There are many idioms in Judaeo-Iraqi Arabic involving the heart. If you upset someone, they might say you’re chopping onions on their heart (yethrem basal all ras efadi), a term similar in meaning to rubbing salt into the wound. It might be said ruefully or as a joke. Samantha Ellis grew up in London and heard Judaeo-Iraqi Arabic in her grandparents’ kitchen in Wembley, where her mother and aunts spoke ‘boldly, confidently, colourfully in their mother tongue’. The talk came with ‘hands in motion, red-painted nails whizzing, gold bangles tinkling, cigarettes waving’, and it was nourishing ‘because talk is life and curiosity and empathy and wonder’. When these same people spoke English, ‘they sounded quieter, meeker, less’.

Idioms about the heart might be delivered wryly, but there is little to laugh about in the history of the Iraqi Jews. Their language itself is dying. With a small son of her own, Ellis, who never became bilingual, starts to think about what she wants him to know, what can be preserved. She begins with memories, language and food. The book, which moves easily between the personal and the historical, is unobtrusively learned and tells a heartbreaking tale of communal violence and persecution. Iraqi Jews like her father and mother, situated at ‘the intersection of the difficult and contested histories of both Iraq and Israel’, have memories of Baghdad as a home from which they were wrenched, and of Israel as a place where they became invisible. Standard histories of Jews and Israel tend not to include the Iraqi Jews. There is fierce dispute in Israel over the term ‘Arab-Jew’, Avi Shlaim observes in his marvellous memoir Three Worlds (which Ellis cites and which I recommend reading alongside this book).

What legacies does trauma leave and can they be avoided? Ellis did not live through what happened to her family, but it has weighed her down nonetheless. They were hyper-vigilant, living, as a cousin described it, ‘like a piano was about to fall on our heads’. Was she an impostor,