Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War
The award-winning, powerful portrait of life in the Middle East, that weaves history, cuisine, and firsthand reporting into a fearless, intimate exploration of everyday survival.
In the fall of 2003, as Iraq descended into civil war, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad. For the next six years, she lived in Baghdad and Beirut, where she dodged bullets during sectarian street battles, chronicled the Arab world’s first peaceful revolution, and watched Hezbollah commandos invade her Beirut neighborhood. Throughout all of it, she broke bread with Sunnis and Shiites, warlords and refugees, matriarchs and mullahs. Day of Honey is her story of the hunger for food and friendship during wartime—a communion that feeds the soul as much as the body.
In lush, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo uses food and the rituals of eating to uncover a vibrant Middle East most Americans never see. We get to know people like Roaa, a young Kurdish woman whose world shrinks under occupation to her own kitchen walls; Abu Rifaat, a Baghdad book lover who spends his days eavesdropping in the ancient city’s legendary cafés; and the unforgettable Umm Hassane, Ciezadlo’s sardonic Lebanese mother-in-law, who teaches her to cook rare family recipes (included in a mouthwatering appendix of Middle Eastern comfort food). From dinner in downtown Beirut to underground book clubs in Baghdad, Day of Honey is a profound exploration of everyday survival—a moving testament to the power of love and generosity to transcend the misery of war.
In the fall of 2003, as Iraq descended into civil war, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad. For the next six years, she lived in Baghdad and Beirut, where she dodged bullets during sectarian street battles, chronicled the Arab world’s first peaceful revolution, and watched Hezbollah commandos invade her Beirut neighborhood. Throughout all of it, she broke bread with Sunnis and Shiites, warlords and refugees, matriarchs and mullahs. Day of Honey is her story of the hunger for food and friendship during wartime—a communion that feeds the soul as much as the body.
In lush, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo uses food and the rituals of eating to uncover a vibrant Middle East most Americans never see. We get to know people like Roaa, a young Kurdish woman whose world shrinks under occupation to her own kitchen walls; Abu Rifaat, a Baghdad book lover who spends his days eavesdropping in the ancient city’s legendary cafés; and the unforgettable Umm Hassane, Ciezadlo’s sardonic Lebanese mother-in-law, who teaches her to cook rare family recipes (included in a mouthwatering appendix of Middle Eastern comfort food). From dinner in downtown Beirut to underground book clubs in Baghdad, Day of Honey is a profound exploration of everyday survival—a moving testament to the power of love and generosity to transcend the misery of war.
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Community Reviews
The American Journalist Annia Ciezadlo’s 2011 memoir Day of Honey is about his relationship with her Lebanese American husband, Mohamad, a journalist, and his family. I find Day of Honey to be a readable book. I have read the book many times, and Ciezadlo provides a different perspective on the Iraq War from 2003 to 2004 and the 2006 Lebanon War. The Day of Honey provides recipes at the end of the book; Day of Honey was nominated for a 2012 James Beard Award for Best Writing and Literature. Ciezadlo believes that “food alone cannot make peace. It is part of a war, like everyone else. We can break bread with our neighbors one day and kill them the next. Food is just an excuse- an opportunity to get to know your neighbors. When you share it with others, it becomes something more.” Ciezadlo believes that cuisine provides a complex picture of the history of a place. Ciezadlo writes of studying a place's cuisine, “the boundaries defined by food and language often reflect the differences between people much more accurately than the lines arbitrarily on maps.” One of the points of the Day of Honey is how the start of warfare affects everyday life, and food is one of the ways that warfare and conflict most affect everyday life. One example of this phenomenon Ciezadlo gives in "Day of Honey" is that in the days leading up to the 2006 Lebanon War: “So many Berutis bought bread that day that the bakers’ syndicate stated to the local radio stations that people should stop hoarding bread.” I enjoyed reading Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo.
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