🎤︎︎ New Five Books Episode: Samantha Ellis on Becoming a Keeper of Her Ancestral Language

In this episode, we’ll hear Samantha reflect on her journey to preserve her Iraqi-Jewish heritage even as the language is disappearing from use. She shares how the hand work of cooking traditional recipes became a tangible way to pass culture to her son, how Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother helped her process family histories, and how stories of imprisonment and fear in Iraq shaped her childhood imagination. 

The daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, Samantha 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?

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, theTLS, the Spectator, Literary Review and more. 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.

1. ⁠Megillat Esther, The Book of Esther

2. ⁠Where The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden

3. ⁠Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman

4. ⁠Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin

5. ⁠Always Carry Salt by Samantha Ellis

Other Books Mentioned:

• Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk

Other Episodes About Sephardic Heritage:

• Esther Levy Chehebar on Marriage, Sisterhood, and the Weight of Tradition

• Elizabeth Graver on Lost Worlds and New Doorways

  What Else We’re Reading Now:

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