The Language of Baklava

Table of Contents

PRAISE FOR DIANA ABU-JABER’S
The Language of Baklava

“Hauntingly beautiful. . . . Vivid characters abound. . . . [A] beguiling and wistful Arab-American memoir [that] offers a poignant glimpse of the immigrant’s 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.” —
Condé
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, love’—the 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 one’s tongue and reads again and again.” —
San
Diego News

“Riveting.” —Ms. Magazine

“Abu-Jaber’s memoir-with-recipes reads like the best of novels. Certainly ‘Bud’—her father—ranks 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 clichéd immigrant-family saga into a poignant and often funny coming-of-age story—and 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 Reichl’s
Tender at the Bone
you’ll 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 won’t 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 Foundation’s 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 stories—the memories and recollections of my father’s 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 immigrant’s story is compelling to us because it is so consciously undertaken. The immigrant compresses time and space—starting out in one country and then very deliberately starting again, a little later, in another. It’s a sort of fantasy—to have the chance to re-create yourself. But it’s 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 don’t 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

It’s a murky, primordial sort of memory: a cavelike place, bright flickering lights, watery, dim echoes, sudden splashes of sounds, and—hulking and prehistoric—TV 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!” I’m sitting in a television studio in a row full of cousins and sisters, not entirely sure how I got here—this was my aunt Peggy’s idea. She’d 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 widow’s 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 guy’s a scream! I can’t stop laughing. What an idiot! I’ve 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 we’re both laughing, but at two different jokes—which must happen quite a bit on children’s programming. He nods approvingly; they love me and my exotic entourage—later we’ll be flooded with candy, passes, and invitations to return to the show. But at the moment, as the Baron stands to leave, I realize I’m not quite done with him yet. I grab him by the back of his black rayon cape and announce on national television, “I’m hungry!”

I’m six and I’m 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 it’s good for me, that it’ll 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.

My father is a sweet, clueless immigrant—practically still a boy. He keeps getting fooled. He saw TV for the first time when his boat stopped in Italy en route to Ellis Island. It was flickering in a hotel lobby. On the screen he saw a lady in a pretty blue dress singing to a cat dressed in a tuxedo. “Look at that,” he marveled to his brother. “They’ve got a whole theater inside that box!” After he’d been in America a couple of months, a door-to-door salesman convinced him to spend three weeks of pay on a TV that didn’t have any working parts. He told Bud it needed some time to “warm up.” Bud hopefully switched it on and off for weeks before an American friend visited and explained that this TV would never be warm.