Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture, with Samantha Ellis

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Samantha Ellis’s mother tongue is dying out. The daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, Ellis grew up surrounded by the noisy, vivid, hot sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. A language that’s now on the verge of extinction.

The realization that she won’t be able to tell her son he’s “living in the days of the aubergines” or “chopping onions on my heart” or reminding him to “always carry salt” opens the floodgates. The questions keep coming. How can she pass on this heritage without passing on the trauma of displacement? Will her son ever love mango pickle?

In her search for answers Ellis encounters demon bowls, the perils of kohl, and the unexpected joys of fusion food. Her journey transports us from the clamour of Noah’s Ark to the calm of the British Museum, from the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages to the banks of the River Tigris. As Ellis considers what we lose and keep, she also asks what we might need to let go of to preserve our culture and ourselves.

The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Samantha Ellis is the author of How to be a Heroine and Take Courage. Her plays include How to Date a Feminist, Cling to me Like Ivy, and Operation Magic Carpet. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, and elsewhere. She worked on the first two Paddington films. She lives in London, where Always Carry Salt was published under the title Chopping Onions on My Heart.