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.