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

"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

"An optimistic and often wryly funny book. A gift to the future, rich with insights about the nature of belonging that are not limited to one community but matter to all of us." The Observer

"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 

"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

"Urgent, alive, propulsive. I adored it." Marina Benjamin, author of Last Days in Babylon