00;00;00;04 - 00;00;32;23 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I'm J.R. Jamison. Today on the Facing Project, I'll be joined by author and playwright Samantha Ellis, whose new memoir, Always Carry Salt, journeys through time and cultural connectivity, as she explores how to awaken her ancestors’ Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic language, and ways to share this heritage with her son without passing on the trauma of displacement. Samantha is the daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, and she grew up surrounded by the noisy, vivid, hot sounds of Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic, a language that's now on the verge of extinction. 00;00;32;29 - 00;00;53;00 J.R. Jamison This potential loss weighed on Samantha, and she set out to preserve ways to teach her son cultural history and phrases like “always carry salt.” And in her quest for preservation, she began to unpack identity and what we lose and keep from generation to generation, and also what we might need to let go of to preserve our culture and ourselves. 00;00;53;01 - 00;01;04;15 J.R. Jamison Samantha and I will walk through these experiences on today's show. Stay with us. [music] 00;01;04;17 - 00;01;40;29 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I'm J.R. Jamison, and you're listening to The Facing Project. My guest today is author and playwright Samantha Ellis, whose new memoir, Always Carries Salt, journeys through time and cultural connectivity, as she explores how to awaken her ancestors Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic language and ways to share this heritage with her son without passing on the trauma of displacement. It's a life affirming tale of resilience and the healing power of our ancestors’ music, stories and recipes. Samantha Ellis, author of Always Carry Salt, “Ashlonak,” thank you so much for joining me on the Facing Project. 00;01;41;04 - 00;01;49;24 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I should really answer. [laughter] I'm not going to answer in Arabic. I should say how- I should say “al,” which means good. 00;01;49;27 - 00;02;10;15 J.R. Jamison Jamison: And I have to say to our listeners, I learned this term from you and from your wonderful memoir, memoir. And let me say that I absolutely adored it. I think it's a wonderful read for everyone because it's an eye opening mix of Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic history, of which I knew little about. Let's be honest, I knew nothing about. 00;02;10;17 - 00;02;32;21 J.R. Jamison But it's also a book about geography, culture and language, food; and it's a story about reconciliation of home and identity. You opened the book with a scene in a park where you're talking with another young mother about the French nursery that her child attends, and how you wish your son could go there and grow up speaking two languages like you. 00;02;32;24 - 00;02;54;04 J.R. Jamison But she questions that you're not French and doesn't understand why you can't send him to school to learn your language. And it's then that you burst into tears because you hear yourself say that your language is dying. The journey of your memoir seems to have started with finding a way to preserve the Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic language, but turned into so much more that we'll get into later. 00;02;54;04 - 00;02;59;14 J.R. Jamison But talk about this defining moment and sparking desire to go on this journey. 00;02;59;16 - 00;03;39;16 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Yes, I was- My son was two, he's now eight. It's been a quite a long, long journey. And yeah, I was in a playground and, you know, I you- look, I- My parents are both Iraqi Jews, and my dad left in ‘51. My mother left in ’71. I have known all my life that our language was going extinct because there are really no Jews, well, I think three Jews left in Iraq, in the whole of Iraq, from quite a big community. In the 1940s, Baghdad was once Jewish, you know, so it really, in my parents lifetime, it's it's it's gone down so it's vanished. The community has vanished. And I knew that in the diaspora we weren't really speaking it. 00;03;39;16 - 00;04;10;18 Samantha Ellis Or, certainly my parents’ generation speak it, but they're not passing it on to thier kids generally. So I knew all of this, but there was something about having to say the words, “My language is dead,” to a stranger. That sort of broke me. And it then, I suppose- Also faced with my little child at two and thinking that he would never speak it, that, whereas this French mother was joyously speaking French with her child, who had gone to this bilingual nursery, and she was speaking to him in French and in English, and it was such a joyful thing. 00;04;10;20 - 00;04;45;12 Samantha Ellis And I thought, oh, I won't be able to do that with my little boy. And it really did. I mean, I really did burst into tears, and I couldn't go to that park for a few quite long time because I thought I would run into this woman, because I was really overemotional. And I just thought, I want to know more about it before it's gone. I want to know what efforts are being made to preserve it, and to keep it going, keep it alive in any way, if that's even possible. And then I very quickly realized you don't just preserve a language. A language is what it contains, 00;04;45;12 - 00;05;08;17 Samantha Ellis you know, what it makes. You know, audible, visible, even, you know, the, the stories, the recipes, the the relationships, the everything, you know, the myths, the rituals, you know, the the fun, you know, of people being together in that language and communicating with each other. It's not just words on the page. It's not just a dictionary or a grammar. 00;05;08;17 - 00;05;11;03 Samantha Ellis Although those, of course, are very useful too. 00;05;11;06 - 00;05;35;10 J.R. Jamison Jamison: And I mean, it was a deep dive that you did not only into the language, but as you mentioned, looking back into history and the histories of the Jewish population in Iraq, that that, as you just mentioned, has dwindled down to three at the time that you wrote this book. And I'm assuming they're probably in their 80s or 90s. 00;05;35;10 - 00;05;41;09 J.R. Jamison So it may go to zero at sometime pretty soon in the near future. 00;05;41;13 - 00;05;43;15 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Yes, it will go to zero. Yeah. 00;05;43;17 - 00;06;10;00 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yeah. And so part of this deep dive, right, is a story of displacement and forced relocation, which is why that number is is dwindling. And as you mentioned before, just a moment ago that your father left in 1951 during a period of denaturalization where the Iraqi government allowed Jews to immigrate to Israel as long as they gave up their Iraqi citizenship. 00;06;10;03 - 00;06;38;10 J.R. Jamison But what they did not know is that the Iraqi government would also seize all of their property, money and assets. At that point, 125,000 Jews had already registered to leave, and they were sent to Israel destitute and starving, with stamps on their passports that forbid them from ever returning to Iraq. I could not believe that when when I read that. Your mom didn't leave for another 20 years in 1971. 00;06;38;12 - 00;07;02;28 J.R. Jamison The Six-Day War in 1967, also known as the Arab-Israeli War, changed everything not only for Israel and the Palestinians, but also the Jews of Iraq. As you write at that time, the Baathist seized power of the country again. And to reverse the trauma of defeat, they blamed the Jews and made life impossible, to put it lightly, and also impossible to leave. 