Always Carry Salt
by: Samantha Ellis
January 6, 2026 Pegasus Books
288 pages
When I was around ten, my father decided he was going to only speak to me and my English-speaking siblings in Yiddish. He believed that wherever we went in the world, we would always be able to find another Jew who spoke Yiddish. His effort failed after a week, largely because telling preteen girls what to do never ends well. We kept pretending not to understand when he asked us to do things, resulting in him having to do everything himself. His brief foray into education aside, my father was more of a supervisor than a do-it-yourself kind of guy. However, looking back at this episode after reading Samantha Ellis’s memoir about her own struggle to speak Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, Always Carry Salt, I think he could have succeeded if he had taken the more romantic approach and told us we were working to preserve a “dying” language.
While my father thought we would be able to find a Yiddish speaker everywhere, the truth is that Yiddish came under attack from the same “killer” language that took down Judeo-Iraqi Arabic – Hebrew. The antisemitic forces pushing Jews out of their homelands in both European and Arabic countries, combined with the pressure to exclusively speak Hebrew in Israel, where many of these refugees wound up, resulted in loss of several languages and the cultural elements that sustained them. In her struggle to understand her family’s past, and reconnect with her Iraqi roots, Ellis mourns that Yiddish was at least saved for its large literary tradition, which is not the case of her milk tongue. I would disagree a little with that assessment – I think Yiddish is being saved by the thousands of Hassidim who speak it exclusively in their communities and teach it to their children from birth, rather than by the handful of scholars who learn it to then translate that body of literature to languages like English. Still, her point is well taken. There are more speakers of Yiddish today that Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, and the loss of the language mirrors the loss of the way of life that created it.
This is especially important right now, in a time when the identity of many Jews from Arabic lands is being ignored by a world that finds them troubling. They don’t fit the narrative most people are trying to build about the middle east – on either side of the spectrum – and therefore their entire existence as a distinct culture is under attack.
Jews cannot live safely in Iraq anymore. Idioms about extreme heat and swimming in the Tigris don’t bear the same cultural resonance in England as they did in Baghdad. Ellis must find other ways to connect to her past and her culture, the most successful being food and music. While she does make attempts at learning the language herself, she acknowledges that the real work of “saving” a language is in teaching it to children who will truly live and dream in it (see my comment about the true saviors of Yiddish, for better or for worse). She comes up against the same struggles my father did – her young son is not interested. In a hilarious episode, her mother does manage to get the little guy to enjoy Iraqi food – it is just the most laborious dish to prepare. In addition, Ellis poignantly describes how her son’s ability to shed the language also reflects his ability to shed some of the generational trauma she carries around. In this way, the book becomes more about sifting through our cultural heritage to keep what is precious, without letting it drag down or harm our present. A skill that I, admittedly, am not very good at.
I like to think that if my father had phrased his attempt to teach me Yiddish as an attempt to save a connection to my past, to a way of life largely destroyed by the Holocaust, I would have been more amenable. I knew, even then, that there is no universal Jewish language. Did I appreciate the intrinsic link to language and culture? I don’t know. I do wish I had tried harder. Much like Ellis, I’ve learned to cook the foods of my ancestors (excluding schmaltz, heart disease runs in the family), and to sing the lullabies, and even listened to the painful stories. Maybe it’s time I tried to learn the language too. If Ellis could do it, then so can I!
Note: BookishlyJewish received an arc of this book from the publisher.