Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
We tend to reserve the word “inheritance” to refer to the physical possessions, or to the genetic properties, that get passed down to us. But for many people, the most significant (and often the most knotty) inheritance lies in our family’s culture and history.
British playwright and journalist Samantha Ellis’ “Always Carry Salt,” set for release on Jan. 6, is an endearing memoir about struggling to come to terms with a particularly complicated heritage.
Ellis was born in England in 1975 to Jewish refugees from Iraq. Her father had been airlifted to Israel as a boy in 1951 and eventually settled in London, where he met Ellis’ mother, who had departed Baghdad in 1971.
As a child, Ellis grew up amid stories, traditional foods and the colorful Judeo-Iraqi Arabic language in which her parents and their families conducted their private lives. However, upon becoming a mother, she realized with deep sadness that she was unequipped to pass this rich legacy to her son.
This brought Ellis into something of an existential crisis, to which she responded by immersing herself in an exploration of what it means to be an Iraqi Jew separated by time and place from a world that no longer exists.
Iraq was home to one of the oldest Jewish diaspora populations, tracing itself back to the first exile in the 6th century BCE. It became the Jewish world’s most significant center of scholarship, giving us the Babylonian Talmud. The community remained strong into the modern era. In the early 20th century, more than a third of Baghdad’s residents were Jewish.
Conditions changed during a period of political turmoil, with incitements against Jews culminating in the horrendous episode in 1941 known as the Farhud, when a large number of Baghdadi Jews were slaughtered, raped or injured by their neighbors. With the establishment of the State of Israel, official persecution of Jews increased, with many suspected Zionists executed. By the early 1950s, the vast majority of the country’s Jews were gone, their property having been seized and their citizenship revoked. The community continued to dwindle, and today fewer than five Jews remain in the country.
Acknowledging her “homesickness for a place I’d never been,” Ellis sought to find her way into a deeper relationship with her origins. This involved both studying books and documenting her own parents’ and grandparents’ often painful experiences, marked by violence and imprisonment in Iraq, displacement as refugees, and discrimination and cultural erasure in Israel.
She did not want to pass on a legacy defined by suffering, though, and sought more celebratory means of sharing her family’s past. What came most naturally to her was cooking. She recreated in her home many of the dishes she grew up with, even attempting to obtain foods that had been part of her parents’ early lives, such as nabug, an elusive fruit (a kind of jujube) that can be found nowhere in England.
But most central to Ellis 一 fittingly for a woman who has made her living with words 一 was language.
Retaining linguistic elements that predate the Arab conquest of the 7th century, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic is distinct from the Arabic spoken by the nation’s Muslims and Christians. For Ellis, it is most alive in its flavorful colloquial expressions, such as “chopping onions on my heart,” which was the book’s title when originally published earlier this year in the United Kingdom.
Not having truly learned her family’s language, she feels a sense of horror and guilt that she is passively witnessing its path to extinction. Gratified to discover an online course in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic hosted by the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, she enrolls, albeit sobered that she is likely not destined to become a fluent speaker.
Indeed, these efforts are often accompanied by a degree of angst and self-doubt. Ellis notes that “for a long time the weight of this made me feel like it was futile to even bother building my ark, let alone loading it with what I could save of my language or my culture. What was the point when we couldn’t go back? Why learn the words for things and places I would never see?”
Over the course of the book we witness Ellis finding a sense of balance, or compromise, and realizing that she cannot shoulder the responsibility for a culture that’s been so weakened by historical forces. She accepts that it can sometimes be enough to take pleasure in those parts that bring her meaning and to share those with her son.
For all of the heaviness in this subject matter, Ellis’ skill as a writer makes the journey delightful. The book is frequently humorous, and its intimacy and honesty make the author feel like a friend.
The book is also timely, coming out at a time when Jews with roots in the Arab world can find their identities challenged, especially amid the charged political rhetoric that has taken hold since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Ellis laments that the “Iraqi Jewish story was being denied and erased with more ferocity than usual because it didn’t fit into the narrative that all Israelis were white European settler-colonizers.”
By choosing to inhabit her identity proudly and fully, even when at odds with reductive narratives that have become increasingly prevalent, Ellis helps give voice to many Jews who struggle to make themselves visible.