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Books In Brief Lebanese Aboard the Titanic On April 15, 1912, the world was shocked by the news that the superliner Titanic, the mightiest ship to ever set sail, had struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage and had sunk, with 1,500 passengers losing their lives in the icy waters of the "Sea of Darkness." Many of them were Lebanese emigrants, on their way to America, although media accounts and retrospectives have continued to gloss over the multi-ethnic nature of the "steerage" passengers. John G. Moses, himself the son of Lebanese immigrants, came across a list of Titanic passengers and recognized common Lebanese family names. His curiosity aroused, he began to research their story, turning to newspapers such as Al-Hoda, the pre-eminent Arabic journal of the early Lebanese immigrant period. He found that aboard ship there had been as many as 174 Lebanese, mostly young men and young families from Mt. Lebanon, on their way to seek new homes in the United States. They had largely been lured by posters and newspaper ads from England telling of third class passage to New York on the 11-story luxury vessel's maiden voyage, at a modest cost. "There was a mad scramble to book passage on the world's largest 'unsinkable' moving object," he notes. Moses traces the Lebanese passengers' departure from Beirut aboard a French liner, eventually reaching Cherbourg, the embarkation port for the Titanic. Expanding on the subject, Moses presents a background of Lebanese immigration to America, focusing on the years of exodus when Lebanon was still under the rule of Ottoman Turkey and the people of Mount Lebanon were gripped by "America fever." For many, that "fever" ended in disaster. Only a fourth of the Lebanese passengers - a total of 43 - survived, including 21 children and 15 women. Many Lebanese passengers were credited with heroic actions. Nicolla Nasrallah, a native of Zahle, was on his honeymoon. He helped save 30 children before he himself drowned, although his bride survived. (There were also four Lebanese weddings aboard ship, and many had brought drums and musical instruments.) The book contains several first-person accounts of the Lebanese who survived the sinking. Moses suggests that the fact that emergency orders to passengers were given in English, which most Lebanese passengers didn't understand, may have added to the desperate confusion aboard ship. Furthermore, he notes, most of the Lebanese traveled in third class cabins, and may not have received the same attention as first class passengers. Combining generalized details about life aboard the vessel with specifics from his research, Moses creates a re-enactment of the voyage and the calamity that ended it, as well as the story of the conception and construction of the Titanic itself, Moses concludes his short but fact-filled book with a list of Lebanese passengers and a select bibliography. The History and the Savor - Centuries of Vegetarian Delights Habeeb Salloum, whose colorful, historically pithy articles have frequently appeared in the pages of Al Jadid, has produced a cookbook based on Middle Eastern and North African cuisine that combines the best of this veteran travel and food writer's talents. In "Classic Vegetarian Cooking from the Middle East and North Africa," Salloum focuses on the kind of food he likes best. The opening paragraphs have the reader walking through the streets of Baghdad or Damascus, for instance, "engulfed in the smoke of barbecuing kebabs." And therein lies the rub, Salloum says in his introduction. In the establishments that cater to tourists and street traffic, it's always the meat dishes that are front and center, a carnivorous emphasis that holds true as well in Middle Eastern restaurants of the world. But the truth is that since the beginning of civilization, it has been savory, nourishing vegetarian dishes that have sustained and delighted the average, working-class diner throughout the region. With a total of 40,000 dishes attributed to the Arab kitchen by culinary historians, Salloum questions why most public eating places offer only a meager dozen dishes on their menusBall of them with meat. "With the exception of falafel and hummus, the vegetarianism of the toiling masses is rarely reflected on restaurant tables," he notes. Part of this is due to regional hospitality tradition that dictates that "a guest be fed the best the land has to offer, which means meat." It is also a centuries-old class issue, with the upper classes shunning vegetarian dishes as being beneath their status. But the vegetarian fare, developed over thousands of years in the Middle East, shaped and influenced by trade and invasion, as well as the availability of local produce and foodstuffs, has resulted in a rich cuisine based on staples like burghul, chickpeas, beans, lentils, and couscous, coupled with vegetables and seasoned with herbs and spices, from cumin to cilantro. Salloum collected more than 350 vegetarian recipes, ranging from Syrian and Lebanese salads to stuffed peppers from Jordan to eggplant dishes from Al-Andalus and Moroccan omelets, pomegranate drinks to pumpkin kibbeh. Salloum's collection of recipes are accompanied by the kind of informative, well-written background material that readers of his articles in Gourmet, Christian Science Monitor, Al Jadid and other publicationsBincluding a previous Interlink cookbook, "From the Lands of Figs and Olives," have come to expect. Although there are none of the full-page color photographs that have become common in recent cookbook publishing (with the exception of the cover), the reader isn't missing out on a single sensation. Salloum is a masterful historian and journalist and detailed chronicler of that greatest reward of the travelerBthe food one relishes along the way, as well as the vegetarian delights of his childhood. These short reviews appeared in Al Jadid, Vol. 6, No. 32 (Summer 2000) |
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