52 pages • 1 hour read
Diana Abu-JaberThe Language of Baklava
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Raising an Arab Father in America”
Content Warning: This section contains references to racism, anti-gay bias, the Holocaust, and suicide; it also quotes people using an outdated term for Asian people.
Diana is six years old and in the audience of an American children’s TV show. The presenter struggles to pronounce the surname on her name-tag: He finds “Abu-Jaber” unexpected, given her green eyes and pale skin. She responds with laughter and cheeky retorts.
Diana introduces her father: Ghassan Saleh Abu-Jaber, known as “Bud” for his habit of greeting all Americans in this way. Diana describes him as “a sweet, clueless immigrant” and relates humorous anecdotes about his haggling habits and misunderstanding of what TV is (4). On Saturdays he cooks breakfast, and the family then visits one of Bud’s many brothers a traditional Jordanian meal.
On one particular day, Diana watches and helps her father prepare shish kabobs, anticipating the big family gathering to follow. The family drives to Lake Ontario for a picnic and sets up grills with all the uncles. Diana’s memory of that day focuses on Cousin Sami, recently arrived from Jordan, “twenty years old, sensitive and willowy as a deer” (6). He embroiders shawls and is called a “poet” by the laughing relatives. The young Diana adores Sami, trying to feed him the shish kabob, which “comes like an emergency” and must be eaten piping hot (8); the first recipe in this chapter is for “Eat It Now” Shish Kabob (10). The following Sunday, Diana is bored and, asking her mother about the “poet” Sami, is told he “wasn’t acting normal—with other men” (11). This confuses Diana.
Diana and her extended family visit “Professor-Uncle Hal” and “Writer-Auntie Rachel,” who live in a big country house with chickens and a barn full of fascinating odds and ends. There, the children find a bleating lamb and fall in love with it. Only Sami is reluctant to interact with it. The adults distract the children with ice cream before dinner—an unknown treat that Diana describes in detail. Afterwards, the lamb has disappeared, and the children are told it has gone to see its grandmother. There is chicken and stuffed squash for dinner instead of the expected shish kabob, but Bud removes the squash from Diana’s plate. Cousin Jess claims that the lamb was served for dinner, which strikes horror in Diana’s heart. As they leave the farm, Diana thinks she hears Sami crying.
Bud explains the mystery of the lamb’s disappearance 20 years later. The uncles, who left Jordan 10 or 15 years prior to that day on the farm, still believed that they could kill and butcher a lamb as it was done when they were children. Despite working as a team and being full of bravado, they made a mess of cutting the lamb’s throat, causing it to suffer and Sami (who was listening) to cry for home. The meat was spoiled and only served as stuffing for squash. Bud admits that “they were no longer who they thought they were” (19).
The recipe at the end of Chapter 1 is for “Peaceful Vegetarian Lentil Soup” (19).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Hot Lunch”
Diana remembers her father working several jobs and coming home late at night with pizza. On his days off he cooks and sings to the food of how much he misses his country: “[I]t’s like an ache in his blood” (20). Diana includes the recipe for “Nostalgic Chicken Livers” here (20).
Diana begins going to Saint Mary’s Catholic girls’ school, which is staffed by nuns who “mean business” (21). Most of the nuns are strict, harsh, and unforgiving, but Diana’s teacher, Sister Paul, is patient and kind. Diana takes a packed lunch to school, full of homemade chicken kabobs, falafel, or spinach pies, but she has to eat in the freezing cafeteria where she is shocked to witness the “congealed, mealy gray mass” that the girls who get their lunch at school eat (22).
Diana makes friends with a boy called Francis and spends recess playing with him. During one recess, the normally stern Sister John discovers that Diana’s father is from Jordan, “The Holy Land,” and rhapsodizes about this fact. Diana is moved to her class and becomes her pet and constant companion, enjoying a privileged status the other girls envy. Diana saves food from home for the nun, who eats it with gusto. Diana’s parents invite the nun home for dinner, where she proclaims Diana is “an angel from heaven” (26). Bud and the nun bond over his cooking, which she devours, and the spiritual virtues of Jordan. Their rapt discussion is observed by Diana, her little sisters, and their mother, who goes to bed disgruntled. The next day Diana takes a letter from her mother to the Mother Superior. Subsequently, Diana is moved back to her former class and Sister John keeps her distance. Diana returns to her games with Francis.
The last recipe in the chapter is “Bud’s Special Rice for Special Company” (29).
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
From the beginning, Diana Abu-Jaber highlights the key themes that have influenced her life and her identity. The first short anecdote about being in the TV audience illustrates the challenges Diana has faced regarding her multiethnic background and the dissonance caused by her appearance and her name, introducing the theme of Chosen and Unchosen Identities. These superficial clashes belie the deeper struggle that she will undergo as she grows up torn between two countries and two very different cultures: “I learn early: We are Arab at home and American in the streets” (5).
The most influential person in Diana’s life, her father, appears early in the first chapter, whose title is dedicated to him. Diana describes him with great affection and humor and details his love for his family and for food—the two essentials of his life. Also clear is her love and admiration for her extended family. Her various Uncles are differentiated by their jobs or their characters—“Diplomat-Uncle Jack” or “Crazy-Uncle Frankie”—and each one appears larger than life. These qualities contrast with Diana’s mother’s “smart and serious” demeanor (7), encapsulating the difference between the Arab and European American sides of the family. However, Diana is at this point unaware of any underlying tensions between the two societies in which she moves, and she views her father’s extended family gatherings as “miraculous things” (5).
One major cultural difference is that of attitudes towards being gay. In Diana’s eyes, Cousin Sami is a beautiful, delicate figure whose identity as a “poet” intrigues her. However, the uncles and their families treat the young man with barely concealed derision; they have taken him in only to “cure” him. His sensitive nature is especially affected by the killing of the lamb. The incident causes shame and discomfort among the adults, who find it difficult to look at Sami: “[T]he mere sight of him is like an accusation” (15). When Bud takes the squash from Diana’s plate, she has her first inkling that something is not right: “This is such an oddity, so counter to all I know of my father, that I don’t even have the words to comment on it” (15). The bungled killing of the lamb represents for Bud and his brothers a moment of reckoning—a reminder that they have to move forward from their lives in Jordan and into their new ones in America. This fact (and the emotional turmoil it implies) is at the core of the book.
Throughout these two first chapters, food is already the work’s primary motif. Its importance and the many roles it plays in the family’s existence emerge: Diana’s father’s nature and his presence in her life are inseparable from the kitchen and meals. Shared meals are at the core of Jordanian family life, and sharing food is an expression of love. Eating is a sensual and spiritual experience, taking the nun, Sister John, out of her dull existence via sensations that mix food and religious rapture. The recipes Diana includes are inextricably linked with the memories and emotions that make up her family history.
