Chopping Onions on My Heart: on losing and preserving culture

(Hardback)

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A sweeping, fluid, all-encompassing book, combining memoir with history and an examination of language, culture and food, which asks us how we can save that which is almost lost -- from the author of How to be a Heroine and Take Courage Samantha's mother tongue is dying out. An urgent need to find out more becomes an expansive investigation into how to keep hold of her culture -- and when to let it go 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 realisation 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' opens the floodgates. The questions keep coming. How can she pass on the stories of displacement without passing on the trauma 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. This is a life-affirming memoir about resilience and repair, and the healing power of dancing to our ancestors' music, cooking up their recipes and sharing their stories.

Reviews

A wonderfully immersive and sensitive meditation on belonging and identity -- VIV GROSKOP, author of How to Own the Room
A book about loss written with pure, irrepressible joy... Urgent, alive, propulsive. I adored it -- MARINA BENJAMIN, author of Last Days of Babylon

Author Bio

The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Samantha Ellis is the author of the books How to be a Heroine and Take Courage and her plays include How to Date a Feminist, Cling to me Like Ivy and Operation Magic Carpet. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, TLS, Spectator, Literary Review and more. She worked on both Paddington films. She lives in London.