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Praise for The Language of Baklava
"In The Language of Baklava, novelist 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 (with recipes!), which follows her "Bedouin" family from New York to Jordan and back."
Elle
"Truly charming. . . . A fascinating memoir of confused exile, great food, and home truths."
O, The Oprah Magazine
"Wonderful, touching and funny.... Honest and precise.... Abu-Jaber explores [her cultural] duality with a generous spirit and clear-eyed vision.... A lush and lyrical memoir."
The Miami Herald
"Incredibly powerful... The world described is so strange and sumptuous, the characters so large and comedic, and the descriptions of the food so enveloping and mouthwatering that you want to climb into this world and make it your own."
The Oregonian
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The 2008 North Country Reads Selection:
About The Language of Baklava
by Diana Abu-Jaber
 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 in some way 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 we each have 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 all the dear ones 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.
Diana Abu-Jaber
More Reviews
"If you look for memoirs in the bookstore, you'll usually find them classified under nonfiction. But who-other than obsessive diary-keepers or politicians with secretaries-can accurately reconstruct conversations or events from 20 or 30 years ago? Perhaps successful memoirists just have phenomenal memories. But more likely they have the gift to turn their life experiences into narrative that feels so deeply, resoundingly true that readers are willing to believe every word. That's certainly the case for Diana Abu-Jaber's new memoir, The Language of Baklava.
Abu-Jaber, who teaches creative writing at Portland State University, has woven her bicultural upbringing into a vivid tale starring her Jordanian immigrant father, Bud. A tender, mercurial family despot, Bud recreated his homeland in his upstate New York kitchen, cooking an endless array of dishes like lamb shanks in buttermilk, okra braised with garlic, and chicken with pine nuts and sumac. Her schoolteacher mother, an American of Irish-German heritage, provides a rooted balance to Dad's flamboyance, and an endless cast of Jordanian relatives adds an almost surreal note to this absorbing tale of a first-generation American girlhood.
In The Language of Baklava ... the author has found a way to blend the filigreed, dreamy storytelling of the Middle East and the razor-sharp Western-world detail that makes a story vivid and memorable. The reader will feast."
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
"In her much-acclaimed second novel, Crescent, Diana Abu-Jaber tempted the readers with flavors and fragrances of Middle Eastern food. Her heroine worked as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant in Los Angeles, preparing meals for patrons who formed a social support network around her.
Anyone who reads her third book, a memoir, will probably conclude that this wasn't entirely a coincidence. In The Language of Baklava, Abu-Jaber reveals the source of her culinary wisdom: a father who is an avid cook and an extended family obsessed with food and celebrations.
Feasts and celebrations play a huge role, but this exquisite memoir offers much more to the discerning reader. With humor and grace, the author explores timeless topics of love, cultural adjustments and what being rootless means.
The author takes us on an insightful journey through many emotional and physical landscapes, a journey we ought not to miss. She even offers us recipes at the end of each chapter.
We echo Abu-Jaber's sentiment when she says, "Why must there be only one home! ... The fruits and vegetables, the dishes and the music and the light and the trees of all these places have grown into me, drawing me away. And so I go. Into the world, away."
Seattle Times
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