Peace by Chocolate
Excerpt was originally published in Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada copyright © 2020 by Jon Tattrie. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions.
Within weeks of their arrival in Antigonish, every Hadhad seemed focused on the future. Batoul, Ahmad, and Taghrid had settled into school. Tareq was investigating what he needed to do to complete medical school so he could become a doctor. Shahnaz woke early to clean the kitchen, make breakfast, and prepare the younger kids for their school day. Then she cleaned, cooked, and messaged her daughters in Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. The only exception was Isam. What would a middle-aged man with a jumble of skills and a passion for chocolate do when he had to start over in a strange country? Isam, who had always trusted his inner guide, suddenly felt as though he was lost in a dark wood, unsure of his next step.
He woke at strange times, in unexpected darkness or light, as his body kept the ancient rhythms of Damascus. He had been the family’s breadwinner his entire adult life and he was hungry for work. But what could he do in this small town? It already had all the plumbers and electricians it needed. Besides, he couldn’t make English words do what he wanted them to do. He spoke only to his family.
A few times a week, Isam walked into town. As he crossed the train tracks and passed the tractor store, he met people. He perked up, smiling, nodding, and exchanging greetings. He passed the Ford dealership and the tennis courts buried in crisp snow. A Canadian flag fluttered in front of the courthouse, a small, handsome wood building with four Ionic columns. Isam stepped carefully on the salted sidewalk. He went into the library. Local people, many of them retired, had volunteered to tutor the newcomers in English. Isam worked hard to express himself in the new language.
But as January turned into February, Shahnaz saw that her husband was still struggling. In the blank white snow of Canada, he saw no signs of his former self. When she had met him, he was a young chocolatier with a big dream. Now he was an older man with ruined dreams. She knew they must start a new chocolate company. Tareq was learning how hard it would be to retrain himself as a Canadian doctor. The country was full of taxi drivers who were engineers and lawyers in their home countries. But chocolate tastes sweet on all tongues. Shahnaz had seen the potential for chocolate from the moment Tareq first talked about emigrating to Canada.
“We can rebuild — and quicker than before, better than before,” she told her husband. “Maybe you can meet Justin Trudeau.” Isam laughed at the idea of meeting the prime minister over chocolate. “You never know where this will lead us,” Shahnaz insisted. “This will be big.”
Winter buried the land outside her window. She knew the hard snow would melt. The spring sun would turn it into nurturing water and the seeds would sprout.
Isam bought the ingredients he would need to make chocolate. When the children were out at school, he found a bowl in the kitchen and mixed the cocoa, sugar, and milk. He poured water into a large pot and brought it to a boil. He slid the bowl on top of the bubbling water and slowly stirred the paste until it was brown and smooth. He carefully removed the bowl from the stove and paused, looking for something that would serve as a mould. His eyes rested on an ice-cube tray. He set the bowl down, cleaned the tray, and placed it by the stove. He lifted the bowl again and poured out the rich mix of chocolate. He added pistachios and hazelnuts and covered them with warm chocolate. He carefully cleaned excess chocolate from the tray and slid it into the fridge. He sat down and waited for three hours, listening to Syrian music. He pulled the trays from the fridge and popped out the chocolates. He sampled one with a smile. When Frank stopped by, Isam offered him a chocolate.
Frank had been preparing for this encounter for a long time, though he never knew it. As he approached the middle years of his own life and his children grew up, he began to think about what truly counted. He devoted his professional life to helping companies, governments, and organizations figure out how to improve and achieve their goals. He specialized in helping people understand themselves and how they thought, so that they could be effective in all aspects of their lives. “We want to help you understand you better than anybody else in the world,” he would say. Frank found James Hollis’s book The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife particularly helpful as he navigated this stage.
Since the Hadhads arrived in Nova Scotia, Frank had been trying to engage Isam, catching his eye, speaking in simple English. Frank even learned a few Arabic phrases. Isam used his broken English, his translator son, and his phone to share his difficulties. Frank saw something in Isam’s struggle that he recognized in himself. He decided to spend more time with Isam, despite the awkward language barrier.
Frank noticed the dirty bowl and tray and the chocolate splattered around the kitchen. Everyone in his family loved chocolate, and he often bought ten-kilogram bags of the best chocolate he could find. It was a leftover habit from the days when he was first courting Heather. Carly was in grade nine when she decided to use the chocolate to make truffles. She planned to eat the entire batch herself, and her brothers dubbed her the Truffle Troll for hoarding the sweets. Carly relented — the truffles were really too rich for just one person. Her family loved them, but Carly, wanting an unbiased opinion, got her older brother, Morgan, to take some to work with him. His colleagues not only devoured the truffles but gave him money to pay Carly. Morgan urged her to think about making more and selling them at the farmers’ market.
Encouraged, Carly bought more ingredients from the grocery store. It took her around two hours to make two hundred truffles. She packed them in clear plastic containers, priced them at six for five dollars, and rented a stall at the Antigonish Farmers’ Market. She unfurled a Truffle Troll banner on the front of the table. She sold out in two hours. Soon Carly was not only selling chocolate at the market each week but also providing truffles to weddings and other special events. She listened to her customers and expanded her product line, offering dark chocolate, mint, cookie dough, peanut butter, cappuccino, Oreo cheesecake, and maple truffles. At times of peak demand, like Christmas, she could spend thirty or forty hours a week making a thousand truffles. She received the Antigonish Chamber of Commerce’s first Young Entrepreneur Award in recognition of her booming business.
Frank could see by the Hadhads’ messy kitchen that Isam truly loved making chocolate, and it occurred to him that if Carly could operate a successful truffle business, Isam could probably get Hadhad Chocolate off the ground again, at least in a small way. He and Carly decided to give Isam several kilograms of raw chocolate to get him started. He beamed when he received the gift. He asked for dried lemons and oranges and some crunchy nuts, and while they went shopping, he pulled out the big pot and bowl and heated water on the stove. He placed the raw chocolate in the bowl and slid it on top of the pot.
The hot water slowly melted the chocolate. When Frank and Carly returned with the dried fruit and nuts, he poured the mix into the ice-cube trays, added the nuts, topped them off with more chocolate, and set them in the fridge to cool and harden.
The familiar happiness returned: the pleasure of work, the joy of the smells, and the delight of people anticipating the finished chocolates. He could say everything he needed to say in chocolate. The magic of chocolate was just as powerful here as it had been decades earlier, when he stood in his mother’s messy kitchen and watched her bite into his first chocolates.
Frank and Carly sampled the chocolate with approval. Isam had started with nothing more than a dream of spending his life making chocolate, and he’d built that into a thriving international business that supported his family and provided employment for many others. He began to believe he could do it again.
Isam spent many happy hours making chocolate in the kitchen of his snow-covered Antigonish home, the windows steamed up, Syrian music playing on his phone. Years of anger and frustration receded into the past. He produced hundreds of delicious Syrian chocolates. They were darker and harder than a typical Canadian chocolate. The nuts and dried fruit gave them a unique taste. Isam knew the secret ingredient was always happiness.
credit: Nicola Davison at snickerdoodle.ca
Jon Tattrie is the author of seven books, including the Canadian bestseller The Hermit of Africville. He works as a journalist for CBC Nova Scotia.