Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm: A haunting story of home, memory, and inherited trauma

Some stories teach us about history by giving us facts. Others make us feel what it means to live through that history. Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm belongs firmly in the second category. This lyrical, unsettling debut follows three generations of Palestinian women as they confront the history of their family, the loss of their ancestral home in Haifa, and the supernatural consequences of a trauma that has never really been allowed to end.

It is a heart-wrenching story, but it is also an important one. There are some subjects that fiction can illuminate in ways that straightforward nonfiction cannot, because fiction allows us to inhabit the emotional reality of an experience rather than simply learning about it. Helm uses the conventions of the haunted-house story to explore displacement, cultural erasure, generational trauma, and the complicated meaning of home. The result is a novel in which the supernatural elements are disturbing, but the real-world horrors behind them are even more so.

Before the Nakba in 1948, Nuhad’s family lives in Haifa, in a home that has belonged to their family for generations. This isn’t simply a building where they happen to live. It is part of their identity, their history, and their understanding of themselves. Their lives are interwoven with the land around them—the buildings, the water, the city itself. Home is not merely a place they occupy. It is part of who they are. Then that home is taken from them.

Decades later, Nuhad’s granddaughter Marina travels to Haifa, determined to understand the history that her family has kept from her. Her mother, Haifa, is reluctant to make the journey, in part because she knows what lies beneath the silences surrounding their past. Once Marina arrives, however, she begins to encounter a city and a history that are profoundly different from the ones she has been allowed to know. And the house remembers.

One of the most effective aspects of Our Cut of Salt is the way Helm makes the ancestral home itself into a character. The house is haunted, but it is also grieving. It remembers the people who belonged there. It remembers what happened to them, and it waits for them to return.

That makes the traditional haunted-house premise much more meaningful than it might initially appear. The house isn’t simply a spooky setting where frightening things happen. It represents the persistence of memory. It refuses to forget what happened to its family, even when the people who survived have been forced to build lives somewhere else. The house’s violence toward those it considers interlopers is horrifying, but there is something deeply tragic about it, too. It is an embodiment of a wound that has never healed.

The supernatural horror in Our Cut of Salt is actually a relatively small part of the novel. There are ghosts and strange noises. The house reacts to people who don’t belong there. People disappear. Cats instinctively avoid the property.

But the real horrors are everywhere.

Helm shows us Nuhad’s experiences before and after the Nakba alongside the present-day experiences of Marina and Haifa. Through those different perspectives, we see how an event doesn’t have to happen directly to someone in order to shape their entire life. Trauma can be inherited. It can influence how a person understands the world, how they raise their children, what they refuse to talk about, and what they believe they need to protect their family from.

Nuhad’s story is particularly heartbreaking because the Nakba doesn’t simply take her home. It takes her childhood. She is forced to grow up almost overnight, and the child she was becomes inseparable from the home she lost. In a particularly effective piece of horror imagery, Nuhad’s childhood self remains behind in Haifa, haunting the house while waiting for her family to return. The supernatural conceit gives literal form to something that is psychologically recognizable: when a traumatic event forces someone to abandon part of themselves, that lost part doesn’t necessarily disappear.

Nuhad carries that loss into adulthood, and it affects the way she parents Haifa. Haifa, in turn, carries the consequences into her relationship with Marina. The damage moves through the generations.

This reminded me strongly of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which also examines the descendants of people who survived an atrocity and the ways trauma continues to shape generations who did not personally experience the original event. In both works, history isn’t something safely contained in the past. It remains present in the lives of the people who come afterward.

That is one of the things horror is particularly good at illustrating. A ghost is a metaphor that doesn’t have to remain a metaphor. The past can literally come back to haunt you.

What struck me most about Our Cut of Salt is the way it takes enormous historical and political questions and brings them down to the level of individual human beings. We can talk about displacement in abstract terms. We can discuss borders, wars, refugees, colonialism, occupation, and competing claims to land as political concepts. But none of those words adequately convey what it means for a person to walk out of their home one day and discover that they can never go back. Helm’s fictional examples make that loss tangible.

One Palestinian family in the novel opens its home to Jewish refugees. While the Palestinian family is out one day, the locks are changed, and when they return, they have lost their home and everything inside it. They have nothing except the clothes they were wearing. Soon afterward, the political situation makes reclaiming what was theirs impossible.

That story stopped me because of how brutally simple the injustice is. A home is a home. A person has a life there. They have belongings, memories, family history, and an understanding of themselves that is rooted in that place. Taking all of that away cannot become less devastating simply because someone gives the act a political justification. The novel repeatedly brings us back to that basic human reality.

This is also where I found myself thinking about the Holocaust. The novel draws deliberate parallels between the persecution and displacement of Palestinians and other historical examples of people being targeted, dehumanized, or forcibly removed from their homes. There are echoes of the Holocaust, as well as of the racial segregation and violence associated with Jim Crow America. Those comparisons are uncomfortable, but I think discomfort is part of what makes the novel effective.

The stories we are taught about history influence the way we understand the present. As an American who learned far more about the Holocaust than I did about the history of Palestine and the Middle East, I recognize how incomplete historical education can shape our assumptions about who is the victim, who is the aggressor, and whose suffering deserves our attention.

Our Cut of Salt does not allow that distance. It puts a family in front of us. It asks us to think about what it means to lose a homeland, what happens when the people who lose it are expected to simply move on, and what happens when their descendants inherit both the loss and the silence surrounding it.