00;07;03;01 - 00;07;32;02 J.R. Jamison Her family tried to escape in 1970, but were captured, resulting in your grandfather being imprisoned for three months. Eventually, thanks to one of his patients, he was a doctor, they were able to finally escape in 1971. At the writing of your memoir, as we've talked about, there were only three Iraqi Jews left in the country. Can you talk more about this and the pressure to preserve while also facing the real haunts of generational trauma? 00;07;32;05 - 00;07;51;04 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Yeah, I mean, I didn't want- There were things I didn't want to put in the book because I was thinking about what I would pass on to my child. I don't want to pass on trauma to my child. And I grew up with these stories, you know, that were that were very difficult, you know, I mean, I had nightmares from when I was very, very young. 00;07;51;04 - 00;08;13;29 Samantha Ellis I mean, I think I was having them, you know, as a very small child, where I was, being chased through sort of desert by men with mustaches because Saddam Hussein's, the Ba’ath Parties’, secret police, the mukhabarat, they used to have these big mustaches. That's how they knew, that they were them. And, so I would have these nightmares and, you know, I was really terrified. 00;08;14;02 - 00;08;31;27 Samantha Ellis I didn't want to pass that on. But at the same time, I realized that I had all these stories sort of piecemeal, you know, they were told to me as a child. They were mixed up, you know, we were interrupted. They missed out some of the worst bits. They also, you know, I didn't know how they all linked up the chronology of them. 00;08;32;00 - 00;08;50;00 Samantha Ellis And actually, I found it incredibly, helpful, to sit down with, I sat- I was lucky enough to talk to my grandmother at length. I mean, she passed away just before the book went to print in the UK, which was over a year ago. So but she was 95. So- [She had] a very long memory. 00;08;50;02 - 00;09;18;06 Samantha Ellis And up until just- Up until the last few months, quite a good memory for these past events. And, also my parents, who had very different experiences. And, it was amazing to sit down and say, you know, “can you just tell me the story again in more detail?” It filled in all these gaps. I found it very sort of helpful, psychologically, not to have these kind of weird gaps that I- into which I had imagined all these kind of even all the horrors. 00;09;18;09 - 00;09;35;25 Samantha Ellis And yeah, I mean, there was this, you know, this, this line really from my grandmother, who, at 11, she survived the Farhud, which was these sort of, riots. Often people call it a pogrom. But we to Iraqi Jews tend to say Farhud because that's our own word, which means a sort of violent breakdown of order. 00;09;35;28 - 00;10;09;00 Samantha Ellis That happened in 1941. She was 11, my grandmother. And actually the stories she tells about that are of the people who helped her, the, the Muslim neighbors, who helped her, who told her that the mob were coming. And then when they, they, they, you know, rushed across town, to, her aunt's house, where two more sets of neighbors, Muslim neighbors, also help them and saved them, and looked after them and sheltered them for a very long time and sheltered a lot of people in that home. 00;10;09;03 - 00;10;28;27 Samantha Ellis So she really sort of. That's her sort of you know, memory of it really is of being helped, although also it was terrifying. And, you know, she was [lucky not] to experience the worst. And then, as you say, my father, he left during what's called a “tus-keet”, the nation- the denaturalization, as you said. He was 11 at the time as well of the “tus-keet”. 00;10;29;03 - 00;10;45;06 Samantha Ellis And he, his parents were keen to register. They wanted to leave. They wanted to go to Israel. They were excited to have a different kind of life. People register for all sorts of reasons. Some people register because of fear. Some people register because they thought it was, you know, exciting to have a new country to go to. 00;10;45;12 - 00;11;11;21 Samantha Ellis There were all sorts of reasons for people registering. But as I say, after they'd registered, you know, they'd signed off saying yes, like, hey, we will give up our nationality. Literally overnight a law was passed overnight in a secret session, and, people were turning up at their shops at their, you know, businesses. And there were people like, you know, locking them out of there, you know, they were police. 00;11;11;22 - 00;11;31;01 Samantha Ellis They would, you know, they they took everything. They were people. While they were there waiting for the planes to airlift them out, there was some people who were starving, you know, there was soup kitchen set up for them. And, you know, then of course, they had a very difficult time in Israel. And my father was in a transit camp for a number of years. 00;11;31;01 - 00;11;50;27 Samantha Ellis And the conditions there were not amazing. And then, yes, my mother was born in ‘51, so. And she didn't leave in ’51, she and her family, decided to stay. My grandfather on my mother's side was not a Zionist, and he didn't really want to go to Israel. And he had an instinct that, you know, they might be living in a tent for a long time. 00;11;50;27 - 00;12;09;23 Samantha Ellis And he was, you know, he liked his comforts and, you know, he he didn't want to leave his home. And he thought you know, maybe things will be easier afterwards. You know, it'll be a small community. No one's going to bother us. And actually, the ‘50s. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. The ’50s were good. We're good in Iraq for the Jews. 00;12;09;23 - 00;12;32;29 Samantha Ellis You know, largely it was peaceful. It was calm. But as he said this, the ‘60s became very difficult. And from the Six-Day War in 1967 onwards, really, really impossible. And I, I knew when I was very young, I knew that my mother and her whole family had been in prison. I knew all these little bits of stories that were very difficult to handle. 00;12;33;01 - 00;12;58;26 Samantha Ellis And, but it's a real question for me about what I pass on that I felt that, in the book, I ought to just tell the stories as plainly as I can and without, there's so much opinion about all of this, you know, there's so much, there's a lot of, people wanting to manipulate the our stories different ways as well as to ignore them as well as to erase them. 00;12;58;28 - 00;13;19;29 Samantha Ellis And I just thought I had the chance with these three family members to tell a really big sweep of history, just simply just what happened, just what they told me. With, you know, as much research to give as much context as I could. And then, you know, it's just it's despair because actually, the story of the Jews of Iraq in the ‘60s is hardly ever been told. 00;13;19;29 - 00;13;43;04 Samantha Ellis Most books end in 1951. And, I felt that that was important. And I, I hope, I don't know. And the other thing that it was a great pleasure for me, right. Writing the book was I, I started to think, well, yes, we do possible generational trauma, but I also think we pass on these strategies for survival and, for resilience. 