Review: 'Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture'

“I was beginning to see that there was always violence somewhere in the vanishing of languages. There certainly was in mine,” writes Samantha Ellis in her new book, Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture. 

Ellis, whose Iraqi parents raised her in England after they sought refuge there, grew up surrounded by family members speaking Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. The language, which she describes as “Wry. Noisy. Vivid, Hot…” is slowly losing its community of native speakers. Due to rising state-sanctioned antisemitism beginning in the 1950s, many Iraqi Jews fled their home country and were forced to learn new languages in order to assimilate. The resulting diaspora has led Ethnologue, a global language database, to classify Judeo-Iraqi Arabic as an endangered language. At the time Ellis began writing Always Carry Salt, only five native speakers of the language still lived in Iraq. 

The book follows Ellis’s journey to combat that loss and, in turn, wrestle with how to pass the language on to her young son. Part memoir, part oral history, and part linguistics lesson, all tied together by Ellis’s sharp and witty critical analysis, Always Carry Salt is a vital new book about the joys and challenges of preserving one’s culture. 

Ellis questions the word “dialect” when speaking about Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, wondering if it minimizes the unique life and voice that the language has taken beyond its etymological roots. The language itself draws upon a blend of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic, with phrases grown from the cultural references of the region where it was born. For instance: eeyam al babenjan, which Ellis translates as “in the days of the eggplants,” meaning “living in a time when everything feels upside down.”

Ellis’s relationship with her son is central to the book’s narrative, as is food. She laughs about the struggles of trying to get a toddler interested in expanding his palate, and the ultimate joyful surprise when he eats the Iraqi-Jewish food that has long represented comfort and home to her. Ellis includes several recipes in the book with vivid descriptions of lamb, rice, amba (pickled mango), rose water, chickpeas, turmeric, and saffron, which will make your stomach rumble. But Ellis doesn’t shy away from the darker history of food, either. She writes that she used to consider watermelon “prison food” because her mother was fed watermelon while being held by the government in Baghdad. When she tries to push against this belief and feeds some to her son, she recounts being stopped by a woman who commented on her child eating something so “exotic.” Ellis uses this story to further illustrate the catch-22 of her family’s multicultural experience. In her attempts to reclaim something from her family’s homeland (watermelon), she and her son are labeled as “other,” exotic, not belonging. Though Ellis is shaken by the experience, it steels her resolve to pass on the joyous parts of that history as well. “I could tell him a story in which English and Iraqi food were not in opposition,” she says, “in which watermelons weren’t exotic, and neither were we.”

Ellis also justly criticizes the Ashkenazi hegemony that overpowers the story of the displacement and persecution of Jews. Many Jews are familiar with stories of diaspora; the word might invoke the stories of the Bible, the Eastern European pogroms, or the conditions of the Holocaust. While these horrific stories are important to understand and learn from as a part of Jewish history, they do not represent the Jewish displacement narrative in totality. Always Carry Salt offers a starting point for learning about the displacement of ethnic groups in the Middle East, not through vast generalizations and impersonal statistics, but through collected family histories and first-hand accounts of what has changed or been lost. Ellis analyzes how Middle Eastern Jews were not only ignored but actively left out of the formation of Israel, and Ellis has not only her family’s story to prove that the dream of a safe space for Jews was not open to everyone. 

As Ellis was writing Always Carry Salt, two of the five Jews in Iraq passed away. There has never been a more urgent time for this book, and for the preservation that Ellis and her peers are working hard for. Ellis refers to this book several times as an “ark,” carrying Judeo-Iraqi Arabic aloft over the floodwaters of time, oppression, and tyranny. By passing along her stories, recipes, and knowledge, Ellis invites all readers, regardless of their ethnic background, to help lift the ark a little higher.