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. - (Simon and Schuster)

Library Journal Reviews

Ellis (How To Be a Heroine) grew up in London in a family of Iraqi Jewish descent, listening as her mother and grandmother spoke in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic and absorbing expressions such as "living in the days of aubergines" to describe an upside-down world. As an adult, however, she regrets that she doesn't know enough about her mother tongue to pass it on to her son, so she sets out to learn the nuances of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. Ellis takes readers on a journey through history as she studies a language on the verge of extinction. Jews came to Iraq, Babylon, in 597 BCE. They had a thriving community until the Muslim conquest. Most left for Israel in 1950, and today, only a few remain in Iraq. 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. VERDICT A story of resilience, identity, and the importance of language to a culture.—Barbara Bibel