00;13;43;07 - 00;13;58;26 Samantha Ellis And I really hope that I have maybe become more intentional about doing that. And maybe that's something that I can do for with my child. And, you know, maybe the book can help all the people do that in their own communities. [music] 00;13;58;29 - 00;14;23;13 J.R. Jamison Jamison: As you were having these conversations with your family, right, with your mom, with your grandmother, with others, did you ever feel, as you were growing up, some of these stories weren't recounted or told in the way you were hearing them now because they didn't want to pass on generational trauma, even though, right, we know you write about this, too, right, 00;14;23;13 - 00;14;43;16 J.R. Jamison it kind of lives in our DNA... But but passing, not passing on the story as a way to kind of put up a layer of protection. Did any of that come out in conversations with them on kind of learning your history and not knowing parts of your history as you were growing up? 00;14;43;19 - 00;15;05;04 Samantha Ellis Ellis: This is going to sound this might sound a bit negative, but I feel like I knew [everything] I probably knew too much. I don't think I was protected from it as much. I think my family were quite traumatized. I, I, I, you know, I don't my- I was born four years after my mother and grandmother and that whole- that whole side of the family left Iraq. 00;15;05;04 - 00;15;34;25 Samantha Ellis And there was often no filter, you know, and, if I didn't know the whole story, it was because I, you know, I was a I was a child and I had missed bits. But no, there weren't- there was one, there was one. There was one big surprises. There was one big detail. My mother was describing her experience, when, over 100, Iraqi Jews were rounded up as they were trying to escape and they were all put into, not a standard prison, 00;15;34;25 - 00;15;53;28 Samantha Ellis it was actually a sort of, Baha'i building, you know, for the Baha'i sect. And it was, just a big building. And it had sort of, raked [theater]- raked seats almost like in a theater. And that I always knew. And then what my mother told me was at the end of the room, they had nooses just hanging there. 00;15;53;28 - 00;16;15;04 Samantha Ellis And I had never been told that. And I, I had imagined this room so many times and had so many stories about this room where they were in prison. And this new detail really, really threw me and is still something I’m, you know, finding difficult to... 00;16;15;07 - 00;16;15;18 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Process. 00;16;15;18 - 00;16;17;15 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Process and remember. Yeah. 00;16;17;18 - 00;16;35;02 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Wow. Did she talk about, in that moment, was it, I don't want to say healing, but did she feel any kind of weight lifted telling you this story? Did you have any conversation around that? 00;16;35;04 - 00;16;59;00 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I know that for my family, the the book coming out and the mostly warm reception it's had, has been really, helpful. And I mean, they I mean, they've been amazing. I couldn't have written this without my family, I’ve got to say that. My mother as well read draft after draft for me and, and make corrections was extremely helpful and also said, “oh, you've missed this.” 00;16;59;00 - 00;17;19;07 Samantha Ellis And I, you know, delighted to be able to fill in things that I've missed. I mean, it was fantastic. But, yeah, I mean, I think there's a- I think our history has been so hidden that there's been a sort of helpfulness to being seen that, we all feel we need we this desire to be seen and understood. 00;17;19;09 - 00;17;43;18 Samantha Ellis And there's a lot of erasure going on at the moment. And it was very, very helpful just to have it set down. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's been helpful. And in the moment of telling me these stories, you know, we, you know, we were together, we had a h- you know, it was I hope there was some, I hope it's helpful to talk about these things. 00;17;43;20 - 00;17;44;17 Samantha Ellis Yeah. 00;17;44;20 - 00;18;09;04 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I think, too, your book is timely in many ways. Right. Because it is teaching others about, the, the Iraqi, the Jewish-Iraqi-Arabic language and culture. But we're also living at a time where so many people are being displaced around the world. And I think there's so many stories coming at us in so many different way, different ways 00;18;09;04 - 00;18;36;17 J.R. Jamison at so many different times. It's hard to wrap your head around, at least for me. I know it's hard to wrap my head around all the stories, you know, and as I was looking into this, there was a June 2025 report from the UN refugee agency that indicated 117 million individuals worldwide were forcibly displaced due to persecution, violence or human rights violations, and that 1 in 70 people on earth had been forced to flee their homes. 00;18;36;19 - 00;19;09;22 J.R. Jamison You write in the book, after Russia invaded Ukraine, you read playwright Natalya Vorozhbyt’s account of the imperfect, painful decision of what to take as she fled. And ultimately she decided upon her mom, her cat, money and IDs, her jewelry, and she regretted leaving behind her photos, her plants, her food in the freezer. And then you reflected on your dad having to leave Iraq with only one suitcase and your mom fleeing with her family, and you wondered what you would take if you had to flee England. 00;19;09;24 - 00;19;33;08 J.R. Jamison I think that's a really powerful exercise, and it made me think about displacement in a different kind of personal way. And I want our listeners just to take a moment. If they're driving, don't close your eyes or anything, but I just want them to take a moment to think about what they would take in a suitcase or less, if they had to flee the U.S., and where they would go. For me, 00;19;33;08 - 00;19;48;11 J.R. Jamison you know, I thought about this as a reading your book, for me, similar to Natalya, I'd take my husband, our dog, I couldn't leave our dog behind. But then I was in the shower yesterday thinking about this again, and I'm like, but what about the dog? The dog food? Would we have room for food? Right? There's so many things to think about. 00;19;48;18 - 00;20;10;15 J.R. Jamison But in that immediate moment I'm like, oh, of course I take my husband and I take my dog, I take our money and IDs, I take our laptops because I'm a writer, right? I have so much of my stuff on my laptop, it's like, I take my laptop, but I probably yeah, I have to leave behind my plants that all through Covid, I got really into kind of having a green thumb and really nurturing these plants around. 00;20;10;18 - 00;20;34;16 J.R. Jamison Yeah, just like you. And you have to leave them behind knowing, as Natalya said, that they would die. Right. And I also think about how much of my past I would have to leave behind. Like, what makes me, me, and how that would possibly just be forgotten to time. And it really puts into perspective when, when when someone has when you have to think about it and kind of that way. 00;20;34;18 - 00;20;40;09 J.R. Jamison What do you think these types of reflective exercises teach us about empathy? 00;20;40;12 - 00;20;58;15 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I mean, thank you for that response because, yeah, I found reading this, account by this Ukrainian writer about what she had to leave just so devastating. At the same time as I was thinking about it. I think it's it's quite important to think about what you would do in that situation, to put yourself in people's shoes. 00;20;58;15 - 00;21;19;01 Samantha Ellis I, I think we could all do with more empathy and nuance and understanding and listening, you know, I really want that to be a big part of the book, that I would be trying to do more of that and hopefully that other people might then do it in their own communities. But also outside of that, 00;21;19;03 - 00;21;32;25 Samantha Ellis I mean, one thing I really learned is the, the question of what you would take is not it's not made in the way that we are talking about it now, with the luxury of not being about to leave. 