ALWAYS CARRY SALT

An immigrant daughter retraces her family’s origins in a sometimes pensive, sometimes humorous memoir.

There’s an old Jewish joke, writes Ellis, that goes, “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.” But not just any food, she adds: The foods are those of survivors from other lands, so that “maybe this is what we pass on: not just the eating but eating together. The let’s part.” In Ellis’ case, the survivors, her parents, were Mizrahi Jews from a community in Iraq that once, in the 1940s, numbered some 150,000; at the time the author writes, the number is now just a handful, the rest having been killed, imprisoned, driven into exile, most to Israel. The survivors remember their homeland, their culture, and their language, called Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. Some of that language survived in Ellis’ vocabulary as a child, but now, she writes, “I could never really speak it…and soon there would be no one to talk to.” Even the original family name, Elias, changed because “my father thought it would be easier to have a name that sounded less Jewish.” Fortunately, as Ellis recounts, she was able to enroll in an endangered languages program and learn something of the ancestral tongue. Along the way, she also read deeply in the matter of endangered languages of all kinds, noting that of the 7,000-odd languages on earth, most people speak just 13, with so many other languages suppressed, forgotten, and overwhelmed by the world languages on the internet, especially English. “Language loss haunts memoirs and fiction by Iraqi Jews,” writes Ellis, “which, severed from my language, I can only read in translation.” All the same, she offers pleasing lessons in Jewish Iraqi language and culture, often by way of food—let’s eat—celebrating such dishes as the “dense, cataclysmically cheesy omelettes called ajjat b’jeben, which means ‘cheese storm.’”

A lovely evocation of a language and culture that stand just this side of oblivion.