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Spectator
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Should family history, however painful, be memorialised forever?
Be under no illusions: this is not a food memoir. Chopping Onions on My Heart is a linguistic exploration of belonging; a history of the Jewish community in Iraq; and an urgent endeavour to save an endangered language. Above all, it is a reckoning with generational trauma. The subjects of Samantha Ellis's previous books include the life of Anne Brontë, heroines of classic literature, feminism and romantic comedy. She is the daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, and the language she grew up around, the language of her people and culture, is dying. Judeo-Iraqi Arabic 'came out of the collisions of Hebrew-speaking Jews and Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, and then absorbed linguistic influences from all the other people who conquered Iraq'. Ellis is irrepressible in the way she talks about her mother tongue, calling it 'earthy, sinewy, witty, excessive, wry, noisy, vivid… Hot, where English often seems cold. Mouth-filling, where English seems empty. Patterned, when English seems plain.' Jewish people first came to Iraq in 586 BC. At the community's height in the 1940s there were 150,000 Jews living in the country. At best guess, by 2019 just five remained. Most left in the decade following Farhud, the pogrom carried out against the Jews of Baghdad over two days in 1941. More than 180 Jews were murdered and countless raped and injured. Ellis's father's family left for Israel, while her mother's stayed on for more than 20 years. But both her parents eventually ended up in London, where Ellis was born. She was raised speaking English, 'but all the gossip, all the stories, all the exciting, forbidden grown-up life happened in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic'. She quietly absorbed the language, but as she grew up, lost it. Now, as an adult and mother, she is acutely aware of the consequences for herself and her son. The mass exodus of Iraqi Jews in 1950-51, and their assimilation into adopted countries, meant that the language was marginalised, and speaker numbers dwindled fast. Ellis's early investigations are urgent, panicked, motivated by a combination of incredulity and guilt that a language that informs her heritage, but that she doesn't speak, isn't being preserved by someone else: 'I raced to my laptop to find out if anyone was saving my language. Someone had to be!' She begins language classes, visits museums and consults relatives. She attempts to trace the history of her people. She cannot accept that the reason languages become extinct is because second generation, non-native speakers 'didn't value or care for them, that we were recklessly letting them die'. She realises that 'there was always violence somewhere in the vanishing of languages. There certainly was in mine'. The mother tongue is 'earthy, sinewy, witty, excessive, wry, noisy, vivid…Hot, where English often seems cold' The psychological effect of being brought up by families who have experienced war, discrimination and displacement is what makes Ellis both neurotic and determined not to pass on that inherited fear to her son. When he garbles the history of how they came to Britain, Ellis decides: 'If I was going to unmuddle him, maybe I had to try to unmuddle myself first.' But how does one preserve the stories of a culture's past without also holding on to the pain that imbues them? In her search for home and belonging, she finds solace in cooking her country's traditional dishes. But this is not a tidy personal narrative that finds resolution in a comforting stew or finishes with a glorious homecoming wrapped neatly in bread dough. Ellis is wary of simplifying the past and making it more palatable through food. The problem is not Iraqi Jewish cuisine; that's the easy bit. It's the gnarly, traumatic parts that are harder to engage with. So, no, this is not a food memoir. And if at times it doesn't seem to know quite what it is, then isn't that sort of the point? Unpicking, extricating different facets of heritage is near impossible, compounded by the conflicting motivations of a second generation immigrant. What begins as a shapeless mass, a grey cloud of uncertainty, slowly morphs into a full-colour, defined picture of a more confident, peaceful acceptance of Ellis's duality – of being Judeo-Iraqi, but not in Iraq, of belonging to two places at once, even if one place cannot be visited. Like her identity, Ellis's book contains multitudes.
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Chopping Onions on my Heart by Samantha Ellis review – an Iraqi Jew's celebration of an endangered culture
Whenever the author and playwright Samantha Ellis tries to define her heritage to people, she often finds them correcting her. 'So many times I've said I'm an Iraqi Jew and been… told 'you mean you're mixed' or 'which parent is which?' or just 'how weird',' she writes in her richly detailed memoir, in which she explores the complex, centuries-old history of the Iraqi-Jewish community and its vanishing language, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees who came separately to London with their families during periods of persecution for the community in Baghdad, Ellis is moved to seek out stories, expressions and objects that will fill some of the gaps in that history when she realises that she lacks the vocabulary to pass on the language of her childhood to her own young son. It's a quest in which intensely personal family memories come to represent the enormity of what has been lost by an entire people (at the time of writing her preface, the Jewish community still living in Iraq numbered three). Ellis writes that she has no idea what her father looked like as a child; he has no photographs from his first decade because, when his family left Baghdad in 1951, Jews were only permitted one small suitcase each, with strictly delimited contents. She interviews both her parents and her ninetysomething grandmother, Aida, about Jewish life in Baghdad and the trauma of leaving. Aida lived through the 1941 pogrom known as the Farhud, when more than 200 Jews were murdered in one night and Aida's family were saved by their Muslim neighbours. To piece together a bigger picture, however, Ellis has to search further afield, where she finds the evidence scant. Everywhere she looks she sees ghosts of what has been lost. There is little surviving literature in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic ('My language was not like Yiddish, which was saved by its books') and few artefacts in the British Museum, despite the number of Iraqi antiquities plundered by the British in the 1920s and 30s. When she tries to use the kohl in the little pots her mother brought from Baghdad in the 1970s, she finds it has all dried up. Nor will she ever eat the traditional fish dish masgouf, because it has to be made with a particular type of carp only found in the Tigris; a fish now tainted because it was found that the carp had been feeding on the corpses of torture victims thrown into the river under Saddam Hussein's regime. Her own paternal family name is gone, anglicised from 'Elias'. Over and above these small losses arches the greatest loss of all: the permanent loss of homeland. Ellis and her family have little hope of returning to Iraq as it's now a death penalty offence to have any association with Israel – an edict that effectively bars most of the Jewish diaspora. 'Maybe I could go to Iraq and escape death,' she writes, 'but I couldn't go to Iraq and feel safe.' Yet, despite this litany of loss, persecution and violence, Chopping Onions on My Heart (the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic equivalent of 'rubbing salt in the wound') is an optimistic and often wryly funny book. It's an exploration of collective memory: how we choose what to value and what to pass on to our children. Ellis is a knowledgable and entertaining guide to the history of a community that 'rarely made it into history books' but whose story is an integral part of the broader history of the Middle East, reverberating down to the present. Her celebration of her endangered culture – through food, art, song, and especially language – culminates in the conclusion that changing identities can be reframed as addition and evolution rather than loss. Watching her son eat makhboose (traditional date-stuffed pastries), she says: 'I felt I'd brought there and then into here and now not as trauma or anxiety, but as a mnemonic to help us remember happiness. A gift from our affectionate ghosts.' This book is likewise 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. Chopping Onions on My Heart by Samantha Ellis is published by Chatto & Windus (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