00;21;32;28 - 00;21;57;08 Samantha Ellis And that, you know, I mean, there were all these stories about Iraqi Jews leaving, particularly in ‘51, and having things confiscated. At the, at the, at the airport. And, they were not allowed to take certain things. There are stories. There are also quite fun stories about the way they smuggle things out. The way [things were] smuggled out inside cooked chickens. 00;21;57;10 - 00;22;20;05 Samantha Ellis And the kind of- There’s a sweet story my grandmother used to tell me about this woman she knew who, who secretly baked all her jewelry into a cake. Didn't tell the rest of the family because she didn't want them to get into trouble or to sort of. You know, be at risk. And then, to her horror, there was someone who was actually very nice to them, this official at the airport and her husband said, “here, take this cake my wife baked.” [laughter] 00;22;20;08 - 00;22;22;06 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Oh no! 00;22;22;09 - 00;22;26;00 Samantha Ellis Ellis: And then the wife was just like, “no!” 00;22;26;02 - 00;22;45;25 Samantha Ellis But you know that these decisions are not, you know, people have to leave in a hurry. They have to leave under enormous pressure. You know, they that- things are confiscated from them and taken from them. And, you know, our ideal list. It's not. Yeah. It's not like getting together your holiday caps, your wardrobe, you know. 00;22;45;27 - 00;22;46;24 J.R. Jamison Jamison: [laughter] Right. 00;22;46;26 - 00;23;10;18 Samantha Ellis Ellis: It's it is so- The pressure's on- that was what was revelatory for me, the pressures on these decisions and then how that sort of then reverberates, you know, down the generations because I mean, because my dad left young, you know, at 11 and he took, you know, things a child would take, you know, and a lot of those things then got lost in the transit camp when he was in Israel and so on. 00;23;10;20 - 00;23;13;25 Samantha Ellis I don't think we've got anything, from, from. 00;23;13;27 - 00;23;34;13 Samantha Ellis From Iraq that he had in Iraq. Nothing. And I've never seen a photo of him in Iraq. And, that makes me really sad, you know. I mean, I'm so, I'm a modern modern mama. I send hundreds of photos of my child to my parents every week. You know, they absolutely, you know, bombarded by them. 00;23;34;15 - 00;23;46;19 Samantha Ellis And I don't know what my dad's childhood, you know, looked like. Really. And that makes me really sad. So these decisions do reverberate, you know, I would say take photos if you can take them. 00;23;46;22 - 00;23;47;27 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yeah. 00;23;48;00 - 00;23;53;08 Samantha Ellis Ellis: That's what people really. I think that's what really feels sad to have lost, you know. 00;23;53;11 - 00;24;23;12 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I mean, one thing that's stood out to me is that displacement does ultimately in some ways lead to erasure, like we've talked about. I mean, all the things you just mentioned, right? Heirlooms that would typically get passed down from generation to generation or photographs of our family and histories, those things get left behind and they're not passed on, and that history is lost to time. 00;24;23;12 - 00;24;34;08 J.R. Jamison So force removal and displacement isn't just that in and of itself. It's also an attempt at erasure of complete cultures and and identity. 00;24;34;11 - 00;24;58;17 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Yes. And I think, you know, I mean, even things that should be portable, like music, you know. So there was this amazing, there was this amazing heritage of Iraqi Jewish music in Iraq, in the- from the ‘20s up until the late and up until 1951, most Iraqi Jewish musicians, sorry, most Iraqi musicians were Jewish. 00;24;58;19 - 00;25;25;13 Samantha Ellis And, I mean, they really sort of dominated the kind of musical scene. And it was partly for this, this extraordinary story there was this blind school set up by a Jewish philanthropist. And, it was open to non-Jews as well. But mostly Jewish kids went and, the headmaster of the school, and the idea was to train blind children in skills that so that they would, you know, historically, if you were blind, you might end up begging on the streets in Iraq. 00;25;25;13 - 00;26;04;27 Samantha Ellis And this was a way of making sure that they could have meaningful careers and support themselves, and just have better lives. And, you know, they've trained them in all sorts of things. But there was this, a particular headmaster who had this idea of training to be musicians and ended up being like a almost a conservatoire. And so many of these, Jewish blind musicians, were, you know, they were part of this Iraq state radio band, and they were, you know, they would often perform for Muslim women who were comfortable unveiling in front of these, these musicians because even though they were men, they couldn't see them. 00;26;04;29 - 00;26;40;00 Samantha Ellis And so there was all these sort of trademark sort of dark glasses and, you know, just really, this amazing tradition, and, and afterwards, in Iraq, their songs were often played on the radio and people would say, oh, it was just a folk song. Or we don’t know who the composer was, it's anonymous. And actually Saddam Hussein was so annoyed and exercised by the sheer quantity of Jewish music being played on the radio that he, he spearheaded this committee to erase their names. 00;26;40;02 - 00;26;59;25 Samantha Ellis And the Iraqi Jewish musicians who moved to Israel found that there was there was pressure there, not to play Arabic music. It was seen as the music of the enemy. Just the language was seen as the language of the enemy, even though it is its own language. And and then again, they were, you know, their music was erased there as well. 00;26;59;28 - 00;27;24;11 Samantha Ellis It is now in Israel having a massive revival. I think there is, across the Middle East, a kind of recognition that these artists were Jewish and, you know, and that they did have these identities in these stories. So it is changing. But for a long time, you know, it's heartbreaking to read about these musicians who were the absolute, you know, stars of their era. 00;27;24;14 - 00;27;29;29 Samantha Ellis And, finding in their own lifetimes that no one knew who they were. 00;27;30;01 - 00;27;56;28 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Wow. And their stories are just either untold or are told in a way that really doesn't honor who they were as people. Keeping on this topic of stories, you write that in Noreen Masud's memoir, A Flat Place, she shares that some people say trauma is untellable, but she believes that traumatized people do know how to tell their stories. 00;27;57;06 - 00;28;15;20 J.R. Jamison What's actually difficult is that often times people don't know how to hear them. And I think that's so true that listening to understand has become a lost art. I also think about just all of the competing priorities in people's lives, and also how we're living at this time, right? Where we're kind of going from video reel to video reel. 00;28;15;20 - 00;28;35;09 J.R. Jamison I mean, I'm guilty of this too, right? Like I get lost in my phone and suddenly I'm like, wait, I came on here just to, like, look up a number. But suddenly I've spent 20 minutes, right, getting lost in my phone. [laughter] Right. So all these things like being thrown at us, I think causes our ability to fully listen to kind of go down or go away. 00;28;35;11 - 00;28;42;27 J.R. Jamison How do you hope telling your family's story through your memoir will or could open pathways for listening and understanding? 