9781416583943

Now in paperback, the powerful memoir that The New York Times described as â€œfilled with adrenalized scenes&Ciezadlo is the kind of thinker who listens as well as she writes.&Her sentences make a smart, wired-up sound on the page. Readers will be lucky to find her.â€In the fall of 2003, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad. Over the next six years, she broke bread with Shiites and Sunnis, warlords and refugees, matriarchs and mullahs. Day of Honey is her story of love, war, and the hunger for food and friendship in times of conflict. Living in occupied Baghdad, Ciezadlo longs for normal married life. She finds it in Beirut, her husbandâ€™s hometown, a city slowly recovering from years of civil war. But just as the young couple settles in to a new home, the bloodshed they escaped in Iraq spreads to Lebanon and reawakens the terrible specter of sectarian violence. In lucid, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo uses food and the rituals of eating to uncover a vibrant Middle East that most Americans never see. From secret Baghdad book clubs to home cooking with her sardonic Lebanese mother-in-law, Ciezadlo illuminates the human cost of war and takes us into the heart of the modern Middle East at a historic moment when hope and fear collide. Day of Honey is a profound exploration of everyday survivala moving testament to the power of love and generosity to transcend the misery of war.

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Annia Ciezadlo has written about culture, politics, and the Middle East for The New Republic, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Time, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. Annia lives with her husband in New York.

New York	p. 1
Introduction The Siege	p. 3
The Quiet Assassin	p. 11
Afghanistanism	p. 26
Bride of the World	p. 33
Mjadara	p. 46
Honeymoon in Baghdad	p. 53
The Benefits of Civilization	p. 55
"Iraq Has No Cuisine"	p. 62
Becoming Human	p. 69
The Movement of Democratic Lovers	p. 74
The Sumer Land	p. 84
The Flavor of Freedom	p. 90
Iftar Alone	p. 100
Chicken Soup for the Iraqi Soul	p. 105
The Devil's Hijab	p. 122
The Free One	p. 132
Even a Strong Person Can Ask for Peace	p. 150
Beírut	p. 167
Republic of Foul	p. 169
The Green Revolution	p. 184
Death in Beirut	p. 194
The War of the Kitchen	p. 209
The Operation	p. 229
Eat, Tray, War	p. 239
Fear and Shopping	p. 241
Mighli	p. 253
Cooking with Umm Hassane	p. 260
Supper of Stones	p. 270
God, Nasrallah, and the Suburbs	p. 277
There Are No Shiites in This Neighborhood	p. 279
My Previous Experience in Warfare	p. 294
Epilogue	p. 315
Acknowledgments	p. 322
Author's Note	p. 328
Recipes	p. 329
Glossary	p. 359
Select Bibliography	p. 365
Index	p. 369
Reading Group Guide and Author Q&A	p. 385
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Introduction

The Siege

HE WAS ONE of an endangered species: among the few white, native-born cab drivers left in New York. Meaty, middle-aged, face like a potato. A Donegal tweed driving cap. He pulled up beside me, drew down the window, and growled out of the corner of his mouth: “You wanna ride?”

We rode in silence until we reached Atlantic Avenue. “You see this street?” he said, waving a massive hand at the windshield. “They’re all Arabs on this street.”

He was right, more or less. The conquest began in the late 1800s, as the Ottoman Empire waned and the Mediterranean silk trade collapsed. Between 1899 and 1932, a little over 100,000 “Syrians”—in those days, a catchall term for practically anyone from the Levant, the French name for the eastern Mediterranean—emigrated to the New World. Many of them settled in New York. In 1933, the Arab-American newspaper Syrian World described Atlantic Avenue, with gently sarcastic pride, as “the principal habitat of the species Syrianica.”

By 1998, the Atlantic Avenue strip was such a symbol of Arab-American identity that 20th Century Fox re-created it for a movie called The Siege. In the movie, Arab terrorists carry out a series of bombings in New York City, and the government imposes martial law and rounds up all the Arabs, guilty and innocent alike, into detention camps.

“These Arabs, yeah,” the cabbie continued. “They come over here, they try to act normal. Try to act like you and me. Like they’re fitting in, ya know?”

He barked out a laugh. “Turns out they’re al-Qaeda.”

It was a relief when people said it openly. I could talk to this guy. He was an ethnic American, and he assumed I was one too. He was right: I’m a Polish-Greek-Scotch-Irish mutt from working-class Chicago. A product of stockyards and steel mills and secretarial schools. I could see where he was coming from. I came from there myself.

But then again: the man I loved was named for Islam’s prophet. We had been seeing each other for about five months. I had thought of him as just another ethnic American, but now it was September 13, 2001, and suddenly nobody else seemed to see it that way. On September 11, the landlady had knocked on his door just before midnight. Mrs. Scanlon was an immigrant herself, from Ireland, and no doubt with terrorism-related memories of her own. In a high and quavering voice, she asked, “Mohamad, are you an Arab?”

I had been thinking about The Siege quite a bit since then.

When 20th Century Fox started filming The Siege in the late 1990s, I had just moved to the heavily Polish Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. Apparently the real Atlantic Avenue didn’t have enough brownstones to look like New York on film, so overnight, Hollywood set designers transformed Greenpoint’s Little Warsaw into a cinematic version of the Arab street. Awnings that had once read Obiady Polski (Polish Dinners) now surged with Arabic script. Tanks rolled past under klieg lights. Wandering down the imitation Atlantic Avenue, it was easy to imagine that all of our carefully constructed ethnic identities were nothing but Hollywood sets, as specious a notion as the species Syrianica, a scaffolding you could put up or tear down in a couple of hours.

The city had papered Greenpoint’s streetlights with flyers forbidding people to park because of Martial Law, the movie’s working title; as it happened, many Greenpointers had fled Poland in the early 1980s, when it was under actual Communist martial law. Middle-aged Polish ÉmigrÉs would stop and glower at the Hollywood diktats with gloomy satisfaction: You see? I told you it would happen here too.