Writing About Vanishing Cultures and Rarely Told Stories: Samantha Ellis on Chopping Onions on My Heart 27 October│14:00 The Buttery, Wolfson College & Online via Zoom

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 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.