Book Event: Samantha Ellis

Samantha Ellis presents Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture
In partnership with The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life

Playwright and journalist Samantha Ellis presents her new book Always Carry Salt, a life-affirming memoir about resilience, language, and the healing power of our ancestor's music, stories, and recipes. The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Samantha grew up surrounded by the noisy, vivid, hot sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic—a language that’s now on the verge of extinction. The realization that she won’t be able to tell her son he’s "living in the days of the aubergines" or reminding him to "always carry salt" opens the floodgates. How can she pass on this heritage without passing on the trauma of displacement? Will her son ever love mango pickle? A moving meditation on the words and traditions that shape us, in Always Carry Salt, Samantha not only considers what we lose and keep, she also asks what we might need to let go of to preserve our culture and ourselves. Ellis discusses her search for answers at Greenlight, before an audience Q&A and signing.