In Hasan Dudar’s Carryout, Palestinian refugee Ziad Idilbi gets used to Ohio relatively quickly, though his Lebanese wife Salma takes longer. Their three America-born children—Mustafa, Nawal, and Walid—have disparate opinions on the matter, but the kids are mostly unified in not wanting to spend their afternoons working at the family carryout. Instead, they enjoy driving through Ohio’s open plains and getting into trouble. The Idilbi family is the nucleus Dudar’s debut collection of linked stories, set in Toledo between the late 1970s and 2000s.
Fiction about the Midwest often concerns itself with proximity and distance. Midwestern proximity is all about turning in and toward: Our family has attended the same state school for generations; we cluster for state fairs and local sports games; our neighborhood is tight-knit and “Midwest nice.” Midwestern distance, on the other hand, is geographic and emotional, a way of determining place and feeling by comparison: Our small town is this far from the nearest urban hub; our children are among the many young, educated people who flee to coastal centers for job opportunities; we Midwesterners find ourselves always in cars, reading the highway mile markers and triangulating where we are in relation to the road signs.
Dudar isn’t the first to use short stories to render Arab-American communities in the Midwest—Ghassan Zeineddine’s critically acclaimed Dearborn (2023) comes to mind—but Dudar is uniquely attentive to this Midwestern play of distance. The collection’s first story, cheekily titled “Urban Renewal,” shows the tedious engagement process between Ziad and Salma, the former already having moved his family to Ohio and the latter demanding escape from violence in Lebanon, despite her family’s disagreement. The couple is married first in Lebanon and then again in Ohio, and this dual ceremony sets the two poles of emotional distance: Lebanon, where everything begins and to which everything refers back, and Ohio, where everything ends up and then continues on into the future. Quickly after the Ohio wedding, Lebanon becomes “back home,” and Ziad tells Salma that, once a refugee begins to refer to their homeland in such a way, the homeland becomes near impossible to return to.
They agree to stop talking about the “old country,” and Ziad both succeeds and fails at this task. His children long for his stories of Lebanon, but like his father before him, Ziad refuses to speak of the life he left. Walid, his youngest, even tries to rope his father into a family history project, in which Walid will ask questions and his father will answer. Ziad agrees but leaves questions like “What did your father or mother tell you about when they fled Palestine?” unanswered. He gives sardonic responses such as “This is getting to be stupid” and small nuggets of truth like “I remember there was silence” when asked about the 1967 Six-Day War. Part of the success of Dudar’s collection is the ability to see the central figure of the immigrant father from inside and outside; his interior care, fear, and longing sustain the collection emotionally, but through the voices of others, we see the hardened exterior he develops as he weathers the storms of racism and financial difficulty. The form of the linked collection, as opposed to perhaps a novel, allows Ziad’s arc to remain satisfyingly open-ended, and the figure of the immigrant father is critiqued in the same breath that he is redeemed, in all of his frustrating, self-sacrificing glory.
This same pattern is true for every character and community in Carryout; Dudar writes toward the ambiguous imperfection of the immigrant and the native-born, the assimilated and the longing exile. This ambiguity allows for a particular richness and diversity in the Arab-American stories Dudar tells. His vision of Midwestern places and communities has the same texture. Dudar makes Ohio look like Ohio, and in doing so, he opens a truly critical space to discuss the region’s politics. Ziad, for his part, buys into the American dream of the small-business owner, which at times serves as an avoidant coping mechanism against everyday danger. His love for the Ohio landscape is balanced by Salma’s sour perspective on that same land, which she sees as somewhere “the world ran out of materials to build.” Yet, these mismatches are tender and human. When Ziad survives a dangerous surgery, Ziad asks Salma if the two of them can spend the evening at their carryout, a question that both shows the precarious, workaholic nature of their entrepreneurial immigrant experience, and also the grounded closeness this shared life has created.
Dudar writes with the loving criticality that comes from growing up in a particular place, with a particular people. He does not rely on simplistic tropes of “backwards” Middle American life. Rather he carefully scrutinizes the racism and xenophobia built into the “heartland” vision of Midwestern decency. The Ohio he sees isn’t utopia or dystopia but a real place where people live, and grow close and far. When a wealthy local threatens to buy out the store, the tense situation is diffused by a dad-joke-style prank. Likewise, a racially motivated school suspension allows for the surprising renewal of an interracial friendship. I read this collection in the shadow of the Twin Cities ICE occupation, when many Midwesterners took to the streets to declare the centrality of immigrant communities to Midwestern life. One cannot avoid the parallels between these events and the moment Mustafa notices his father carrying the family passports in his pocket after 9/11, occasionally flipping through them, “making sure that none of us had expired.” In Carryout, Ohio is home but not homeland, something close enough to make a life in, but still occasionally cruel enough to keep at a distance.
Still, for Dudar, the further one gets from the homeland, the closer one grows to the home. When Ziad leaves Toledo for a stint in New York, he finds himself wishing not for Lebanon but for those “far-out fields of Ohio, where night was night and day was day.” When Walid gets a job in Cairo, he cannot be away from his father for long and returns to Toledo to find, among other things, a photo of himself as a child “at the family carryout, standing inside an empty milk crate, trying to help them stack cartons of cigarettes.” For Dudar’s characters, the Midwest is both a spiderweb and a surrogate mother’s embrace, a wishing well for which one never runs out of coins.
This act of wishing is what Carryout most brilliantly renders. Despite their frugality and paranoia, the Idilbis are full of desires, and Toledo both enables the pursuit of these desires—for cultural closeness, for remembered stories of a shared past—and leaves them impossible to fully achieve. So, desires are passed down from father to son, to daughter, in dreams and in omissions. And across generations, Dudar’s characters feel the pull to return, to seek the homeland in the home, and to wish that, with enough time, the two places will feel closer than they really are. In so many ways, Dudar’s collection is a triumph, a paean to human connectivity and the warm “heartland” that, in its brightest moments, the Midwest imagines itself to be.
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
by Lillian Lippold
Lillian Lippold is a writer from Minnesota, based in Chicago. She edits The Bullpen, runs a lesbian-only writing workshop at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and leads a Midwestern reading group at the pub. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cleveland Review of Books, The Ana, Confluence, and The Middle West Review.