Samantha Ellis on Becoming a Keeper of Her Ancestral Language

About this episode

Samantha Ellis discusses her efforts to preserve her Iraqi-Jewish heritage and the challenges of passing it on to her son amidst the language's decline.

In this episode, we’ll hear Samantha reflect on her journey to preserve her Iraqi-Jewish heritage even as the language is disappearing from use. She shares how the hand work of cooking traditional recipes became a tangible way to pass culture to her son, how Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother helped her process family histories, and how stories of imprisonment and fear in Iraq shaped her childhood imagination. 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? 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…

People in this episode

Host: Tali Rosenblatt Cohen

Guest: Samantha Ellis

Topics covered

• Iraqi-Jewish heritage
• language preservation
• cultural identity
• family history
• cooking traditions

Keywords

• Iraqi-Jewish
• heritage
• language
• cooking
• family history
• cultural transmission
• Samantha Ellis

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: How to be a Heroine, Take Courage, How to Date a Feminist, Cling to me Like Ivy, Operation Magic Carpet, Lose Your Mother, Megillat Esther, The Book Of Jewish Food

Places: London, Iraq

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