Product Description

From the acclaimed author of Crescent, called “radiant, wise, and passionate” by the Chicago Tribune, here is a vibrant, humorous memoir of growing up with a gregarious Jordanian father who loved to cook. Diana Abu-Jaber weaves the story of her life in upstate New York and in Jordan around vividly remembered meals: everything from Lake Ontario shish kabob cookouts with her Arab-American cousins to goat stew feasts under a Bedouin tent in the desert. These sensuously evoked meals in turn illuminate the two cultures of Diana’s childhood–American and Jordanian–and the
richness and difficulty of straddling both. They also bring her wonderfully eccentric family to life, most memorably her imperious American grandmother and her impractical, hotheaded, displaced immigrant father, who, like many an immigrant before him, cooked to remember the place he came from and to pass that connection on to his children.

As she does in her fiction, Diana draws us in with her exquisite insight and compassion, and with her amazing talent for describing food and the myriad pleasures and adventures associated with cooking and eating. Each chapter contains mouthwatering recipes for many of the dishes described, from her Middle Eastern grandmother’s Mad Genius Knaffea to her American grandmother’s Easy Roast Beef, to her aunt Aya’s Poetic Baklava. The Language of Baklava gives us the chance not only to grow up alongside Diana, but also to share meals with her every step of the way–unforgettable feasts that teach her, and us, as much about iden-tity, love, and family as they do about food.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94353 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-15
• Released on: 2005-03-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Abu-Jaber's father, who periodically uprooted his American family to transplant them back in Jordan, was always cooking. Wherever the family was, certain ingredients—sumac, cumin, lamb, pine nuts—reminded him of the wonderful Bedouin meals of his boyhood. He might be eating "the shadow of a memory," but at least he raised his daughter with an understanding of the importance of food: how you cook and eat, and how you feed your neighbors defines who you are. So Abu-Jaber (Arabian Jazz; Crescent) tells the charming stories of her upbringing in upstate New York—with occasional interludes in Jordan—wrapped around some recipes for beloved Arabic dishes. She includes classics like baklava and shish kebab, but it's the homier concoctions like bread salad, or the exotically named Magical Muhammara (a delectable-sounding spread) that really impress. While Abu-Jaber's emphasis is on Arabic food, her memoir touches on universal topics. For example, she tells of a girlhood dinner at a Chinese restaurant with her very American grandmother. Thanks to some comic misunderstandings, the waiter switched her grandmother's tame order for a more authentic feast. Listening to the grandmother rant about her food-obsessed son-in-law, and watching Abu-Jaber savoring her meal, the waiter nodded knowingly at Abu-Jaber. "So you come from cooking," he said, summing her up perfectly.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–A coming-of-age memoir about seeking identity through the foods of childhood. The daughter of a Jordanian father and an American mother, Abu-Jaber was raised in upstate New York but spent long periods of time in Jordan. Her Middle Eastern grandmother's knaffea and her American grandmother's roast beef helped her bridge both worlds. The author peppers her story with recipes for the foods that have formed her, and with recollections about her eccentric family. Her father carried her over his shoulder as he cooked onions for the meals that helped him remember his origins. Her American grandmother, always at odds with her son-in-law, cooked a huge ham when they first met, not realizing (or perhaps knowing all too well) that Muslims don't eat pork. Not all of the memories associated with food are pleasant. Abu-Jaber experienced her first dose of prejudice when her father, unaware of suburban traditions, grilled shish-kabob in the front yard. On the bus to school the next day, a friend informed her, …in this country nobody eats in the front yard….If your family doesn't know how to behave, my parents will have to find out about getting you out of the neighborhood. Perhaps her most memorable meal was in a Bedouin camp. The tribal women tried to entice her to stay with them rather than return to the U.S. as they scooped mensaf, a goat dish, into their mouths. Teens don't need to share Abu-Jaber's love of food to enjoy this story of family, love, and finding one's identity.–Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In her novels Arabian Jazz (1993) and crescent (2003), Abu-Jaber wrote luminous, heart-stopping fiction about Arab Americans. Here she chronicles her own growing up as the oldest daughter of an American mother and her exuberant Jordanian father, Bud, who, like his large crowd of siblings, aches for his birth county. "I sense a deep weirdness about my own existence in the world," she writes. "How could these two people have ever found each other?" Bud is a passionate cook, and as in Crescent, the intoxicating power of good food forms a sublime current through the story, with recipes anchoring each chapter. Abu-Jaber writes about the profound disorientation of both childhood and the immigrant experience with the same acute insight, poignancy, and expertly timed, self-deprecating comic narration. Recollections about family, fitting in, and the author's struggles to become a writer read like polished, self-contained short stories, both familiar and enchantingly exotic. But beneath the amusing, generous personal stories are "deeper, formless questions": Do people "have to decide who they are and where exactly their home is? How many lives are we allowed?" Abu-Jaber's sly, poetic precision will leave readers breathless. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

family and cooking
A delightful book, filled with interesting stories about a larger-than-life bunch of characters and enhanced by recipes for the foods they eat. Meet a family pulled between Jordan and America, experience their tumuluous activities and sample (at least in imagination) the wonderful foods they are always eating.

Please don't let it end...
Viscerally satisfying, moving, poetic...I can't get it out of my head...I wish it could have gone on and on and on....I want more....I want to cook with Ghasan...be fed rice from his hand...I want to hear more about how her Arab family loved Diana, and about her grown up love hinted at near the end of the book...how her sister's perceived the same world...I want to eat and sleep with Bedouin's in the desert by firelight...Please feed me more...

not for the squeamish
This is a miserable book. A few minutes in, it has a description of meat running with blood, then shortly later a detailed description of a botched, brutal slaughter of a baby lamb. That's when I tossed the book into the rubbish pile. I'd give it negative stars if that were possible, it certainly doesn't deserve even one star.