Chopping Onions on My Heart
  • Published: 17 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529934304
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

Chopping Onions on My Heart

on losing and preserving culture

Formats & editions
Hardback
29 Apr 2025
EBook
17 Apr 2025
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A sweeping, fluid, all-encompassing book, combining memoir with history and an examination of language, culture and food, which asks us how we can save that which is almost lost -- from the author of How to be a Heroine and Take Courage

'An optimistic and wryly funny book... rich with insights' OBSERVER
'I couldn’t put it down’ RUKMINI IYER
‘I loved this book so much... Think: The Body Keeps the Score in practice not theory’ ELLA RISBRIDGER

Samantha’s mother tongue is dying out. An urgent need to find out more becomes an expansive investigation into how to keep hold of her culture – and when to let it go

The daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, Samantha grew up surrounded by the noisy, vivid, hot sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. A language that’s now on the verge of extinction.

The realisation that she won’t be able to tell her son he’s ‘living in the days of the aubergines’ or ‘chopping onions on my heart’ opens the floodgates. The questions keep coming. How can she pass on the stories without passing on the trauma of displacement? Will her son ever love mango pickle?

In her search for answers Samantha encounters demon bowls, the perils of kohl and the unexpected joys of fusion food. Her journey transports us from the clamour of Noah’s Ark to the calm of the British Museum, from the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages to the banks of the River Tigris. As Samantha considers what we lose and keep, she also asks what we might need to let go of to preserve our culture and ourselves.

This is a life-affirming memoir about resilience and repair, and the healing power of dancing to our ancestors’ music, cooking up their recipes and sharing their stories.

‘A moving and resonant lament for the past but also a thought-provoking siren call for the future' ANNE SEBBA
'Urgent, alive, propulsive. I adored it' MARINA BENJAMIN
  • Published: 17 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529934304
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

About the author

Samantha Ellis

Samantha Ellis is a playwright and journalist. Her first book How to be a Heroine was published in 2014. Her plays include Cling to me Like Ivy, Operation Magic Carpet and How to Date a Feminist. She has written for the Guardian, Observer, TLS, Spectator, Literary Review, The Pool, Exeunt and more. She lives in London.

portrait photo of Samantha Ellis

Also by Samantha Ellis

Take Courage
How To Be A Heroine
See all

Praise for Chopping Onions on My Heart

A wonderfully immersive and sensitive meditation on belonging and identity

VIV GROSKOP, author of How to Own the Room

A book about loss written with pure, irrepressible joy

MARINA BENJAMIN, author of Last Days of Babylon

A profound meditation on loss and the importance of language as a means of remembering... Thoroughly recommended

ANNE SEBBA, author of The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz

Easily my non-fiction book of the year

RUKMINI IYER, author of The Roasting Tin

I loved this book so much. It's a heart-opener and an eye-opener, an invitation to understand our world better. Think: The Body Keeps the Score in practice not theory

ELLA RISBRIDGER, author of Midnight Chicken

I devoured this touching, vivid, joyous account of both belonging and not belonging

AMANDA CRAIG, author of The Three Graces

Beautiful and vibrant, funny and engrossing, this book is full of insights, passion and fascinating twists

RACHEL SHABI, author of Off White

A beautiful tale of painful cultural loss, delicious food, rich history; and the bittersweet grief that only the perfect recipe can solve. A truly enlightening book that will leave you hungry yet satisfied

CARIAD LLOYD, author of You Are Not Alone

Chopping Onions on My Heart is quite simply wonderful - a lyrical meditation that sparkles with life and joy. Such an elegant study of identity, loss, and hope, and so beautifully written

FRANCESCA SEGAL

I loved this funny, moving memoir

EMMA FORREST

Utterly absorbing… every page sparkles with anecdotes, facts, adventures and asides

BIDISHA

An optimistic and often wryly funny book... a gift to the future, rich with insights about the nature of belonging that are not limited to one community but matter to all of us

Stephanie Merritt, Observer

Ellis’s book is a useful reminder that Jewish generational trauma is not confined to the descendants of those who survived the Holocaust. In fact, given the ubiquity of refugees in the modern world, Chopping Onions on My Heart’s aching sense of loss has a truly global resonance

Keith Kahn-Harris, Guardian

As an Iraqi Jew, reading Chopping Onions on My Heart felt like being seen: the entire book felt like a fierce, honest, and profoundly comforting hug

Maia Zelkha, Yad Mizrah

An engaging mix of harrowing history, earnest reflection, recipes, common sense, love, humour and life

Norma Clarke, Literary Review
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