Latest news with #SamanthaEllis
Spectator
2 days ago
- 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
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Chopping Onions on My Heart by Samantha Ellis review – can you save a culture?
Samantha Ellis yearns to eat the nabug fruit that her Iraqi-Jewish parents recall from Baghdad back gardens. Yet when she asks for it in London's Iraqi shops, she's met only with blank looks. It took much effort for her to find the English name for the nabug – the Christ's thorn jujube – and even then she's unable to source seeds online. Eventually an Iraqi Muslim friend brings her a bag of the fruits. She shares them with her mother, who lights up: 'It's nabug!'. She tells her grandson she hasn't eaten one in 50 years, and despite wanting a Haribo, he joins his grandmother and mother in enjoying the taste, 'like a cross between an apricot and a date'. This story in Ellis's memoir is, like the book itself, about many things – loss, the distance between generations, nostalgia for a place one has never been, and the power of food to evoke memory – but perhaps most fundamentally, it is a story about language; of its slipperiness and ambiguity. It's not clear whether nabug is, in fact, an Arabic or a Judaeo-Arabic word. Ellis grew up hearing her parents and grandparents speak this language and developed an imperfect, passive knowledge of it. Unlike Yiddish, which has a substantial literature, Judaeo-Arabic was primarily used orally and has no standardised form. Even when Ellis starts attending Judaeo-Arabic classes, her mother often doesn't recognise the words and phrases she is being taught. There isn't even a universally agreed name for the language. Ellis's book is a linguistic feast (as well as a gastronomic one – recipes are included). The book's title is taken from a splendidly histrionic idiom – 'You're chopping onions on my heart!' – and Ellis relishes the 'hotness' of Judaeo-Arabic over the frigidity of English. I too loved phrases such as 'she talks like she has kubba [a kind of dumpling] in her mouth', with which her family would affectionately mock her youthful mangling of the language. The sounds are inviting, too: Skitti oo-khalia – 'shut up and leave it' – sounds somehow just right. But there's a deep anxiety behind Ellis's interest. Unesco classes Judaeo-Iraqi Arabic as 'potentially vulnerable', because it is not being passed on to new generations. Ellis's desire to preserve it is shot through with guilt about her former passivity, as well as despair at the magnitude of the task. Tracing their history back to Babylonian times, the Jews of Baghdad prospered even into the modern era, despite legal inequality and occasional persecution. Yet the situation deteriorated rapidly amid the post-first world war upheavals that brought both western imperialism and modern nationalism to post-Ottoman Iraq, and Zionism to what would become Israel. The 1941 pogrom known as the Farhud left hundreds dead, and by the early 50s most Jews had either been expelled or emigrated, sometimes to Israel where they faced discrimination in the early years of the state. Ellis's mother's family held out until the early 70s, when all but a handful of members of this ancient community fled Saddam Hussein's oppression. The political implications of the fate of Iraqi Jewry are bitterly contested. For Ellis, though, this is primarily a personal tragedy and a boundlessly sad one. There is no going back to what was lost, and it isn't clear what her own responsibilities are to the future; what she should pass on to her son and what she should let go of. Her efforts to find the words to speak as Iraqi Jews once did never fully succeed. However, by the book's end she comes to accept the imperfections of her knowledge and the messiness of her inheritance. 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, Chopping Onions on My Heart's aching sense of loss has a truly global resonance. Keith Kahn-Harris is the author of Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish People Are Not Who You Think They Are Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture by Samantha Ellis is published by Chatto & Windus (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
