Tuesday 22 April 2025, 7:30 pm UK, 2:30 pm ET. Samantha Ellis’s mother tongue is dying out. An urgent need to find out more becomes an expansive investigation into how to keep hold of her culture – and when to let it go.

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 realisation that she won’t be able to tell her son he’s ‘living in the days of the aubergines’ or ‘chopping onions on my heart’ opens the floodgates. The questions keep coming. How can she pass on the stories without passing on the trauma of displacement?

In her search for answers Samantha’s  journey transports us from the clamour of Noah’s Ark to the calm of the British Museum, from the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages to the banks of the River Tigris. As Samantha considers what we lose and keep, she also asks what we might need to let go of to preserve our culture and ourselves.

She will be in conversation with Lyn Julius about her new book ‘Chopping onions on my heart’ (The Judeo-Arabic equivalent of ‘Rubbing salt in the wound’).

Samantha Ellis is a British-born playwright and writer. She is the author of How to be a Heroine  published by Chatto & Windus in January 2014. Her biography of Anne Brontë Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life was published in January 2017.

Recording here.

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