Episode
Samantha Ellis, "Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture" (Pegasus Books, 2026)
- Podcast
- New Books in British Studies
- Published
- Jun 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2978
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK2559469871.mp3
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-british-studies-6600/episodes/samantha-ellis-always-carry-salt-a-memoir-of-preserving-language-and-culture-pegasus-books-2026/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-british-studies-6600/samantha-ellis-always-carry-salt-a-memoir-of-preserving-language-and-culture-pegasus-books-2026.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
I had the privilege of speaking with writer Samantha Ellis about her deeply moving new book, Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture (Pegasus Books, 2026). Our discussion explored not only the story of a disappearing language, but also the broader questions of memory, identity, and what it means to inherit a fragile cultural legacy. At the heart of Ellis’s book is Judeo-Iraqi Arabic—also known as Baghdadi Jewish Arabic or Hakimalna—a language once spoken by the Jews of Iraq. Rich with layers of Hebrew and Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic, it reflects over two millennia of Jewish life in the region. Today, however, it stands on the brink of extinction. As Ellis shared, a language is considered endangered when it is no longer passed on to children, and Judeo-Iraqi Arabic may have only about a thousand speakers remaining worldwide. Within a generation, it could fall silent. Ellis described a powerful turning point in her own awareness: a casual question from another parent about why she was not sending her son to a nursery that spoke “her language.” Her spontaneous response—“my language is dead”—became the catalyst for the journey that led to this book. That moment captures the quiet grief of linguistic loss, but also the urgency of preservation. Our conversation traced the long arc of Iraqi Jewish history, beginning with the Babylonian exile in 597 BCE. Iraqi Jews lived in the region long before the arrival of Arabic, shifting over centuries from Hebrew to Aramaic and later to Arabic, while preserving distinctive linguistic features from earlier eras. This layered history lives on in the language itself. Yet the mass departures of Iraqi Jews in the mid-20th century—particularly the 1950–51 airlift—fractured this continuity. Today, only a handful of Jews re…