---

---

For me, the emotional center of the novel is Nuhad’s lost childhood self. That idea gives the entire haunting another dimension. Nuhad’s childhood is inseparable from her home, so when the home is taken from her, part of Nuhad remains there. The house becomes the physical manifestation of everything she lost: her childhood, her family, her sense of safety, and her belief that the world is a place where she belongs.

Bringing those pieces back together becomes necessary for Marina and Haifa as well. The novel suggests something that rings true far beyond this particular family: healing trauma often requires us to acknowledge the parts of ourselves that were lost rather than pretending they never existed. You cannot simply bury a traumatic history and expect it to stop influencing the generations that follow.

That is true for individuals, families, and, potentially, societies. The question is how we stop the cycle. Our Cut of Salt doesn’t offer an easy answer. It certainly doesn’t suggest that acknowledging historical suffering automatically makes it disappear. Instead, it shows how easily hurt becomes something that is passed down. People who have been hurt can hurt other people. Children inherit fears they don’t understand. Parents make choices based on wounds their children cannot see. It is hurt people hurting people, repeated across generations and across the world. The challenge is figuring out how to stop.

Structurally, Our Cut of Salt moves between Marina and Haifa in the present and Nuhad in the period immediately before and after the Nakba. We also get the perspective of the house itself, which gives the novel another way of exploring memory and loss. That structure works particularly well because we aren’t simply told what happened to Nuhad. We experience the consequences alongside the women who come after her.

The traditional horror elements are there, but they aren’t really the point. The ghosts and the murderous house are almost secondary to the much larger horror of what has happened to this family. In fact, there were times when the supernatural elements felt less frightening to me than the history surrounding them. That is one of the novel’s greatest accomplishments.

A haunted house is scary because something terrible happened there. But what if the terrible thing isn’t imaginary? What if the house is haunted because the people who lived there really were forced out? What if the ghost isn’t frightening because it is dead, but because it remembers something that everyone else would rather forget? Helm takes the familiar machinery of the haunted-house story and uses it to ask those questions. The house is not simply haunted. It remembers.

There is a larger question underneath everything in Our Cut of Salt: Who gets to call a place home? That question is particularly important because human history is full of people who have been displaced so that someone else could occupy their land. We have seen it in countless forms, from the treatment of Indigenous peoples around the globe to forced migrations, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, wars, and the ongoing displacement of people around the world.

I don’t think the answer should depend on which religion a person practices, which side of a political conflict they have been taught to support, or which historical grievance they believe is most important. Every human being deserves a home.

We cannot go backward and undo every historical injustice. We cannot restore thousands of years of history to the way it was before people were displaced, persecuted, or killed. But we can decide what we do with the world we have inherited. That means looking for ways to make room for displaced people without simply displacing someone else. It means recognizing that one group’s suffering does not justify another group’s suffering. And it means refusing to treat human beings as obstacles to be removed in order to achieve a political goal.

This is one reason I am glad a novel like Our Cut of Salt exists. It gives Palestinian characters the opportunity to tell a story about their history, their families, their homes, and their losses. It asks readers who may have encountered this history primarily through political arguments to look at it through the eyes of people who are experiencing the consequences.

That doesn’t mean fiction can give us every fact we need to understand a complicated historical conflict. It can’t. But it can make it much harder to think about history as a collection of impersonal events. A real person lost that house. A real person was forced to leave. A real person watched their family disappear. A real person’s child grew up carrying that loss. And another real person’s child inherited it.

That is what makes Our Cut of Salt so powerful. The novel takes a historical and political catastrophe and turns it into an intimate story about three women who are still living with the consequences decades later. The ghosts may haunt the house, but the past haunts the people. And perhaps the only way to stop either one is to finally acknowledge what happened.

Our Cut of Salt is a haunting, lyrical, and deeply painful novel about displacement, memory, family, and the ways historical trauma survives long after the original violence has ended. Deena Helm uses the haunted-house story not simply to frighten us, but to give physical form to the idea that a place can remember what happened there and that the people who were forced to leave it can carry that memory for generations.

The result is a novel in which the supernatural horror is almost beside the point. The ghosts are frightening, but the real horror is what happened to the living. And that is precisely why this story will stay with me long after I have read it.

Fiction cannot solve political conflicts. It cannot give us every historical fact, and it shouldn’t replace nonfiction as a way of learning history. But a novel can do something different: it can ask us to feel the human consequences of those facts. It can put us inside a home before it is taken away and then make us understand what it means when that home remains part of a family’s identity long after they have been forced to leave it.

Our Cut of Salt does that extraordinarily well. It reminds us that homes are more than buildings and that displacement is more than relocation. A home contains memory, identity, family, childhood, and belonging. When you take someone’s home, you aren’t simply taking property. You are taking part of their understanding of themselves.

And when that loss is never acknowledged, it doesn’t necessarily disappear. Sometimes it waits. Sometimes it haunts. Sometimes it gets passed down. And sometimes, as Our Cut of Salt shows us, the only way forward is to finally face the ghost.

What books have changed the way you understand a historical or social issue? Tell me about them in the comments.

Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm releases September 22, 2026. An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Join the conversation

If you love books that stay with you—and enjoy thinking about them long after you’ve turned the final page—subscribe to get new literary analyses and writing tips from Write on the World!

Related Content

• After the Israel-Hamas War: Palestinian Perspectives (Brandeis University)
• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained (BBC)
• Jews and Arabs Share Recent Ancestry: Clashing groups are Y chromosome cousins (Science)
• Read more historical horror novels that illuminate real-life horrors (Write on the World)

Now available in print and on Kindle!

Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.