00;28;43;00 - 00;29;05;02 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I, I'm I'm a big fan of showing your workings. You know, like I, I, I'm happy to, show how ignorant and stupid I am. And, at the beginning of the journey, because there were so many things I did not know. And then, you know, really just to kind of chart a process of learning. And, I mean, I'm happy to do that because it's, I think, a more honest way to do it. 00;29;05;02 - 00;29;26;11 Samantha Ellis But also maybe it's helpful because actually, I think, I think we've we have lost a lot of the ability to listen and, you know, really understand. But I think some of that is because we feel like we ought to know already and, you know, and why should we know already about everything about other people, you know, or even about people in our own family? 00;29;26;13 - 00;29;55;08 Samantha Ellis You know, we all have a lot to learn and, and, and, and I think it's really important to not put this pressure on us to think that we know everything, to be able to ask, well, what is it like to be you? What is your story? How does it feel? And and then if it if and also it might and to understand that it might not be what you were expecting and it might not be clear and you might have to ask a 100 more questions to go, 00;29;55;08 - 00;30;08;02 Samantha Ellis “I really I really want to understand, but I don't. Can you can you tell me more?” You know. “Well, can you tell me again?” Or, you know, because I think it really is hard to understand another person. 00;30;08;04 - 00;30;37;02 Samantha Ellis And. I think we should honor how hard it is in the complexity of it, and particularly when there were sort of competing viewpoints and competing narratives. Again, we have to listen to everyone. We need to like, try, I think. So I'm hoping by sort of laying bare how that process was for me that other people might be able to, you know, do that work in their own lives with people they know, with their friends, with their family, and with strangers. 00;30;37;02 - 00;30;42;07 Samantha Ellis You know? And and the more you do that, people become not strangers, of course. 00;30;42;09 - 00;30;48;08 J.R. Jamison Jamison: And the easier it becomes, too, to practice kind of that listening and empathy muscle. Right. 00;30;48;08 - 00;30;49;29 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Yeah. I think so, yeah. 00;30;49;29 - 00;31;10;18 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yeah, yeah. You write too, that part of preserving identity is about language and that language is not just words, it's notation, it's gesture, it's facial expressions, it's volume, it's emotion, it's style. You go on to write that understanding language provides us with curiosity and empathy and wonder, all at high speeds. 00;31;10;21 - 00;31;12;07 J.R. Jamison Tell me more about this. 00;31;12;09 - 00;31;39;05 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I was really trying to pin down, what is this language? What is it? And, it's yeah, so much of it is the volume, the speed, the vibe. You know, it's a very colorful language. You know, it's full of these kind of crazy phrases. The UK title of the book was Chopping Onions on My Heart, because this is a phrase that you say in Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic, which, is, you know, it's like rubbing salt in the wound. I could say to you, 00;31;39;08 - 00;31;43;13 Samantha Ellis “What do you mean? You’re chopping onions on my heart!” You know, it's very melodramatic. I mean, it really is. 00;31;43;13 - 00;31;45;09 J.R. Jamison Jamison: It's really vivid, right? Like. 00;31;45;11 - 00;32;06;27 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Quite vivid. You, you're chopping, You're not only just chopping on someone's vital organ, but actually the heart, the organ of feeling, you know, and you're chopping a vegetable associated with stinging and tears. You know, and it really kind of goes overboard. And there's a lot like that. There's there's, you know, it's a very sort of sinewy language, you know, it's it's very alive. 00;32;06;27 - 00;32;35;14 Samantha Ellis It's very, I don’t know, vivid, you know, you know, it sounds vivid. I don't know what the word is. And I just wanted to sort of get across the feel of it because, I mean, I suppose, I actually I'm delighted lots of readers have gone and listened to it because there are these all these archives, which I've sort of tried to link to at the end so that people can go and listen to it, but a lot of people will never meet an Iraqi Jew and have a conversation with them. 00;32;35;14 - 00;32;57;02 Samantha Ellis So, you know, this is kind of you know, it's just a way of getting it across. And yes, I think in terms of kind of empathy, I, I thought it isn't just the words. What is someone telling you in the way they, you know, where their hands are? You know, our hands are, you know, I'm actually fiddling here with a, while I’m talking to you, a pen because otherwise, my hands are always up in the air. 00;32;57;05 - 00;33;06;13 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yeah. Same [unintelligible] Same I have. I have my ring that I'm, like, twirling on my finger. Yeah. [unintelligible, laughter] 00;33;06;13 - 00;33;28;01 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I was really interested. So I was, one of the stories that I was fascinated to kind of research with Siegfried Sassoon, who is Iraqi Jewish on his father's side. But he never knew really knew about it because his family were estranged and his father died when he was young, and he just never really had that sort of, you know, connection to that side of his family. 00;33;28;04 - 00;33;52;13 Samantha Ellis And, I was really interested while he was at university, the same university I went to, he was told that his gestures were too big, to keep it down. So was I, you know, there's quite a lot of years that separate us. Yes. This is still going on. And, he was, felt very, you know, he's always read as this poet who is sort of, you know, tortured and repressed. 00;33;52;15 - 00;34;16;06 Samantha Ellis And I always assume that was because he was queer and he was not able to be out. And because he was a pacifist in a time of war. But actually, maybe part of it was also his ethnic identity and his cultural identity. He was an Iraqi Jew when he did not really know how to be one. And, you know, he, he even though he didn't really, identify as an Iraqi Jew, he experienced significant anti-Semitism. 00;34;16;06 - 00;34;38;18 Samantha Ellis And, you know, he internalized some of it. And I, you know, I probably I don't know if he ever really if I don't know if he ever even heard the language. And I, I feel that feels quite sort of devastating to me. So I suppose I was thinking about if you didn't hear the language, but his hands still, you know, naturally went up. 00;34;38;20 - 00;34;39;08 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yeah, yeah. 00;34;39;14 - 00;34;42;09 Samantha Ellis Ellis: You know, there was some part of him that was doing it. 00;34;42;12 - 00;34;43;04 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yeah. 00;34;43;07 - 00;34;49;26 Samantha Ellis Ellis: [Or thinking it,] that was being Iraqi Jewish or speaking to Iraqi Arabic, even if he only ever spoke in English. You know. 00;34;49;28 - 00;35;17;11 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I was so fascinated by his story. And the amba, right, like the Iraqi, the Iraqi Jewish mango pickle and how that's connected to his story and his family. And also, as you were doing your research, you realize that really this the the mango pickle maybe didn't originate in Iraq, right? Like it was in India. And it kind of shifted, in some way, 00;35;17;11 - 00;35;42;10 J.R. Jamison your thoughts about stories we tell in culture and identity. What did kind of learning more about his story, which is kind of sad and tragic in many ways. Right. Because it's about decisions that don't just happen. It's because of history and chance and time. And what's happening at that time. But what did kind of reading about him learning more about his story teach you, 00;35;42;10 - 00;35;50;15 J.R. Jamison and right, in the amba pickle connected to all of this, kind of, teach you about your own identity and reclaiming your identity? 