The “Back to our Roots” Suite
by Sergio Assad
The main reason for us to embark on this project was to pay tribute to our ancestors, but at the same time we always found the idea of crossing cultures fascinating. Through music you can merge very different cultures without the communication problems of verbal language. Our grandfather Jorge Assad immigrated to Brazil in 1895. We don’t know exactly the reasons, although we remember our father saying that it was due to a religious matter. Our grandfather was Christian. The big wave of immigration from Syria and Lebanon happened from 1870 to 1920 or so. Around two-hundred thousand people arrived from those countries carrying an Ottoman passport. The number of males was far greater than the females, and a lot of these men went to the second major immigrant colony, in Italy, to find their wives. That was the case with our grandfather. He married Francesca Caggiano, an Italian immigrant, and in order to be able to communicate they could only use Portuguese. In that way Arabic and Italian were not transmitted to their children, and the only language we learned later was Portuguese. Although the Arabic and Italian languages were lost, the culinary aspect of the Lebanese side was kept. We were very familiar with tabouli, hummus, kibbe, etc.
The Assad Brothers, Odair and Sergio