A Little Taste of Syria

A LITTLE TASTE OF SYRIA

There’s a sweet little market down the street from where I live on Jackson Avenue in Culver City, California, aptly named, Jackson Market.  Tucked between two duplexes on a residential street, it’s oddly incongruous for the area, but I’m told it was once a feed store for the livestock that served the grand Haciendas that once made up the verdant La Ballona Valley, now known as Culver City. Long before MGM Studios and the infamous backlots where Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz were shot, Mexican soldados accompanying Spanish explorers obtained land grants to settle and cultivate the land here, living somewhat peaceably beside the original inhabitants, the Native Tongva-Gabrieliños.

So Jackson Market holds a lot of history between its walls. It seems fitting, somehow that this little landmark is now owned by a Syrian.

I’ll call him Tony (he asked that his real name not be used for security reasons). Tony and his brother bought the market about the same time I bought my house up the street. I watched them transform what had become a rather rundown, utilitarian convenience store into a charming, popular oasis for Panini sandwiches, ice cream, fine wine, and what I found impossible to resist: home-baked red velvet cupcakes.

In the just over ten years that Tony has been running the place, I have watched Jackson Market literally blossom, as he planted more and more flowers outside, added breakfast crepes to the weekend menu, and built a trellis-adorned courtyard in the back, beguiling his customers with the smell of jasmine and a cascading water fountain.  If you didn’t know any better, you might as well have been eating at some French country cafe. During lunchtime on any given weekday, the place is packed.

As Obama stares down the barrel of world opinion on whether or not to launch a military strike on Syria in retaliation for Bashar al-Assad’s unleashing chemical weapons on his own people, I found myself wanting to learn more about Tony’s story. We sit inside his office, paintings of ancient Syrian towns on one wall, and hi-tech DJ turntables and speakers stashed against another, he tells me today is his forty-fourth birthday. We watch the end of Obama’s speech together on CNN… “I know well we are weary of war—we cannot resolve the underlying conflict in Syria with our military…there are ancient sectarian differences, which will take many years to resolve. We are not contemplating putting our troops in the middle of someone else’s war. But we are the United States of America, we cannot turn a blind eye to what has happened…” Deciding to wait for Congress to vote, Obama sidesteps the decision to strike, for now.

Forty-four years ago Tony was born in Damascus, where he still has family. Until last year, he had been traveling back and forth to Syria and Lebanon to help run the family business, a factory just outside Damascus that manufactured calcium carbonate, one of the main ingredients in house paint. Tony’s family is Sunni, which makes up about 80% of Syria today.

“Sunni’s have always been treated very poorly, as second-class citizens. All the government offices and major political positions are held by Aliwites. We moved to California because the life there was difficult for us, and my older brother wanted to be a doctor. He wasn’t able to get into medical school there, as things were closed to Sunni’s.”

For decades, the Alawites controlled the country, first under the brutal Hafez al-Assad, (who launched his own massacre on Sunnis in 1982 in Hama, crushing a rebellion that killed over 20,000 people), before his son, ironically a doctor, Bashar Al-Assad took over in 1994. Initially seen as a reformer, he was to repeat a similar attack in Hama in 2012 that has escalated into a massive civil war that has taken the lives of over 100,000 Syrians.

Tony explains how most Sunnis in Syria could never hope to rise above their peasant-class status, and were relegated to a life of hardship.  “There was so much corruption. I remember, at our factory, government officials came to paint on our walls, YES TO ASSAD and we had to pay for the paint! There was a billboard across the road with this huge image of him, and they came to us and said we have to light the sign at night. And I kid you not, we had to run a wire from our factory and pay the electricity to light up Assad!”

The thing you notice immediately about Tony, reflected in the vibrant, personalized touches of his market is his effusive friendliness. He’s always joking with his employees, and has this boundless energy. When he threw a block party to thank his customers for ten years of business, he barbecued steaks for us. Later, he told me he remembered as a boy how hard it was for Sunnis to even buy meat.   

