Writing about Vanishing Cultures and Rarely Told Stories: Samantha Ellis on ‘Chopping Onions on My Heart’

Writing About Vanishing Cultures and Rarely Told Stories:

Samantha Ellis on Chopping Onions on My Heart

The Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Jewish Women’s Voices Seminar

How can you write against cultural erasure?  

Samantha Ellis’s Chopping Onions on My Heart (2025) explores what it means to inherit a language and culture that are disappearing. The daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, Ellis’s mother tongue, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, is now on the verge of extinction. Her attempt to learn more about it takes her into her family’s history and the wider history of Iraqi Jewry, asking what it means to inherit a past, what we choose to remember, and what might otherwise be lost.

Chopping Onions on My Heart’s aching sense of loss has a truly global resonance

—The Guardian

Chopping Onions on My Heart moves between memoir, family history and cultural history. Ellis draws on interviews with members of her own family, whose stories span almost a century of Iraqi Jewish history, alongside a rich range of historical sources, from sixth-century demon bowls made by Mesopotamian Jewish women to the musical culture of Baghdad’s Jewish blind school. In bringing these different kinds of material together, Ellis asks how we might write about a place she has never been able to visit, and how life-writing might recover connections to histories disrupted by displacement and erasure.

In this event, Samantha will explore questions including:

• How do you find your own way through stories that have been conflicted, misused or misunderstood?
• How can you write authentically about a place you have never been able to visit?
• How can you write from what Saidiya Hartman calls a ‘place of rupture’?
• What can life-writing do to preserve culture and create new forms of connection across generations?
• How can writing rooted in a deeply specific history speak to readers beyond it?

This event will appeal to readers and writers of life-writing, and to anyone interested in Jewish culture and history, Iraqi history and culture, family stories, and endangered languages. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.

This event will be introduced and moderated by Dr Aviva Dautch.

Speaker Details:

Credit: Jules Rogers

Samantha Ellis’ latest book, Chopping Onions on my Heart (published by Chatto & Windus in the UK, & under the title Always Carry Salt by Pegasus Books in the US) is about her mother tongue, the language of Iraqi Jews, going extinct, about losing, saving, keeping and letting go of culture. It was shortlisted for the Wingate Award. Her previous books are her reading memoir How to be a Heroine, or What I’ve Learned from Reading too Much, and Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life (both published by Chatto). Her plays include How to Date a Feminist and Cling to Me Like Ivy (both published by Nick Hern Books). She worked in the writers’ rooms of the first two Paddington films. As a journalist, she writes for the TLS, Guardian, Financial Times, Spectator, Lilith, Psyche and more. She’s written prefaces to the Vintage edition of Agnes Grey, and the Persephone edition of A Lady and Her Husband. 

Dr Aviva Dautch is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the UK's Jewish arts and culture quarterly. She lectures on modern Jewish literature at the London School of Jewish Studies and JW3 and contributes to programmes on BBC Radio 4. She is an award-winning poet whose residencies and commissions have included The British Museum, The National Gallery, and Bradford and Hay Literature Festivals. Aviva is the Jewish Women’s Voices OCLW Visiting Scholar for 2025-6.

About The Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Jewish Women’s Voices Seminar:

The Vera-Fine Grodzinski Programme for Jewish Women's Voices is a collaborative initiative by Dr Kate Kennedy, Director of the ‘Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’, and Dr Vera Fine-Grodzinski, a scholar of Jewish social and cultural history.

The Programme is the first of its kind at any UK academic institution. Launched in October 2023, the Programme celebrates the life-writing of Jewish women, who are often underrepresented in mainstream historical accounts. The Programme is a three-term seminar series dedicated to exploring the diverse experiences of Jewish women across centuries, countries, and cultures.

Further information about the Programme can be found here.

Further Details and Contacts:

This event is free and open to all. If you are able, please consider donating £5, £10, £20, or more to support OCLW’s free events, outreach activities, and programmes, helping us to keep life-writing open to all.

Donations can be made when booking your place or via our online donations portal. Every gift makes a difference. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Registration is strongly recommended for in-person attendance and required for hybrid attendance. Registration will close at 10:30 on 27/10/2026.

This is a hybrid event. The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.