Chopping Onions On My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture
Chopping Onions On My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture
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, explored through the grief of a language facing extinction. Samantha Ellis tells the story of her Iraqi Jewish family, their sayings and their memories, in a way that is so joyously intimate that you feel you know their mother tongue. When I finished it, I felt like someone had chopped onions on my heart.”
I can think of few writers able to bring pure, irrepressible joy to writing about loss, but Samantha Ellis pulls off the feat with panache. Heritage is a weighty subject, but the questions, giggles, petulance and energy of a child’s eye perspective lend Ellis’s book an urgency and aliveness that makes for a propulsive read. I adored this book.
I loved this funny, moving memoir.
CHOPPING ONIONS ON MY HEART is a profound meditation on loss and the importance of language as a means of remembering. It is a moving and resonant lament for the past but also a thought provoking siren call for the future. Such an original approach to examining how and why we communicate has never been more important. Thoroughly recommended!
CHOPPING ONIONS ON MY HEART (the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic phrase for ‘rubbing salt in the wound’, but SO much more visceral, I love it) is easily my non-fiction book of the year, although as it isn’t out yet, treat yourself and pre-order because it’s going to be a HIT. Samantha explores the history and politics of her family’s language, and her writing is just incredible - witty, informative and quietly devastating in turn. I couldn’t put it down.
Deeply satisfying and almost academic sense of intellectually rigourous self-questioning; really admire Samantha Ellis’s willingness and capacity to hold multiple ideas at once so lightly. Beautiful, thoughtful,.
Beautiful and vibrant, funny and engrossing, this book is full of insights, passion and fascinating twists.
A beautiful tale of painful cultural loss, delicious food, rich history; and the bittersweet grief that only the perfect recipe can solve. A truly enlightening book that will leave you hungry yet satisfied.
I devoured this touching, vivid, joyous account of both belonging and not belonging…packed with intelligent nostalgia for a lost paradise of tastes, smells, textures and language Ellis's book is a feast in itself.
A knowledgeable and entertaining guide.
An optimistic and often wryly funny book... a gift to the future, rich with insights about the nature of belonging that are not limited to one community but matter to all of us.
A linguistic feast (as well as a gastronomic one...) CHOPPING ONIONS ON MY HEART’s aching sense of loss has a truly global resonance
This book, which moves easily between the personal and the historical, is unobtrusively learned and tells a heartbreaking story
Remarkable... render and profound... As an Iraqi Jew, reading CHOPPING ONIONS ON MY HEART felt like being seen... like a fierce, honest and profoundly comforting hug
A radiant and moving meditation on how we might find renewal even in the shadow of devastating events...vibrantly, even radically hopeful
Beautiful and vibrant, funny and engrossing, this book is full of insights, passion and fascinating twists
CHOPPING ONIONS ON MY HEART is quite simply wonderful – a lyrical mediation that sparkles with life and joy. Such an elegant study of identity, loss, and hope, and so beautifully written
Marvellous
A glorious, fascinating, substantial, utterly absorbing journey through love, language, family and time
Soul-searching, sensory... enthralling.
Beautiful
A lovely book, full of thoughts about culture, language and place
I am amazed at the breadth and range of knowledge and insights, and love the endearing humorous way (Ellis) delivers information that is tragic and frightening as well as heart-warming and hopeful.
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