The Language of Baklava

Content Warning: The source material contains references to racism; it also quotes people using outdated terms for Roma and Asian people.

“I learn early: We are Arab at home and American in the streets.”

At the age of six and living in Syracuse, New York, Diana is already aware that she has two identities. Bud, her father, speaks English and swaggers when they are outside, but he sometimes slips into Arabic to haggle. When he is at home he cooks traditional food and carries her around on his shoulder while cooking, to her American mother’s distress. Reconciling her Chosen and Unchosen Identities will be a major part of Diana’s character arc.

“Then he gazes fondly at the frying liver as if it is singing sweetly back to him. But I don’t understand this yet. I was born into this snowy Syracuse world. I have no inkling of what other worlds are like.”

The portrait of Diana’s father continues. Bud sings of the one he loves while he is cooking, but he cannot explain to Diana whom exactly he misses. She is still too young to understand what he feels, as she has not been to Jordan yet.

“‘Diana’—she fans the air—‘is an angel from heaven.’

I have the uncanny sense of having left the room. Mom examines her with one eye a little tight, as if to say Are we talking about the same person? But Bud nods approvingly. ‘Oh ho ho ho,’ he says, and heaps Sister John’s plate with slices of garlicky dripping eggplant.”

Sister John has discovered that Diana’s father is from “the Holy Land” and is enraptured first by this news and then by his cooking. Invited over for dinner, she and Bud bond over the idea of Jordan and all that it contains. Diana is perplexed to suddenly become the nun’s “best friend,” having previously been just another wayward nuisance. This is one of many comedic scenes in the memoir.