Border Crossings: Meron Hadero's 'A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times'

What is the true weight of a lovingly baked loaf of bread? What is the real price of a bouquet of flowers, when it’s sold by a florist who questions your humanity?

These are some of the questions posed in “A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times,” the debut collection of short stories from Ethiopian-American author Meron Hadero.

The book was published by Brooklyn-based independent publisher Restless Books in June. Its characters are immigrants who are “navigating contexts that challenge their understanding and assertion of self as they seek new ways to belong,” Hadero explains in her author statement.

In the book—which features two stories explicitly set in Brooklyn—Hadero deconstructs the very idea of displacement.

In one story, “Mekonnen aka Mack aka Huey Freakin’ Newton,” a sixth-grader has to “learn about race, real fast” after immigrating from Ethiopia to 1989 Crown Heights with his parents, who do not see themselves as Black.

In it, the protagonist is forced to make a decision about how to maintain his pride when a florist denies his father’s request to buy flowers.

In “The Thief’s Tale,” an Ethiopian father who feels old and “a little pathetic” while visiting his daughter in Brooklyn emerges with a triumphant sense of self through an interaction with a would-be thief in Prospect Park, while the thief has a very different experience.

And in “The Suitcase,” a woman visiting family in Addis Ababa grapples with choosing what can fit in her suitcase back to America when each family member is asking her to take something precious: a loaf of homemade bread, a pack of spices, an Amharic-English dictionary.

“In the mundane, there is the profound,” Hadero said in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition (the book was named an NPR Best Book of 2022). “So what is a loaf of bread is actually a relative missing those that she hasn’t seen in decades, and wanting to show her love and cross a very hard-to-bridge divide.”

For Hadero, who was born in Addis Ababa and came to the United States as a child via Germany, the stories are an invitation to puzzle through ideas about home and belonging.

“Usually I think I end up with more questions to pose — but I think that makes a good story,” Hadero laughed, speaking during a video award ceremony for the 2021 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, which she won.

Now based in California, Hadero has had an illustrious academic journey so far. She has a JD from Yale Law School, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and a BA in history from Princeton. Fellowships include Yaddo, San Jose State University, MacDowell, and Ragdale, and she was a research analyst at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

After some of Hadero’s stories appeared in journals, “A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times” was fast-tracked to publication during the pandemic, when it won the 2020 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

The Gowanus-based nonprofit started in 2013 as a publisher of international literature in response to what its website describes as “homogenizing trends in American publishing.”

It created the immigrant writing prize in 2015 in reaction to the rise of Donald Trump and increasing news coverage of immigration, Restless Books Editorial and Marketing Director Nathan Rostron told Brownstoner.

“We wanted to do something that would make a stand and support the work of immigrants,” he said. The prize awards $10,000 and publication to a first-time, first-generation immigrant writer.

Rostron said Hadero’s manuscript was selected from about 200 entries. The judges called the book “sharp and humane” and a “gift” in a world where so many people’s lives are being profoundly shaped by border crossings.

While many of the prize winners are new writers, and may require “dozens” of rounds of edits, Hadero’s book didn’t need many at all. The most significant change was to the title — originally “Preludes,” Rostron said.

“That title had its own strengths. But we thought ‘A Down Home Meal For These Difficult Times’ — which is the title of one of the stories — was just so wonderful and evocative,” he said. “And in the middle of a pandemic? Yeah, that’s what we need, we need a good down home meal.”

Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the Fall/Holiday 2022 issue of Brownstoner magazine.

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