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A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture
by Samantha Ellis
A life-affirming memoir about resilience, language, and the healing power of our ancestor's music, stories, and recipes.
Samantha's mother tongue is dying out. 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?
In her search for answers Samantha 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 Samantha considers what we lose and keep, she also asks what we might need to let go of to preserve our culture and ourselves.
Always Carry Salt is an immersive and moving meditation on the words and traditions that shape us and what we carry forward into future generations.
"An immigrant daughter retraces her family's origins in a sometimes pensive, sometimes humorous memoir. A lovely evocation of a language and culture that stand just this side of oblivion." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Samantha Ellis's powerful memoir Always Carry Salt exemplifies diaspora yearning and determination. Written with the belief that 'sleeping languages can be kissed back to life,' Always Carry Salt is a remarkable memoir about what we pass down and why." —Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"Ellis elicits hope and heartbreak in this moving exploration of her Iraqi Jewish roots. She successfully highlights both the richness of her mother tongue and the existential stakes of her quest. The journey is equal parts inspirational and edifying." —Publishers Weekly
"As readers follow the journey of Ellis's refugee forebears, they will learn about the community's migration, the British period of rule in Iraq, stolen artifacts in the British Museum, tasty recipes, belly dancing, and the author's son's acquisition of the culture in his own way. A story of resilience, identity, and the importance of language to a culture." —Library Journal
"Ellis's book is a useful reminder that Jewish generational trauma is not confined to the descendants of those who survived the Holocaust. In fact, given the ubiquity of refugees in the modern world, Always Carry Salt's aching sense of loss has a truly global resonance." ―The Guardian (UK)
"A beautiful tale of painful cultural loss, delicious food, rich history; and the bittersweet grief that only the perfect recipe can solve. A truly enlightening book that will leave you hungry yet satisfied." ―Cariad Lloyd, author of You Are Not Alone
"I couldn't put it down. Easily my non-fiction book of the year." ―Rukmini Iyer, author of The Roasting Tin
This information about Always Carry Salt was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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, 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.
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