00;35;50;17 - 00;36;13;13 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I mean, I really, in the end read his story as a sort of story of assimilation and and quite a sad story, you know, very quickly, his family went, you know, he became his branch of the family became very assimilated. Really in one generation, his it was his supposedly his great grandfather who invented amba, the mango pickle, 00;36;13;15 - 00;36;38;06 Samantha Ellis when he was in India and where there was a sort of satellite community of Iraqi Jews, he'd fled persecution in Iraq and he'd gone to India. And supposedly he tasted these mangoes and really wanted to share them with his friends back home and realized they wouldn't travel. They had the idea of pickling them. It almost certainly wasn't him, but it it almost certainly was one of this community, that did it. 00;36;38;08 - 00;37;00;18 Samantha Ellis I mean, maybe it was him, but, you know, he he had a sort of international business empire and 14 children. So [laughter] I don’t know how much time he had. So sort of, you know, pickling. But anyway, and he, you know, he kept the, Iraqi Jewish language and culture going even for the generations that he was out of Iraq. And in fact, his, business, 00;37;00;18 - 00;37;21;08 Samantha Ellis one of the reasons it's so well was that they used to communicate in Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic. And so it was almost like a code. No one else could read their sort of, you know, their letters. And it was very helpful to, you know, to have this kind of business code that they could use, and, you know, but within, you know, very quickly, within a couple of generations, it was gone. 00;37;21;10 - 00;37;46;10 Samantha Ellis But, and I was quite, so I've always been had this feeling of chasing authenticity, you know, and I think this is very, this is a thing that happens a lot to children of immigrants and refugees that we are desperately trying to be authentic, but we can't because we aren't born there or we can't go there or, you know, so we're definitely trying to be, you know, be what our parents are, but we can't do it. 00;37;46;13 - 00;38;05;20 Samantha Ellis And, you know, frustrated that things have been lost and let go of and, you know, it's very it's quite it can be quite painful. And so, for example, I used to cook, Iraqi Jewish food almost with my phone in my hand, you know, mom, do you how do you how do you do the rice when you say, you know a cup, do you mean this cup or that cup? 00;38;05;22 - 00;38;32;23 Samantha Ellis And, how much turmeric, you know, and really just very stressed. Not enjoying the cooking, not, you know, playing with it. And I used to hate fusion food. I used to think it was, you know, betrayal and, you know, wrong. And why can't you do the cooking the real way and the authentic way? And I mean, I, I recognize now that it was partly because I was worried I was sort of a fusion person, you know, there I was, you know, living in London, writing books about the Brontës, you know. 00;38;32;26 - 00;38;34;19 J.R. Jamison Jamison: [laughter] 00;38;34;21 - 00;38;47;09 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I, I am assimilated, you know, in many, many ways. And actually discovering the amba, the iconic Iraqi Jewish pickle, really is our sort of it's our sort of essence, you know? It’s what we have at every single meal. 00;38;47;12 - 00;39;17;09 Samantha Ellis Discovering that it was invented by homesick, it's resonated Iraqi Jews outside of Iraq. It was a fusion food, you know, came from their encounter with Indian mangoes. Actually freed me up. I just thought, I mean, that is authentic. And it is fusion. It's both. We can't be drawing these lines, so I have to kind of, you know, am I condemned to kind of always cook these recipes exactly the way my mum did? 00;39;17;09 - 00;39;33;02 Samantha Ellis She doesn't do it the way her mum did or her grandmother. You know, she's adds more cumin here or less turmeric there or whatever, you know, why can't I be playful? It's actually sort of made me feel I should own my culture a bit more my identity and play with it a bit more and enjoy it and experiment with it. 00;39;33;04 - 00;39;50;13 Samantha Ellis And maybe that's a kind of lighter way to hand it on, you know, to be loose with it. So, I mean, I mean, there was a great moment early on where we were trying to teach my son, he was only two at the time, what to call these date pastries; we call them makhboose. And he couldn't say ‘kh.’ 00;39;50;18 - 00;39;53;01 Samantha Ellis So he was “mataboose.” 00;39;53;04 - 00;40;05;12 Samantha Ellis But, I mean, we still call the “mataboose” now, in my family, you know? Years on he [can’t] say it, his accent actually is quite good. And I thought, oh no, this is how language dies. And then I thought, no, no, this is how language survives and grows. 00;40;05;14 - 00;40;23;16 Samantha Ellis I mean, it it it we're all, you know, he now can say it. We will continue to say it properly, you know, when we're not around the kids, but I don't mind. I mean, you know, we have to be able to be playful with our identity, with our culture. To enjoy that. 00;40;23;16 - 00;40;26;00 Samantha Ellis They are us as well. You know. 00;40;26;03 - 00;40;28;25 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yeah. [music] 00;40;28;27 - 00;41;11;09 J.R. Jamison Jamison: You you write about sleeping languages. You kind of shift from dying language to saying sleeping languages. And you write about, Native American languages that have been re-awoken, right. And some of this is kind of creation of words, because words that we use in modern day weren't words that were used when that language was fully alive. Is this kind of that same shift to do you think, as you're thinking about, the language and the food and it's not necessarily fusion, but it's kind of a moving into a new generation of thought around that language and keeping it alive, 00;41;11;09 - 00;41;12;28 J.R. Jamison are these connected? 00;41;13;00 - 00;41;35;22 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I don't know if I, I mean, I hope that people say it properly, the words, I suppose, going forward, but I think better to be saying it all than not. And, you know, that was quite liberating for me. But this concept of sleeping languages was absolutely revelatory to me because I just was so frustrated, partly by this language around, endangerment and extinction of languages. 00;41;35;28 - 00;41;59;15 Samantha Ellis It made it sounds as though, it was an agentless process, you know, it just happens. It's, you know, it's just happening. We can't stop it. It's, you know, what can we do? And actually, it's not I realized that almost all languages that disappear or even that dwindle, there's a lot of violence. There's a lot of decisions as oppression that's, you know, they don't just go. 00;41;59;17 - 00;42;21;10 Samantha Ellis And it's not that we've been careless with it. It, you know, these were decisions that were made for our community. And, and we have no choices in. And, and, it's Wesley Leonard, this amazing linguist. He speaks in Myaamia language. He, had this idea of sleeping languages that can be kissed back to life. 00;42;21;13 - 00;42;45;04 Samantha Ellis And he talks about the paradox of speaking an extinct language. And I love these stories of people being told their language is extinct. And actually it isn't. And, there's another amazing story from close to home for me, from the Isle of Man in Britain, where this, primary school full of Manx children who were told Manx was, it was extinct. 