details in this book have been changed to protect peoples privacy, and various episodes have been edited down for brevity or clarity.

Copyright 2012 by Salma Abdelnour

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Broadway Paperbacks and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abdelnour, Salma.

Jasmine and fire : a bittersweet year in Beirut / Salma Abdelnour. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Abdelnour, Salma. 2. Abdelnour, SalmaHomes and hauntsLebanonBeirut. 3. Lebanese AmericansLebanonBeirutBiography. 4. Beirut (Lebanon)Biography. 5. Beirut (Lebanon)Description and travel. 6. Beirut (Lebanon)Social life and customs. 7. Lebanese AmericansNew York (State)New YorkBiography. 8. Moving, Household. 9. Transnationalism. 10. New York (N.Y.)Biography. I. Title.
DS89.B4A23 2011
956.9250453092dc23
[B] 2011050266

eISBN: 978-0-307-88595-1

COVER DESIGN BY LAURA KLYNSTRA
COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY ZUBIN SHROFF

v3.1

To Jamal, Mariana, and Samir

INTRODUCTION

You cant go back home to your family, back home to your childhood back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the timeback home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Thomas Wolfe, You Cant Go Home Again

Yes you can.

Or anyway, I did.

Just as everything in my New York life was miraculously clicking all at once, and for the first time everwork I loved, an apartment I adored, friends I cherished, a romance Id rekindledI decided to move back to Beirut. Messed-up, bombed-out, dysfunctional, infuriating, bewitching, baffling, beautiful Beirut. My home. The city I loved deeply, madly, more than any other, and could never manage to shake from my mind.

Id been longing for Beirut, in a profound and nagging way, ever since my family escaped when I was in elementary school, in 1981, at the height of the Lebanese civil war. In those years, bombs were ripping through the city day and night, wrecking buildings in our neighborhood, drastically disrupting and destroying lives all around. Id been living with my parents and little brother in an apartment in Beiruts bohemian Hamra neighborhood, a tangle of lively streets packed with coffee shops, bakeries, bars, eclectic stores, and every kind of restaurant imaginablesprawling Lebanese cafs, take-out shawarma stands, French bistros, Italian pizzerias, American burger joints, even a Swiss fondue place. Our condo building, full of aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived upstairs and downstairs and popped in regularly for spontaneous visits, was a short walk uphill from the beach and steps from a beautifully landscaped university campus. Just down the street was the private elementary school my brother, Samir, and I went to, the International College, a rigorous but relatively liberal establishment where many of our family friends, as well as expat families from around the world, also sent their kids.

Id been happy at school at the time and had a close crew of coed classmates I looked forward to seeing every day. But like all other schools in Beirut in those years, mine was constantly suspending classes for weeks in a row whenever the bombs fell too close by. On one day Ill never forget, violent skirmishes exploded right outside the school building, and everyone in the classrooms had to run to the hallways to crouch down, away from the windows, until we could be safely evacuated that evening. In those years, the night was usually scarier than the daytime; thats when opposing militias would shell each other from rooftops around the city and often dangerously close to our building. Id run and hide under my bed, terrified we were going to get blown up, too. No, no, dont worry, my parents would always say, although I realize now they were just as afraid as I was.

But despite the horrors of life in Lebanon during the war, I remember feeling mostly content, in the way children can be when they dont understand much, and when theyre surrounded by friends and family and all kinds of simple pleasures: a slumber party with cousins, a day at the beach during a cease-fire, a pistachio ice cream cone, a weekend playdate with a favorite classmate. The only evidence I have now that the good parts outweighed the bad, to my young mind anyway, is that I refused to leave Lebanon when my parents decided it was time to flee. At least I tried, as best I could, to say, Nope, were staying put.