Whenever the author and playwright Samantha Ellis tries to define her heritage to people, she often finds them correcting her. “So many times I’ve said I’m an Iraqi Jew and been… told ‘you mean you’re mixed’ or ‘which parent is which?’ or just ‘how weird’,” she writes in her richly detailed memoir, in which she explores the complex, centuries-old history of the Iraqi-Jewish community and its vanishing language, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic.
The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees who came separately to London with their families during periods of persecution for the community in Baghdad, Ellis is moved to seek out stories, expressions and objects that will fill some of the gaps in that history when she realises that she lacks the vocabulary to pass on the language of her childhood to her own young son. It’s a quest in which intensely personal family memories come to represent the enormity of what has been lost by an entire people (at the time of writing her preface, the Jewish community still living in Iraq numbered three).