00;42;45;07 - 00;43;02;18 Samantha Ellis Wrote a letter in Manx, to the UN, I believe, saying, if our language is extinct, what language are we writing this letter in? And of course they had to translate it. But I love the sort of gumption of these kids, you know? And, sleeping means it can be kissed back to life. But I think it, you know, it needs a lot of love. 00;43;02;18 - 00;43;23;20 Samantha Ellis And I really love the work in, the US of the Endangered Language Alliance in New York, which really has a focus on revitalizing languages and allowing people to speak them, in whatever way they can. And it also, their co-director, Ross Perlin, wrote this amazing book, Language Nation, and he says, you don't have to be a speaker. 00;43;23;20 - 00;43;43;28 Samantha Ellis You can be a keeper. And I found this revelatory, because I’m not a good speaker, really a speaker at all. But maybe I can be a keeper. Maybe if I just have, you know, my 10 or 20 phrases, you know, my 100 or so words that something it's better than nothing. And I can go from where I am rather than from where I wish I was. 00;43;44;00 - 00;44;09;17 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I want to go back to this conversation on generational trauma, and you talk openly in the book about going to a therapist, and your therapist suggested about the baggage of the past and that you needed to leave it behind, but you were like, no, it's important to keep these stories and keep them alive. But your therapist said okay and agreed, but asked you to do sifting. 00;44;09;20 - 00;44;14;10 J.R. Jamison Can you talk about that process and what did that help you discover? 00;44;14;13 - 00;44;34;11 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Yeah, I found this revelatory, the idea that you don't leave everything behind, but you can sift, there's a few things that I really wanted to sift. I mean, there's a lot of, in Iraq-Jewish culture, especially around women, there's a lot of shame, as in a lot of Middle Eastern cultures. That's not something I want to be a big part of 00;44;34;11 - 00;44;52;28 Samantha Ellis my life anymore. And, you know, I don't want anyone to pass that on to my son. And, you know, I thought it was quite, it was quite useful just to say. Okay, obviously. I mean, I don't know, it's very hard to decide not to pass things on, but to think, okay, I'm going to try not to pass that on. 00;44;53;01 - 00;45;12;07 Samantha Ellis There's with the recipes as well. There are a few foods, I just don't like. I don't have to eat them just because they are the cuisine of my culture. You know, I, other people will cook them. And, you know, I'm not trying to be a spokesperson for everything, all the time. And it was just quite, you know, good to go, 00;45;12;10 - 00;45;37;04 Samantha Ellis you know, I also, I am, I like cumin more than my mum. I'm going to put more in, that's fine, you know, just to make these decisions. So from the big to the small, I guess, and, I think in terms of the difficult stories, what I was trying what I am trying to do is tell the stories, so that my son knows them and he knows where he comes from. 00;45;37;04 - 00;45;59;18 Samantha Ellis And I think knowing where you come from is really useful in knowing where you're going in life and everything and feeling rooted, but without too much of the emotional charge. Obviously, this is a kind of difficult thing to do, but, you know, to, to tell them at his level and allow him to ask questions. I look, I'm sure my parents were trying to do the exact same thing. 00;45;59;18 - 00;46;17;14 Samantha Ellis And, you know, we all fail and succeed in our own ways. But I love this idea that it's not all or nothing. It's very easy to feel that you have to be the custodian or the spokesperson or, you know, the archivist. Every single thing must be saved. And we have so little, so we have to save every last scrap. 00;46;17;17 - 00;46;26;19 Samantha Ellis Well, we can also make decisions. We're also in charge of our own, you know, stories. And I found this quite helpful. 00;46;26;21 - 00;46;40;19 J.R. Jamison Jamison: There's a moment you write about in the book related to this, a Yom Kippur service that you attended via Zoom with Rachel Rose Reid. Could you recount that story for our listeners? 00;46;40;22 - 00;47;08;06 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Yeah. So Rachel Rose Reid is in the UK and she's a Kohenet, which is a sort of priestess, you know, sort of Hebrew priestess. It's a it's a it's a reclamation of a sort of an old idea, that women, can be sort of powerful, you know, within ritual in this way. And, she held this Yom Kippur service over zoom, and, I had not realized. 00;47;08;06 - 00;47;28;00 Samantha Ellis I mean, I'm not particularly religious, but I have always gone to synagogue. I hadn't realized that Yom Kippur has this idea of letting go of your vows. The ones that do not serve you, the ones that are not helpful. Promises you made that you shouldn't have made. And, that that is part of it. It's it. 00;47;28;03 - 00;47;46;20 Samantha Ellis I hadn't I hadn't understood that that is part of the service that we have this mechanism for letting go. And, and during the service, they were the most amazing. There was someone on the zoom who'd always, enjoyed fasting on Yom Kippur because they had, an eating disorder. And it was the one time no one was telling them to eat. 00;47;46;23 - 00;48;04;21 Samantha Ellis And I'm going to let go of that and have a meal, because actually, it's it was not useful to be fasting on Yom Kippur. They’d done enough fasting in their life. And I found this quite incredibly moving. You know, having a meaningful Yom Kippur might for that person mean having a meal because they were able to do it. 00;48;04;23 - 00;48;26;03 Samantha Ellis And, the people were letting go of all sorts of things. And I did really feel a sense of sifting of almost kind of clouds of flour, kind of, you know, and keeping the bits I needed, you know, it's something I've tried to keep doing because you don't do it once, you know, it's a lifelong thing, I think, like to mask. 00;48;26;05 - 00;48;50;01 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Part of this letting go, too, you write about how you had read Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother. And it helped you become unstuck because she wrote about visiting Ghana not to reclaim her African heritage, but for the rupture of the story, the idea of making value out of reckoning with the slave trade, and trying to understand how it still affects descendants of enslaved people. 00;48;50;04 - 00;48;54;11 J.R. Jamison What happened once you became unstuck? What did this open up for you? 00;48;54;13 - 00;49;11;01 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I, yes, I mean, she had this thing about the rupture is the story. For me, the rupture is the story. So she's not trying to get back to this kind of pre-, you know, pre-fall kind of, you know, Garden of Eden sort of life that may or may not have been what it was. You know she's trying to look at the rupture. 00;49;11;01 - 00;49;45;04 Samantha Ellis At- And I felt that actually there was a point where I had to look at the rupture, the fact that we cannot go back to Iraq. Look at that trauma. Look at that displacement. Look at what that's done to my family, to me. You know what it's still doing. And sort of sit with it, you know, not try and just kind of go, oh, I wish we could go back to this wonderfulness that may or may not have been wonderful and, you know, valorize this kind of lost, you know, Garden of Eden, life. 00;49;45;06 - 00;50;11;26 Samantha Ellis I, I, I, I felt that was more healing than actually than ignoring it or, you know, and it's not about wallowing. It's just about looking at it, sitting with it, giving it its space. It felt very helpful to me. Because there is a rupture. We can't deny that. And it's it is still is the impact is still being felt and not just by my community. 