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.
Key Figures
Diana Abu-Jaber
The author of The Language of Baklava, Diana Abu-Jaber is at the center of this very personal memoir. She is the American-born daughter of a Jordanian immigrant father and an American mother of German and Irish background, and this is the key to the dynamic of the book: She grew up in a liberal, progressive suburb of New York, but at home her father tried to maintain the morals and gender norms of Jordanian culture. As the first-person narrator, Diana describes these experiences in close detail, including her feelings, fears, and self-questioning. The book follows her life from early childhood through to her thirties, tracking her development from child to adult through her tumultuous teenage years. She also describes how she became a writer and how she chose the topics and themes that inform her books: family, home, roots, and identity. Her experience as an Arab American resonate with those of other immigrant backgrounds, as she says when talking about her novel Arabian Jazz: “[P]eople from many different cultural backgrounds—Italian, Chinese, Russian, African—tell me they come from a family just like the one in the book” (318).
Diana is a spirited, creative character from childhood, retorting, “English, you silly” at the TV presenter who makes fun of her Arabic surname (3), which clashes with her Northern European appearance. Her refusal to be pigeonholed and to conform to one or the other of her parents’ cultures is consistent throughout her life and creates the clashes with Bud that dominate her adolescence. Her struggle is not just to define herself in terms of Chosen and Unchosen Identities but also to determine The People, Places, and Feelings that Constitute Home for her. Her father and his relatives, Middle Eastern food and hospitality, and her experiences when visiting Jordan all pull her towards her Jordanian roots. However, the controls and limitations on her, driven by the traditions her father tries to maintain as she grows into a young woman, push her towards American culture. Her inability to settle down, stay married, or commit to motherhood are all products of this tussle: “I’d grown up in confinement and now there is no part of me that can bear anything like more confinement” (230). At the end of the memoir, she admits that she cannot identify her one, definite home but says, “I miss and long for every place, every country I have ever lived” (327).
As well as a memoir, The Language of Baklava is a cookbook. Diana’s father instilled his love of meals and cooking in her from an early age: Watching and helping her father cook and attending family picnics full of shish kabobs were among the highlights of her childhood. She writes about food poetically and associates it with key personal experiences and emotions.
Ghassan (Bud) Abu-Jaber
Ghassan Abu-Jaber, known by those close to him as Bud, is Diana’s Jordanian American father and is as central to her memoir as to her life. Her book is as much about Bud’s struggle to learn where he belongs as it is about hers. Their individual journeys run parallel, at times joining in harmony but often, as Diana grows up, clashing and twisting.
Bud comes from a large Bedouin family from Yehdoudeh in Jordan; he has seven brothers. The Abu-Jabers live in a fortress-like village in the desert, and their tribe is still ruled by the sheikh, or chief, who remains in the compound. The Abu-Jabers are known for being a family with “very little domestication, serenity, or respectability” (238), and Bud paints a lively and adventurous picture of his childhood through the stories he tells his own children. His mother was a Palestinian refugee, the educated daughter of a minister, who initially turned Bud’s father, Saleh, down. Bud has inherited his father’s traits: the love of company, cooking, feasting, and laughter.
Bud moved from Jordan to America as a young man and met his future wife in a café, where he charmed her with a grilled cheese sandwich, imposing himself between her and her date. His brave and passionate side impressed her, and he loves and dotes on her throughout his marriage. However, his love for his daughters is the fierce, protective love of traditional Bedouin culture, and his dreams for the future of his family are similarly traditional: “to buy a restaurant, for [his] girls to marry [their] second cousins and have babies, and for these babies to dance around his knees” (156). His stubborn, volatile, and inflexible character causes him (and Diana) some hardships in America.
Bud also suffers greatly from missing his homeland, and this is what drives him back to Jordan twice during the memoir, with a third attempt aborted at the last minute. Bud’s inability to adapt to the American way of life creates constant frustration, irritation, and restlessness. He and his brothers and their families carry on their traditions of huge family gatherings and feasts, including barbecuing in public view in their front garden. Bud is Muslim, having converted from Syrian Orthodox, but he maintains a belief in superstition and folklore despite having lived in America for a long time.
Bud is proud, and he rails against the low-paid, menial jobs he has to take in the US and the “donkey animal” type of boss he has to work for (60). He maintains his dream of owning a restaurant throughout the memoir, and this tenacity and ambition finally come to fruition in “Bud’s Family Fun Center.” There, he has to compromise. Instead of serving the Jordanian food he adores, he caters to the American craving for fast food. Yet he creates the atmosphere of a Jordanian coffeehouse through his instinctive generosity and hospitality. The energy needed for this kind of lifestyle is ultimately too much for him, as he is now in his fifties or sixties. However, the other aspects of his dream have been partially realized by his daughters having children, which finally gives him a reason to call America home.
Diana’s Mom
Diana’s mother features heavily in her memoir, though her name (Pat) is never revealed, except in the Acknowledgments. She is an important counterweight to the impulsive and exuberant personality of Diana’s father, Bud. Her own mother was of German descent, and her origins are Irish on her father’s side; Diana inherits her mother’s Northern European looks. Diana’s mother plays an essential role in her development, guiding her towards ways of dealing with her father’s impulsiveness and temper while nurturing Diana’s nascent love of books and writing.
Diana often describes her mother through juxtaposition with her father: “Where Bud is hot and worked up, she is cool and clear and waiting. Where Bud is talking all the time, she listens” (30). She is somewhat unknowable to Diana, which may be why Diana does not offer as clear a picture of her personality as of Bud’s: “There is a deep, private center to her” (31). Diana’s mother is calm and tolerant, accepting of Bud all the way through Diana’s childhood and early adult life: She uproots the family twice to follow him to Jordan, giving up her home and her job as a reading teacher. Bud respects and is somewhat in awe of her; when he buys Frankie’s house in Jordan for an extortionate price, he is afraid to tell her. She has a natural authority, in part due to her height, as shown when the nosy neighbors criticize their front-yard barbecue: “She is nearly six feet tall, with good level shoulders and a long neck and wavering Cassandra eyes” (81). Bud’s family comes to view her as the force that stops him from returning to Jordan, referring to her as “that American” (265).
The strong and steady support that Diana’s mother offers her husband is the same force that guides Diana on her path to becoming a writer: “My mother, the eternal American, knows that we are inescapably responsible for our lives and are the masters of our own futures” (268). Her own love of books inspires Diana’s love of literature, and when Diana goes to graduate school to study writing, her mother celebrates her dissertation with a gift: “I know that she is telling me—as she has in her subtle ways over the years—that I shall be a writer’ (231).
