Always Carry Salt

A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture

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.

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.

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Endorsements & Reviews

"A story of resilience, identity, and the importance of language to a culture." Library Journal

"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

"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

“This book, which moves easily between the personal and the historical, is unobtrusively learned and tells a heartbreaking story.” Literary Review

“It’s impossible to finish this memoir and not come away with a desire to claim as your own fantastic and near-forgotten expressions such as “Yethrem basal all ras efadi!” (you’re chopping onions on my heart!)” Jewish Journal

“Thoroughly enjoyable. Samantha Ellis has done something wonderful and unique with Always Carry Salt.” Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

“I am amazed at the breadth and range of Samantha Ellis’s knowledge and insights, and love the endearing and humorous way she shares information that is tragic and frightening as well as heart-warming and full of hope.” Claudia Roden, award-winning and bestselling author of Book of Jewish Food, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food and more

"I loved this book so much. It's a heart-opener and an eye-opener, an invitation to understand our world better. Think: The Body Keeps the Score in practice not theory." Ella Risbridger, author of Midnight Chicken 

"A moving and resonant lament for the past but also a thought-provoking siren call for the future." Anne Sebba, author of The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz

“A wonderfully immersive and sensitive meditation on belonging and identity, explored through the grief of a language facing extinction. Samantha Ellis tells the story of her Iraqi Jewish family, their sayings and their memories, in a way that is so joyously intimate that you feel you know their mother tongue. When I finished it, I felt like someone had chopped onions on my heart.”
Viv Groskop, author of One Ukrainian Summer and The Anna Karenina Fix