00;50;11;26 - 00;50;17;15 Samantha Ellis You know, what happens to the Iraqi Jews ripples out to the whole of the Middle East. 00;50;17;17 - 00;50;44;11 J.R. Jamison Jamison: A somewhat of an aside to this. You're also a playwright and worked on the first two Paddington films. There's also a connection to Paddington and Always Carry Salt when you're exploring fictional stories of heroes throughout time, who made new homes and planted and new places. And you list Paddington as one such example. Do you think you were subconsciously drawn to work on the Paddington films due to this connection? 00;50;44;13 - 00;51;08;18 Samantha Ellis Ellis: [laughter] Well, I know the part of the reason that Paul King, who wrote and directed the Paddington films, very kindly let me join some of that adventure was because I knew and had experienced through my family or my parents my parents had experience of, you know, having to leave your home and having to find a new home and they wanted that to be a huge part of the story. 00;51;08;21 - 00;51;25;11 Samantha Ellis And I did feel, I mean, I love working on those first two films. I felt that it was important for kids to have, a story that they could understand at a level that they could understand it about, this, this, this bear 00;51;25;11 - 00;51;49;01 Samantha Ellis who comes to a new country where he's not welcome at first, and then he finds a home and he is welcome. And, he finds all the sort of misfits and outsiders and oddballs to kind of connect with, and, is becomes a valued part of the community. I find it incredibly moving. And, yeah. So it was definitely a huge part of working on that. 00;51;49;01 - 00;51;51;26 Samantha Ellis And I, it was a privilege to do it. 00;51;51;28 - 00;52;01;20 J.R. Jamison Jamison: How has working on this book been different from your other mediums, and what from this journey do you think that you'll carry over into your other work? 00;52;01;22 - 00;52;18;19 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I think both the working on it and the response to it so far and hopefully continuing, has been completely different. I have had, the most extraordinary, I mean, you know, as I said, my last two books were mainly about the Brontës, and people will write to me and go, “I think you were really wrong about Charlotte.” 00;52;18;24 - 00;52;29;21 Samantha Ellis And they're very [divided.] And I’m very happy, very happy to continue having those conversations. You know, I really enjoy those, but it's been totally different. People have been writing to me going, “you don't know me, but we are fifth cousins.” What? [laughter] 00;52;29;21 - 00;52;31;20 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Wow! 00;52;31;26 - 00;53;04;11 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I mean, amazing things like that. And, people have written to me saying, I have one Iraqi Jewish relative and, you know, it's been completely lost in my family. And this has helped me piece together the jigsaw of my family story. And, I did a, a conversation over zoom last week with an Iraqi Jew in Melbourne, Australia, who, as a result of writing the book, had setting up a sort of community gathering for all Iraqi Jews and about Iraqi Jews, in order to keep the culture going in a way that it hasn't been. 00;53;04;13 - 00;53;18;21 Samantha Ellis And, they're doing a monthly event and, oh, it was just the most amazing thing. In Toronto, a group of Iraqi Jews who read my book are having, they found the speaker to teach them the language and they’re having classes. 00;53;18;22 - 00;53;19;14 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Oh wow. 00;53;19;16 - 00;53;41;16 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I mean, none of this. So, I mean, obviously, I'm thrilled about all of this, and I'm thrilled it's been impactful for other people. But I'm very grateful because it's impactful for me to know that it's resonated with people in that way, and that there is this kind of, you know, swirl of us around the world. 00;53;41;18 - 00;53;54;12 Samantha Ellis I feel like I've found a community, I, beyond the bit of it that I knew I had. And it's been really wonderful. And, it's made me feel, more, 00;53;54;15 - 00;54;00;10 Samantha Ellis connected, belonging, seen, include all of those things. So it's just been really nice. 00;54;00;11 - 00;54;05;07 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yeah. I'm a firm believer that stories are what bring us together. Right? 00;54;05;07 - 00;54;06;18 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Yeah. I think so. 00;54;06;25 - 00;54;22;10 J.R. Jamison Jamison: One of the conclusions I came to after reading your memoir is that letting go of generational trauma and healing our souls isn't letting go of who we are, but it's about how we adapt to become while keeping our histories and traditions alive. 00;54;22;12 - 00;54;28;14 J.R. Jamison What's one takeaway you hope people have after reading Always Carry Salt? 00;54;28;16 - 00;54;48;16 Samantha Ellis Ellis: I really hope people might want to, talk to their families, hear their stories. I hope that they might want to, ask their grandma for that recipe they always liked and write it down. I hope they might want to talk to people who are different from them and find out about their stories as well. 00;54;48;19 - 00;55;13;09 Samantha Ellis I just would like more, yeah, I suppose listening and connecting and, and I was very taken by this thing that the psychotherapist, Julia Samuel, wrote, which is that, she said that if generational trauma is, isn't processed and it just, just keeps going down the generations until someone's prepared to do the work. And it is work like I think it is work. 00;55;13;12 - 00;55;17;20 Samantha Ellis But maybe we all could do a little bit more of it. Sorry. That's more than one thing. [laughter] 00;55;17;23 - 00;55;30;09 J.R. Jamison Jamison: No, it's it's fantastic. It's all connected and all important. Samantha Ellis, author of Always Carry Salt. Thank you so much for joining me on The Facing Project. I've really enjoyed our conversation. 00;55;30;11 - 00;55;33;02 Samantha Ellis Ellis: Thank you. Me too. I've really enjoyed it. 00;55;33;04 - 00;55;45;24 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Always Carry Salt is out now everywhere books are borrowed and sold. More about Samantha Ellis can be found online at SamanthaEllis.me.uk. [theme music] 00;55;45;26 - 00;56;14;25 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Thank you again to Samantha Ellis for joining me on today's show and to her publisher, Pegasus Books, for providing a complimentary copy of Always Carry Salt. To listen to past episodes of this program, visit Indiana Public Radio dot org slash The Facing Project or find us on your favorite podcasting app, or on YouTube or on the NPR network. Or just ask your smart speaker to play The Facing Project on NPR. To continue the conversation about this episode, 00;56;14;28 - 00;56;42;06 J.R. Jamison find us on Facebook and Instagram at Facing Project. The Facing Project is recorded at Indiana Public Radio at Ball State University in beautiful and wonderful and evergreen Muncie, Indiana. It was produced by the amazing producer and audio engineer extraordinaire Sean Ashcraft. The show is distributed nationally through PRX. I'm your host, Jamison, and until next time, I wish you the courage to share your own story and the empathy to listen to others.