"Whenever the #author and #playwright Samantha Ellis tries to define her heritage to people, she often finds them correcting her. “So many times I’ve said I’m an #Iraqi #Jew and been… told ‘you mean you’re mixed’ or ‘which parent is which?’ or just ‘how weird’,” she writes in her richly detailed #memoir, in which she explores the complex, centuries-old history of the Iraqi-#Jewish community and its vanishing language, #Judeo-Iraqi #Arabic.
The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish #refugees who came separately to #London with their families during periods of persecution for the community in #Baghdad, Ellis is moved to seek out #stories, expressions and objects that will fill some of the gaps in that #history when she realises that she lacks the vocabulary to pass on the language of her childhood to her own young son."