Samantha Ellis's insightful memoir, Always Carry Salt, explores the complexities of the author's attempts to pass on her Iraqi Jewish heritage--food, mannerisms, history, and most of all, language--to her London-born son. Blending historical context, personal experience, and occasional recipes, Ellis traces her family's journey from Baghdad to the United Kingdom, and the joys and struggles they experienced while holding onto their culture. As she collects words in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, Ellis asks probing questions about language and power, noting the ways Iraqi Jews--like many other marginalized groups--have been erased from both religious and cultural narratives.
Ellis (How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I've Learned from Reading Too Much) describes the grief of realizing that her language is disappearing from her own psyche and the larger world, and she shares part of the history that reflects the "violence... in the vanishing of languages." As she mourns, she also tries to re-create and share her culture, making makhboose (date-stuffed pastries) for her son to take to school and planting nabug (an Iraqi fruit) in her London garden. Her attempts to pass down a "joyous, jumbled, multilingual life" that includes specific cultural practices (idioms, dances, favorite snacks) embodies a generous, openhearted curiosity about other people and their backgrounds. While she is honest about the pain of erasure, Ellis also continues to "insist on the possibilities of being an Arabic-speaking Jew," even or especially when that identity is fraught. Always Carry Salt is a thoughtful account of one woman's reckoning with cultural loss, and the hope and creativity to be found in moving forward. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams