Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture

Ellis (How to Be a Heroine) elicits hope and heartbreak in this moving exploration of her Iraqi Jewish roots. Ellis grew up in 1970s London after her parents fled pogroms in Iraq. Though the author was privately proud of her heritage, she felt self-conscious about her differences from other British children, swapping school lunches of pita and black eggs for cream cheese on white bread. When she became a mother in the late 2010s, Ellis grappled with how best to raise her son with an awareness of his roots. Then, in 2019, after she learned that Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, the unique language of her people, was dying out, she became obsessed with forestalling its extinction. As she details digging through university archives, looking at her culture’s artifacts in the British Museum, and traveling to Iraq, Ellis successfully highlights both the richness of her mother tongue (“chopping onions on my heart” is the equivalent of “rubbing salt in the wound”) and the existential stakes of her quest (she chillingly points to a Venezuelan dialect whose last living speaker was not a human, but a parrot). Though the ending is more ambiguous than tidily triumphant, the journey is equal parts inspirational and edifying. Agent: Aram Fox, Massie & McQuilkin. (Jan.)