Samantha Ellis, "Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture" (Pegasus Books, 2026)
I had the privilege of speaking with writer Samantha Ellis about her deeply moving new book, Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture (Pegasus
Books, 2026). Our discussion explored not only the story of a
disappearing language, but also the broader questions of memory,
identity, and what it means to inherit a fragile cultural legacy.
At the heart of Ellis’s book is Judeo-Iraqi Arabic—also known as
Baghdadi Jewish Arabic or Hakimalna—a language once spoken by the Jews
of Iraq. Rich with layers of Hebrew and Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic, it
reflects over two millennia of Jewish life in the region. Today,
however, it stands on the brink of extinction. As Ellis shared, a
language is considered endangered when it is no longer passed on to
children, and Judeo-Iraqi Arabic may have only about a thousand speakers
remaining worldwide. Within a generation, it could fall silent.
Ellis described a powerful turning point in her own awareness: a
casual question from another parent about why she was not sending her
son to a nursery that spoke “her language.” Her spontaneous response—“my
language is dead”—became the catalyst for the journey that led to this
book. That moment captures the quiet grief of linguistic loss, but also
the urgency of preservation.
Our conversation traced the long arc of Iraqi Jewish history,
beginning with the Babylonian exile in 597 BCE. Iraqi Jews lived in the
region long before the arrival of Arabic, shifting over centuries from
Hebrew to Aramaic and later to Arabic, while preserving distinctive
linguistic features from earlier eras. This layered history lives on in
the language itself. Yet the mass departures of Iraqi Jews in the
mid-20th century—particularly the 1950–51 airlift—fractured this
continuity. Today, only a handful of Jews remain in Iraq.
And yet, as Ellis emphasized, culture does not disappear all at once.
Language may fade, but other forms of transmission endure. Food, in
particular, becomes a powerful vessel of memory. Ellis initially
resisted including recipes in her book, but came to understand that
cooking is itself a kind of language—a sensory bridge to the past. The
image of her mother carrying three rolling pins from Iraq is emblematic
of this continuity: tangible objects that hold intangible heritage. Even
the book’s title gesture—“always carry salt”—evokes protective
practices familiar across Mizrahi communities, small rituals that encode
belief, memory, and identity.
We also discussed the remarkable story of the Iraqi Jewish Archive,
discovered in 2003 in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein’s secret
police headquarters. The archive contains hundreds of thousands of
documents—school records, letters, communal registers—offering an
intimate portrait of everyday Jewish life in Iraq. Today, innovative
projects are using AI to transcribe and translate these materials across
multiple scripts, making them accessible to descendants and scholars
alike. Yet the archive’s ultimate fate remains uncertain, raising
complex questions about ownership, memory, and cultural restitution.
A particularly resonant theme in our conversation was Ellis’s
struggle with authenticity. As a second-generation Iraqi Jew raised in
the UK, she grappled with whether she had the “right” to tell this
story, especially without having visited Iraq herself. Her resolution—to
be “authentic to me”—offers an important model for thinking about
diasporic identity. Preservation, she suggests, does not require perfect
replication. It allows for adaptation, creativity, even reinvention.
One can honor tradition while also “messing with it,” whether by
adjusting a recipe or reimagining inherited practices.
Ellis introduces a beautiful concept she calls “milk language”—the
language absorbed in early childhood, through intimacy and care, even if
it is not the dominant language of one’s environment. This idea invites
us to reconsider how language lives within us, not only as a tool of
communication but as a carrier of emotional and cultural memory.
As an educator, I was especially struck by Ellis’s closing insight
and her implicit call to action: to speak with our elders while we still
can. There is a profound difference between hearing fragments of family
stories in childhood and sitting down, as an adult, to listen fully and
intentionally. These conversations do more than preserve history; they
create connection, continuity, and a deeper sense of self.
Always Carry Salt is not only a memoir. It is an
invitation—to remember, to document, and to carry forward what might
otherwise be lost. In a time when so many cultural threads are at risk
of unraveling, Ellis’s work reminds us that preservation begins with
attention, with curiosity, and with the willingness to listen.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
