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Books In Brief

By Judith Gabriel

ART OF THE COOKBOOK

Alice's Kitchen, My Grandmother Dalal & Mother Alice's Traditional Lebanese Cooking, Linda Dalal Sawaya, Linda Sawaya Design, Portland, OR 1997, 216 pp.

This earthy, almost fragrant book is "self-published" in the same way that homemade bread is a "self-rising" mound of leavened flour. When you smell it baking, you can only be grateful someone did the kneading. (And the writing.) And then hope they give you a slice while it's still hot. Especially if it's khoobz marouq.

Linda Dalal Sawaya, a cook, painter, children's book illustrator, photographer and graphic designer who put the recipe collection together, has had her work published on the covers of several books, including "Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American Feminists," and included in the new anthology by Naomi Shihab Nye, "The Space Between Our Footsteps."

The youngest of five daughters of Lebanese immigrants, she is also a writer, and the pages of this very special cookbook contain not only recipes, but evocative descriptions of how her grandmother, Dalal, prepared the traditional dishes back in her Lebanese mountain village, and how her mother, Alice, followed the time-tested formulas in her American kitchen, making adjustments that Sawaya passes on. Sections on ingredients, the use of spices and fragrant waters, sample menus and helpful instructions make this a highly useful reference, one that belongs in a handy nook of anyone's kitchen.

A truly literary picture emerges of such commonplace dishes as Lebanese pickles and kibbeh, which one would expect to find in such a setting. What makes the entries stand out is the context of descriptive nostalgia and culinary refinement that frames them.

Beginning as a personal collection that she shared with friends, the prototype cookbook was given new life when Aramco World Magazine ran eight pages of her recipes and featured Sawaya and her mother, Alice, on the cover. That led to a second edition, and now a third edition.

Now residing in Oregon, Sawaya writes that the book is her gesture to honor and preserve her Lebanese culture for herself and others who appreciate the traditions of "living gently on the earth....Sharing and preparing food with love." A portion of the proceeds of the sales of "Alice's Kitchen" will be donated to "benefit the people of Lebanon."

To purchase this book, please contact Linda Sawaya Design, P.O. Box 91024, Portland, OR 97291, e-mail sawaya@teleport.com, Website: http://www.teleport.com/~sawaya.

YEAR OF THE NAKBA

On The Hills of God, Ibrahim Fawal, Black Belt Press, Montgomery, AL 1998, 444 pp.,$27.95

A book for anyone who read fictionalized historical sagas like "Exodus" and found certain chapters missing from the whole story, this first novel by Ibrahim Fawal traces one Palestinian family and its neighbors from the last days of pre-1948 Palestine to the mass expulsions in the early months of Israel's statehood.

"On the Hills of God," which received the 1998 Josephine Miles Award from Pen Oakland, pivots on the experiences of a 17-year-old youth, the scion of a comfortable physician's family, who processes the events unfolding around him with his peers and takes in the political analysis and commentary of the elders around him, caught up in varying degrees of hopes, disbelief, struggle and loss.

"In Palestine's last summer of happiness," begins the first chapter of the book, which covers the events of that one crucial year in history. And there is no happy ending, concluding only with the emblematic promise to return. The inhabitants of the typical but fictional village of "Ardallah" come to life with believable idiosyncracies and multilayered personal conflicts, including those they have with each other, like people in any community. Yousif Safi is, by birth, Christian. He has two buddies: one Muslim, one Jewish. The interaction among the three village friends reflects how the events of 1948 alter the coexistence of various groups, as well as their personal lives, as they are caught in the inexorable sequence of events that will change forever the lay of the land, the balance of the village, and the innocence of youth.

Interwoven with a budding love interestBone that challenges the traditional status-quoBthe geopolitical nightmare unfolds against a background of increasingly complicated daily life. The nuances of actual events (the breaking news of the day as well as previous history) are disseminated through conversations, gossip, radio broadcasts, neighborhood discussions, and the often fatal and tragic incidents that explode from a world over which the characters no longer have any control, trampling the familiar rhythms of ordinary peoples' lives.

The book is highly cinematic, which comes as no surprise. Fawal was born in Ramallah, Palestine, received a master's degree in film from UCLA, and teaches film and literature at the University of Alabama. He is also completing his doctoral studies at Oxford University in England, examining Arab culture through the cinema of Youssef Chahine. Fawal himself was first assistant director on "Lawrence of Arabia," working with director David Lean.

BOSNIAN POET RECORDS WAR

Sarajevo Blues, Semezdin Mehmedinovi , Translated by Ammiel Alcalay, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1998, 122 pp.

Considered to be the best writing to emerge from war-torn Bosnia, "Sarajevo Blues" by Semezdin Mehmedinovi has been translated into English by Ammiel Alcalay, and is receiving wide acclaim as collection of poems, prose vignettes and "micro-essays" that capture the horrors of battle and the experiences of the Bosnian people as the world around them collapses.

Mehmedinovi was born in 1960 near the city of Tuzla, moving to Sarajevo where he earned a degree in comparative literature and became active in the city's lively cultural and counter-cultural scene. He remained in the besieged city throughout the siege by Serbian nationalists, as an editor of the magazine "Phantom of Liberty." Originally published in 1992, "Sarajevo Blues" became a forum for Bosnia writers and translators under siege or living in exile.

Besides writing four books and editing journals, he co-wrote and co-directed of "Mizaldo," one of the first Bosnian films shot during the war, which won the first prize at the Mediterranean Festival in Rome in 1995. He and his wife and their child left Bosnia and came to the U.S. as political refugees in 1996.

Included in this edition of "Sarajevo Blues" is an introduction by translator Ammiel Alcalay, who was awarded a fellowship for his work by the National Endowment of the Arts, and a grant by PSC-CUNY. Alcalay considers much of the translating he did in Bosnia during and after the war to be a form of literary activism. "Rather than a passive conduit, the translator is often an alchemist and healer of wounds in the sense conjured up by Wilson Harris when he speaks of the pain engendered by >phantom limbs,' the severed traces of which we must dig very deep to find."

In an interview with the poet, also included in the book, Alcalay offers that as a translator, he had a hard time finding a space for Bosnian culture until the war broke out. "The creation of a receptive space for marginalized literatures or languages can occur through a variety of means. Unfortunately, in far too many instances war and conflict become the primary means through which an unperturbed or disinterested audience connects to places far removed from the orbit of their ordinary aesthetic, formal, existential or political concerns."

In several short prose pieces, the award-winning Mehmedinovi describes the people of Sarajevo, such as Effendi Spahi, the imam of Imam Bey's Mosque, who had three children and a grandchild killed by shells. He writes: "Here's what I think: there are neither major nor minor tragedies. Tragedies exist. Some can be described. There are others for which every heart is too small. Those kind cannot fit in the heart." Elsewhere: "Islam: Faith in expansion, but without imposition; it has no missionaries. An I that doesn't pronounce itself, while leaving its abundant, human traces everywhere. And that is the trait of great people."

He describes scenes of war: "Shells are constructed so shrapnel can't be cleaned out of the flesh, that's why there are so many amputations. Their power is a great stimulant to the soldier, that corpse in a trenchcoat, to his military autism." And in a piece entitled "White Death," he writes, "When snow falls on Sarajevo, when pines crackle with frost, the bones underground will be warmer than us. People will freeze to death: a winter without fire is coming, a summer without sun has past."

In his almost journalistic detachment, Mehmedinovi paints a picture that is so well-rendered one can bear to read what would otherwise be too painfulBbut his poetic reportage is never cold. "Sarajevo Blues was, after all, written by a poet who lived at the center of the city's pulse, and there is constant evidence in his work that he experienced and recorded the terrible events with his heart fully engaged.

These articles appeared in Al Jadid, Vol. 4, No. 25 (Fall 1998)

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