The Language Of Baklava: A Memoir (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
I love to read. I love to cook. I love to eat good, well prepared food. I love to read about people who cook.But the author apparently isn't a person who cooks, at least not beyond helping grandma or auntie make the occasional pastry. She never does the cooking. It's done for her, or she's invited to a meal cooked by someone else.The recipes are delicious, and a person with some cooking experience should be able to reproduce them--IF you can find the special ingredients. The author glibly stars things like sumac and zaartar and special cheeses and shreddable phyllo dough and says "buy in specialty shop." Meaning, I don't know--New York City? Chicago? Or, if you live where I do, London or Madrid or Barcelona, at the very least. If you don't live in a large city with a sizeable Arabic culture population, you'd better learn to make your own dough, and forget about anything containing other specialty stuff.The memoir itself claims to look back with longing on a happy childhood between two cultures--but it apparently wasn't. There's a thread of bitter anger that runs throughout the writing like grit in a cup of steaming black coffee. Some of the anecdotes read an awful lot like payback. She whines constantly...about being forced to leave her friends and go to Jordan, then being forced to return to the US, then being forced to leave her neighbourhood and move to the country, and then --how dare they!--her parents sell the rambling old house she hated to move to, and move somewhere else. At first I thought she disliked her bland American relatives and their bland American food--her portrait of her maternal grandmother is pretty dam' scathing, and her mother is portrayed as a non-person who just goes along with whatever her husband dictates. Ah, says I, she identifies more strongly with her Jordanian roots? No. She whines about those too. Her father is portrayed as a hapless goofball who drifts from one unskilled job to another, her uncles are shown as manipulative, predatory thieves who think nothing of diddling her dad out of his savings, while the Lebanese branch of the family are shown as filthy rich and privileged, but not the kind who share the wealth...yeah. She even manages to criticise her friends. The American ones eat "strange" foods like eggnog, and she keeps on about how her Jordanian childhood friends weren't very clean. Nice.I guess the authoress' problem is--she doesn't like herself. No matter where she is, or what she's doing, she wants to be somewhere else doing something else, with other people. I myself was a misfit in the place and among the people where I was raised. I myself skipped my junior year of highschool to go to college early. I myself chose to leave my birthplace and make a new home. And yes, there was some culture shock, but I knew early on that we make most of our own happiness or lack thereof by our choices. The authoress of this memoir seems to have been expecting someone, something, someWHERE to make her happy, without realising that she doesn't come off as the most loveable person in the world, either. I do intend to prepare some of the recipes. I do not intend to slog through the memoir again.
Diana Abu-Jaber's narrative, The Language of Baklava, is a love affair with Jordanian food, and the story of her extended Jordanian family's roots in the desert tents of Jordan and now re-settled in upstate New York. It's a mash up of American and Arabic memories as Diana's fertile imagination ranges between the extremes of a father who can't quite settle down in either country and her American born mother who's patient, long-legged beauty anchors the family. While her father's frenetic storytelling fuels Abu-Jaber's writing ("you know, it's that crazy Abu-Jaber way"), it's her mother's paced, constancy that underlies the narrative.Abu-Jaber writes of her family's foods with intense, mermerized abandon. She's lost in the taste memory of Bedouin Mensaf Leben and reassured with the wonder of Mrs. Manarelli's Civilized Panna Cotta. Each recipe calls up a fine symphony of memories and an even better story. Preparing food, feeding friends and loved ones is the essence of the work, the purest form of love that supersedes all else and keeps the family, and their culture intact.There are wonderful contrasts. The picnics in the snow of New York's winters and sweaty, dirty running running in Jordan. The goat stew feast under a Bedouin tent in the desert and the confused butchering of Lambie one afternoon at Uncle Hal's farm in Ontario Orchards. Marvelous contrasts like friends for life and friends for a scooter, when Diana's father Bud takes them all back to Jordan for two years. In Madama Butterfly, her risque American grandmother takes Diana to the opera and introduces her to Oriental Food where the ancient rivalries between China and Japan battle in Diana's head and take away her appetite. The grown up daughter who sees her father for what he is, and loves him and his family with all their crazy dreams.The Language of Baklava was a 2005 finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Creative Non-Fiction. I'm pleased to know that this talented author teaches at Portland State University, in Portland, Oregon and hope to make her acquaintance some day. -Ashland Mystery
What do You think about The Language Of Baklava: A Memoir (2005)?
I just wrote a review of a book in which an extraordinary story was written in a way that made it less than completely involving. This book happily does the opposite! Ms. Abu-Jaber makes the ordinary events of her childhood extraordinary through her warm and shining writing and her empathy with her family member characters. And of course not all of her childhood is ordinary! With an American mother and Jordanian immigrant father, & a large extended family of her dad's relatives surrounding her, things are a little different even before dad uproots the family & has them all living in Jordan for a while. I can't wait to try some of the recipes, tho there are others that sound much too complicated! I've always wished I could be part of a family in which someone has the time for this kind of "all-day cooking"! Oh, especially baklava, one of my goals for this year is to learn to make baklava! Anyway - the writer's father is a character you'll remember for a long time, & overall this is a funny, sweet & involving portrait of a girl growing up in two cultures.
—Marigold
I finished Diana Abu-Jaber's memoir The Language of Baklava, which I checked out from the library, and I may have to get a copy of this book. It's a wonderfully written memoir filled with memories and food recipes, much of which hailing from Abu-Jaber's Jordanian heritage from her father's side, but some others that are pulled from other places.Much like Kim Sunée's Trail of Crumbs, which is another memoir mixed with recipes, Diana Abu-Jaber's recollections place a major focal point on the food, which is sensuously described. The recipes seem more attainable, and there are a few that are vegetarian-friendly. The people Abu-Jaber describes, especially her father, are shown lovingly, and I'm particularly fond of her Auntie Aya, the only daughter among many sons. The appearances she makes in Abu-Jaber's book are memorable--especially the conversation she has while making sweets with a teenage Diana on page 186 that I've included in my favourite quotes on my Goodreads profile: "Marry, don't marry," Auntie Aya says as we unfold layers of dough to make an apple strudel. 'Just don't have your babies unless it's absolutely necessary." "How do I know if it's necessary?" She stops and stares ahead, her hands gloved in flour. "Ask yourself, Do I want a baby or do I want to make a cake? The answer will come to you like bells ringing." She flickers her fingers in the air by her ear. "For me, almost always, the answer was cake."Seriously, best reasoning ever.
—doreen
I loved this book. It was both hilarious and moving. It made me laugh and cry and better understand feelings of homesickness, loss, love, and all sorts of other touchy-feely things. Abu-Jaber draws her characters vividly and paints a very full and rich characterization of her childhood and young-adulthood. The only thing is that I felt that it was almost a little too full and rich. Is that possible? Finishing this book make me feel almost like I had finished a Thanksgiving dinner where I overate too many delicious things. It all tasted great, but then you feel like you might burst. My mind was so full of her descriptions of food, emotions, places, people and all of their richness and romanticism that it was a little overwhelming, honestly. But it definitely was an engrossing, witty, and insightful read. I think I likely will be a big Abu-Jaber fan and hope to read her other books.
—Spauly
