When I first flipped through this book, I noticed the many recipes accompanying each chapter. I hoped this wasn’t some hokey gimmick and as I read this book I wasn’t disappointed. Diana Abu-Jaber grew up with a father passionate about most everything, but particularly about food. Living in upstate New York, surrounded by her extended American and Arab family, she describes the various meals shared with them. What’s impressive about Abu-Jaber’s writing is her ability to inhabit the ages of which she writes. What I mean is that when she writes of her life at age 8, it’s not her looking back and reflecting, you really feel how she saw the world at age 8. It’s an amazing way of writing.

She describes being torn between two cultures with spare beauty:

I have recently come to understand something about myself, which is that I am—as my uncle Hilal might say—a hopeless case. Even if I had somehow, down the line, brought myself to have babies and to stay in my hometown in a house with an easy, wide-hipped porch, none of that would have made any difference to the sleepless part of me. Like a second, invisible body, I sit up out of my sleep at night, wander across the room, stop beside a darkened window, and dream my way through th eglass. It is more than looking: the elements of darkness and distance release my mind liek a dash of sugar on the surface of hot water. In the distances between stars, it seems there is no flavor or scent (although I think I might detect the purple black glisten of eggplant skin within the night air, the slyest reminder of how the forms of life and the physical world are infinite and everywhere). Come back, I want to say to my second self, there is tea and mint here, there is sugar, there is dark bread and oil. I must have these things near me: children, hometown, fresh bread, long conversations, animals; I must bring them very near. The second self draws close, like a wild bird, easy to startle away: It owns nothing, and it wants nothing, only to see, to taste, and to describe. It is the wilderness of the interior, the ungoverned consciousness of writing.

We grow into the curve of what we know–for me, that was my family’s rootlessness, and my father’s control and scrutiny–movement and confinement. I am as surely a Bedouin as anyone who has traveled in a desert caravan. A reluctant Bedouin—I miss and long for every place, every country, I have ever lived—and frequently even the places my friends and family have lived and talked about as well—and I never want to leave any of these places. I want to cry out to protest: Why must there be only one home! Surely there is no one as bad, as heartbroken, as hopeless at saying good-bye, as I am. 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.

And the recipes usually accompany the chapter. For example, she relates a story from her childhood, when her father and his brothers buy a lamb to make fresh grilled meat. They were remembering their childhoods in Jordan and hoping nothing had changed. They wanted to forget the grocery stores of America with their processed and packaged food. Unfortunately, they have aged and changed, and slaughtering a lamb does not come as easily anymore. At the end of the story, she provides a recipe for ‘Peaceful Vegetarian Lentil Soup’. Frankly, most of the recipes she includes sound delicious and seem easy to make.

What I liked best about this book is it’s insight into immigrant culture. I don’t know much about Jordan or its culture. And the Abu-Jabers move there for a year when Diana was a young girl. She returned for a year to write a novel whem she was older. Eating and cooking is such an integral part of the culture. When she returns to Jordan as an adult, she must visit and eat at each of her relatives’ houses and they all ask her if their’s is the best.

Most of all this book is about her coming to terms with her father who never comfortably becomes an American. He constantly wants to return to the Jordan of his youth, but becomes disillusioned each time he returns. It’s not until she is much older that he realizes that the Jordan of his youth only exists in his mind anymore. Time and places change us and it is hard to go back. But one thing she learns from her father is the language of food.