A love letter to the lost language of a Mizrahi childhood

Having rarely seen my Sephardi-Mizrahi heritage reflected in Jewish literature, I was eager to read British author Samantha Ellis’s recent memoir, Chopping Onions on My Heart. Later, when I speak to Ellis about her book, we bond over our shared desire, as she puts it, “to disrupt the idea that all Jews are white, European and don’t speak Arabic”.

London-born Ellis is the eldest child of Iraqi-Jewish refugees. Her father left in 1951 and was airlifted to Israel along with the majority of Iraq’s Jews; his passport stamped “forbidden to return to Iraq”. As Ellis notes, most histories of Iraqi Jews end here, with the airlift to Israel. But Ellis’s mother was atypical in that she only left in 1971.

“When I was growing up,” she writes, “I never heard about the Jews of Iraq in the 1960s from anyone except my family.” Ellis describes experiences of the Jews who stayed in Iraq as “fine in the ‘50s but absolutely horrendous in the ‘60s”.

While her father and his family faced appalling conditions in Israel’s ma’abarot (transit camps), it’s the experiences of her mother’s family that seem to have impacted Ellis most.

From the time she was five, Ellis knew that her mother, uncle and grandparents had been imprisoned when trying to leave Iraq, and that her grandfather had been in prison on his own again. “I used to have nightmares as a child, that I was being pursued across the desert by men,” she tells me.

And Ellis refused to eat watermelon for years: she was told that a prison guard in Iraq gave her grandfather a watermelon, but she confused what was intended to be a tale of kindness, and instead associated the delicious fruit with persecution.

As a child, Ellis also heard Judeo-Iraqi Arabic every day; she even dreamed in it. Her parents spoke to her in English but “all the gossip, all the stories, all the exciting, forbidden grown-up life happened in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic”. So much so that when she was small, Ellis thought that “English was just a children’s language, for nursery rhymes and picture books.”

In turn, she assumed that when she grew up, she’d be fluent in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. But her assumption was flawed: now a parent herself, Ellis can’t speak Judeo-Iraqi Arabic and her language is dying.

It's this loss of language, combined with becoming a mother, that was the catalyst for Ellis to write Chopping Onions on My Heart (the title is the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic equivalent of rubbing salt on a wound). Ellis felt compelled to understand the stories of her culture and community before they were lost – or worse, erased – so she could tell them to her son.

Ellis also wanted to write down her mother’s recipes, and her book contains recipes for dishes including sambusek bel tawa (deep-fried chickpea pastries), kubba shwandar (meatballs encased in rice, with beetroot sauce) and zangoola (sweet, fried pastry).

As an aside, Ellis and I also bond over the frustration of writing down our mother’s recipes, with their vague instructions and absence of measurements. Her comment that getting recipes from an Iraqi “is not a relaxing business” is classic British understatement.

Ellis’s memoir-cultural history is the story of her efforts to preserve her vanishing Iraqi-Jewish culture, and eventually learning to let go of parts of it. But it’s not an easy journey. Ellis poignantly describes planting a garden to cure her homesickness for Iraq, referencing Nebuchadnezzer (the Babylonian king), who made the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for his wife because she missed her homeland. Only Ellis is homesick for a place she’s never been, and can never visit – in Iraq, having any association with Israel now attracts the death penalty.

Yet as much as she’s drawn to Iraq, Ellis wants her son to have a different experience to hers. She wants to give him confidence and pleasure in his identity, and to break her family’s cycle of trauma. In part, then, Chopping Onions is a celebration of the richness of the Iraqi-Jewish food, language and traditions that are so integral to Ellis’ life. This, for me, was one of the great joys of her book.

Ellis describes how “incredibly affirming” it was for her to see recipes in Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food for dishes she’d only ever eaten at relatives’ homes. Chopping Onions is similarly affirming for me, with its references to words and traditions I’ve rarely, if ever, seen written down, such as shasha – the bags of sweets that Iraqi Jews send to loved ones when a new baby is born. Or the practice of pinning lucky charms to babies’ clothes (or in my case, my daughter’s pram) to ward off the evil eye. And saying “awafi” (literally, to your health) after eating a delicious meal.

Yet this comprehensively researched book has much to offer a wider audience. Ellis has intentionally referenced much of the existing literature about Iraqi Jews, observing that that while there are a lot of first-hand narratives, “where we [Iraqi Jews] are… only becoming slowly visible is in official and objective storytelling… so I felt like it was important to give it [the book] a framework of the literature that already exists”.

Ellis also weaves in all kinds of other fascinating information, like her discovery that more than one Jewish scholar thought that hamantaschen – the triangular shaped pastries traditionally eaten on Purim – were supposed to be vaginas, associated with the heroine of the Purim story, and not the three-cornered hat of the villain, Haman.

Her perspective, too, is often thought-provoking. For most Jews, Arabic is a foreign language, often associated with the enemy. But for Ellis, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic is a language “of safety, of closeness, trust and belonging”. She tells about an Ashkenazi friend who remarked that Arabic sounded like a really harsh language. “I was mystified,” she says. “I told him that it isn’t. And that if he’d been spoken to in it by his mum when he was a baby, he wouldn’t say that.”

My family left Iraq long before Ellis’, so neither of my parents speak much Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. They did, however, give me an Arabic name. Ellis, I discover, doesn’t have an Arabic name but asks me mine. “Kahela,” I reply in my Australian accent, a little embarrassed that I can’t pronounce it properly; the way my mother says it.

Later, I ask Ellis whether she voices the audio book for Chopping Onions. “Omigod yes,” she replies. “I had to put a note at the beginning about my terrible pronunciation of the Arabic.” Suddenly, I don’t feel so bad. But I’m conscious that so much has been lost in just one generation.

Yet there have been gains, too. Towards the end of her book, Ellis writes that although she cannot teach her son Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, she can make magic in her kitchen by reappearing the food her family ate in Baghdad. And she does – including baking Iraqi date-stuffed pastries called makhboose (also known as baba b’tamar or date babas). Watching her son eat makhboose messily and with joy, “I felt I’d brought there and then into here and now”, she writes, “not as trauma and anxiety but as a mnemonic to help us remember happiness.”

With Chopping Onions, Ellis has joined other second- and third-generation Sephardi-Mizrahi writers – such as Ayelet Tsabari, Sarah Sassoon and Marina Benjamin – in documenting the history and experiences of Arabic-speaking Jews and their descendants. Finally, we are no longer invisible.

Chopping Onions on my Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture (Chatto & Windus) is available now.