Always Carry Salt
A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture
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- 18,99 €
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- 18,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A life-affirming memoir about resilience and repair—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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ellis (How to Be a Heroine) elicits hope and heartbreak in this moving exploration of her Iraqi Jewish roots. Ellis grew up in 1970s London after her parents fled pogroms in Iraq. Though the author was privately proud of her heritage, she felt self-conscious about her differences from other British children, swapping school lunches of pita and black eggs for cream cheese on white bread. When she became a mother in the late 2010s, Ellis grappled with how best to raise her son with an awareness of his roots. Then, in 2019, after she learned that Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, the unique language of her people, was dying out, she became obsessed with forestalling its extinction. As she details digging through university archives, looking at her culture's artifacts in the British Museum, and traveling to Iraq, Ellis successfully highlights both the richness of her mother tongue ("chopping onions on my heart" is the equivalent of "rubbing salt in the wound") and the existential stakes of her quest (she chillingly points to a Venezuelan dialect whose last living speaker was not a human, but a parrot). Though the ending is more ambiguous than tidily triumphant, the journey is equal parts inspirational and edifying.