“The whole thing started because in this town called Dara’a, a group of boys, the youngest I think was ten… ten years old (!)  wrote graffiti on a public wall critical of Assad. I mean they were inspired by Tunisia and the Arab Spring, they were too young to realize practicing free speech was forbidden. And for this they were arrested, tortured, their fingernails were pulled out.  Their parents and the locals got very upset, and it grew from there.”

For most Syrians, and clearly for Tony, family is everything. His market has a distinctly family-run feel. His employees stay, his customers are local regulars, and he’ll go to any lengths to stock something you request. During those back-and-forth trips to Syria that abruptly stopped this year due to security concerns, I would often see little reminders of his homeland: olive oil soap, handmade jewelry, Lebanese wine. One morning, having run out of milk for my coffee, I walked my dog to the market. I was surprised to see a distinguished looking old man in a crumpled suit, dozing in the early morning sun at one of the two tables Tony had set up by the front windows.  I was later told this was Tony’s father, the family patriarch, who had been brought back from Syria for his safety. He was suffering from a long-term illness, which severely damaged his vocal chords, so he has difficulty speaking. I couldn’t help wondering what this man, given his personal history and his forced decades-long silence might have said if he could.

Tony told me his father worked in the oil fields in northern Syria. He later went to Cal Poly and became an engineer, and began selling emulsifiers and corrosion inhibitors to the oil companies. “A lot of eyes were on him because he was making money and he was Sunni. His life was definitely in danger. It was a big secret. Later I found out other Sunnis who did this were thrown off buildings and decapitated…”

Tony himself was jailed briefly last year, when he was stopped in Damascus for driving with an international drivers’ license, even though he is now a U.S. citizen. He was told he needed a Syrian driver’s license because he was “Syrian.”

I asked him what he saw in Syria’s future, and he shrugged. “Bush kinda ruined it for everybody…he scared everybody into going to war again. This falsifying of reasons and fake war is ruining the Middle East, when war becomes a huge lie. Syria is saying Biden is just like Colin Powell, a front man for all the lies” referring to Assad’s denial of the chemical weapon attack.

Unlike some of my leftist friends and the pundits on Democracy NOW, (“I love her voice” Tony shyly admits, referring to Amy Goodman)…Tony is all for the U.S. to intervene, but he cautions:

“They should have gone in there two years ago, and we would never be here.” He believes the answer is to get rid of the regime, but it’s beyond complicated now. He worries about the futility of a limited strike. We both agree the idea is absurd…how does one put “limits” on any kind of bomb? It’s like saying you can actually measure destruction in some scientific way. Try telling that to the now over 2 million Syrian refugees. Try explaining the concept of “pre-emptive or punitive” to the terrified new citizenry of entire cities bursting the desert seams of Turkey, Jordan, Iraq. In the largest of these camps, Za’atari, the population is roughly that of Santa Clara, California. As the West flexes its war rhetoric muscle and as Congress plies the partisan line to its debate, try telling the two thousand babies born in Za’atari to an uncertain future, the difference between action and inaction.

“There are all kinds of fighters converging on Syria now—Hezbellohs coming from Lebanon. Iran, China and Russia behind Assad. When Hezbollah came, Al Qaeda came to assist the Syrian Liberation Front…its depressing--its going to become a war not of the people of Syria, but of the world.”

He stops to rush out to greet some guests who have come to help him celebrate his birthday. I sit on his plush green velvet couch and stare at his collection of albums, wondering what kind of music he listens to at night, when the memories get to be too much. I think of all the ways in which Tony worked hard to bring beauty to his establishment: planting, watering, making countless smoked turkey paninis, treating Sony film executives with the same care and compassion as the skinny drug addict who sits on a curb at the intersection, talking to herself. I’ve seen him offer free food countless times.   

“You know, my Dad told me one time one thing—my end is in my country.

He meant it. He left a lot of hope for us there. My family helped to build Syria.  He was the engineer that built the giant windmill in Hama. He wasn’t interested in politics. He was interested in bringing technology to Syria. He just wanted things to work.”

He stops, interrupted by the laughter of his friends outside.

“He would bring us back sweets—cream of wheat little balls stuffed with condensed milk, I had some here for a while…it was so great. That’s the taste I remember.”

That’s the Syria Tony will probably never taste again.