In Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, the phrase yethrem basal all ras efadi– literally, “you’re chopping onions on my heart!”– is an overly dramatic, theatrical way of telling someone they’ve upset you. As Samantha Ellis notes, it’s our community’s version of “rubbing salt in the wound.” For those who are taken aback by the graphic imagery of a literal onion being chopped on a human heart: like many other Judeo-Arabic expressions, the most brutal imagery is often used playfully, with a wink. I even recall times when my own father’s incessant teasing became too much for my irritated aunts, and they yelled gaṭṭa rāsak! at him— meaning, may your head be cut off. 

But just as easily, it can create images of incredible tenderness– ayouni, as to mean, you are my eyes, or ab’dalek, meaning, let me go as a sacrifice for you. Judeo-Arabic is a silly, flirty, hot-headed language. For Samantha Ellis, that drama, excess, and emotional charge aren’t just linguistic quirks– they’re part of an inheritance she’s still holding onto. In her recently released memoir, Chopping Onions on my Heart, Ellis wrestles with what it means to belong to a culture whose language and idiosyncrasies are slipping away– and what it means to mourn a mother tongue in real time. 

The memoir moves between intimate family memory and the violent sweep of history– between the personal and political, the tender and the devastating. She writes about the Farhud, the widespread 1941 massacre that lasted two days and left hundreds of Jews dead, countless of their women raped, homes and businesses destroyed, and a community terrified. It was a moment of rupture, but not an isolated one– the Farhud was the culmination of rising antisemitism in Iraq, fueled by Nazi influence and embraced by many in the local population. Ellis, too, traces the unimaginable aftermath: the existential questions Iraq’s Jews mulled over as they collectively wondered what would happen to them next– and whether they should leave or stay. 

Ellis focuses on Jewish life in Iraq through family testimony and cultural inheritance. She writes in depth about the gradual shift in the 1940s– when Iraq still had a fragile hope of a diverse, pluralistic society– but also about how Jewish identity became something one had to be cautious about revealing. “[Jews] had only to open our mouths to reveal our identity,” Ellis wrote while quoting writer Naim Kattan’s memoir, Farewell Babylon, referring to the telltale sound of Judeo-Arabic. Many switched to Muslim Arabic – humiliating, but safer. 

With the establishment of Israel and the Arab invasion that followed, Iraqi Jews were scapegoated; Zionism became a capital offense, and hundreds of Iraqi Jews were accused of being spies. Ellis dutifully notes how the public hanging of Jewish businessman Shafiq Adas in Basra– cheered on by 10,000 locals, broadcast live on Radio Baghdad– marked a terrifying descent for Iraqi Jews.

Her description of this gory display isn’t distant history for me, either: my grandmother was 18 years old and my grandfather 32 when it happened, having been married a few years earlier. By 1951, over 125,000 Jews had registered to leave Iraq, and the Iraqi government met in secret and passed a law to seize all property, assets, and bank accounts of those departing, as well as of any Jews who had already fled. When they finally made their exodus out of Iraq, their passports were stamped with a note that forbade their return. 

Ellis threads these shocking facts and testimonies of violence, intolerance, politics, and social upheaval through her family stories of migration, cultural dislocation, and linguistic loss– especially in early years of the State of Israel, where Iraqi Jews found themselves in Ma’abarot transit camps. It was in these tent camps that Mizrahi Jews were often discriminated against, and for Iraqi Jews, where Judeo-Arabic began to disappear, slowly pushed out by Hebrew. Through some remarkable feat, Ellis manages to capture this layered devastation while in discussion of the cultural threads that still survive in food, humor, expression, music, and family dynamics. Her memoir’s non-linear structure is part historical, part testimony, and part cultural-linguistic archive all at once; her prose moves fluidly between the scholarly and the intimate, often laced with both humor and grief. 

Just as much as she honors the past, Ellis is deeply invested in cultural continuity. She writes with warmth and wit about her young son learning about Iraqi-Jewish history and culture; it made my heart swell with pride. In one moment that made me laugh out loud, Ellis describes one rainy and cold night in which she and her son had to run through the rain from Lego club; he suddenly announces, “Let’s move to Iraq now so it will be hot.” These reflections are tender and profound, shaped by Ellis’s desire to raise a child who sees his heritage not as a cultural afterthought, but as an active story worth being part of. 

Even as she describes her family, food, music, and history, she never loses sight of the political urgency of her story, either. The timing of her memoir could not be more vital: she writes about the darkness that permeated throughout the Jewish world at the end of 2023 after Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the beginning of the war in Gaza. “The Iraqi Jewish story,” she wrote, “was denied and erased with more ferocity than usual because it didn’t fit into the narrative that Israelis were white European settler-colonizers… the assumption was that no Arabic word could be Jewish, no Jew could speak Arabic, and that there were no Jewish Arabic languages.” Even Hebrew– a Semitic language that predates Arabic by over a thousand years– was stripped of its Middle Eastern identity. Food, too, became politicized. 

That being said, Ellis’s memoir arrives at a moment when stories like hers– and mine– are often denied space or legitimacy; it’s a reminder that our stories, languages, and histories are not just footnotes in the Jewish story. As an Iraqi Jew, reading Chopping Onions on My Heart felt like being seen: the entire book felt like a fierce, honest, and profoundly comforting hug. ◦

Samantha Ellis’s Chopping Onions on My Heart is available for order here.

Maia Zelkha is the founding editor of Yad Mizrah Magazine. She lives in a moshav in Central Israel.