How did you decide to write a memoir about your mother?
In a way, I didn’t choose to write it. Chose to write this. I’ve long known that my mother’s story was extraordinary. A girl forced to flee from Warsaw to Lvov, then deported to a Siberian labor camp, then resettled in the Ferghana Valley of Central Asia for five years, then to Palestine and later to New Zealand: The global scope of that story was astonishing, and the storms of twentieth-century history that ran through it—the rise of fascism, World War II, the Holocaust, and three political partitions (of Poland, Soviet Central Asia, and Palestine) – has troubled me all my life. But I didn’t have a complete understanding of the story, and that initially stopped me from writing it.
It was only after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in about 2017 that I was finally able to sift through the contents of her old Chinese tea-checks and extract the details of her story. But I began to realize that her story was not just of the twentieth century: it was part of a much older century. In the Ferghana Valley, my mother lived in the center of what was once the ancient Silk Road trade network connecting China, Persia, and India. The multi-ethnic, multi-faith ghosts of the Silk Road were a big part of her experiences. What’s more, I began to realize that these ghosts were always present in his life, even before he moved to the Ferghana Valley; He shaped the history not only of his merchant family but of the people of entire Asia and Europe.
How did you come up with this title?
The working title of the book was jewish silk road. But for a book about the history of intimacy across boundaries of culture and faith that we now consider inconsequential, that title seemed too academic, and too misleadingly focused on Judaism. girl from fergana As a title I liked it because it refers to not one but two people – my mother, of course, but also her best friend in the Ferghana Valley, an Uzbek girl named Kamrakhan. The title points simultaneously to Jewish and Muslim directions and, in doing so, quietly reminds us that behind what we might think of as a single entity lies multiplicity. Like the girls of Ferghana, cultures are the product of interactions with others.
This is an entertaining memoir about your mother, but did you intend to also capture the history of the largely displaced Jews?
I did it. But this is not Jewish history as we might assume. This is not the history of a unique people who have maintained a single identity for millennia despite overwhelming odds. Rather, it is a history of cultural encounter with non-Jewish neighbors that has continually shaped and reshaped what it means to be Jewish. Perhaps the most fundamental discovery I made while writing the book is that the first Jews did not live in ancient Israel. Following the liberation of the captive Israelites by Cyrus the Great, Jewish identity in Persian-ruled Babylon was a diasporic creation. The Israelites tried to codify the tenets and rituals of their faith, and they did so by interacting with Persian Zoroastrians, from whom they acquired belief in heaven and hell, the idea of ​​a Messiah, and certain specific practices such as the burial of cut nails. That dialogue led to the creation of the Torah, Judaism’s sacred text, and the first formulation of what it means to be a Jew. Even the Hebrew script that we think of as distinctly Jewish was derived from the script used by speakers of Aramaic, the language of the ancient Achaemenid Persian Empire. What it means to be a Jew over the past two millennia has been the result of constant such interaction and borrowing, especially with people from the so-called Muslim world.
You have explored the life of your mother Stella. How did you do that?
As you may have noticed, the narrative of the book moves back and forth in time. That non-linearity was suggested to me by the contents of my mother’s tea chest, in which she had stored mementos of her childhood years – photographs, letters, paintings, official papers. These were thrown into the box without any thought, without regard to time or place. At first, I tried to organize them into a traditional biography of my mother, which followed a systematic chronological sequence. But this proved impossible. Gradually, I found myself appreciating the scattered, uneven nature of the ark’s contents. Their lack of order struck me as close to how memory works and, indeed, how we exist in space and time. We are a contradictory assortment of bits and pieces of many different moments, locked in oblivion; Without any warning, this or that fragment of this or that time can suddenly invade our consciousness before it recedes again. Fragments of many times co-exist within us. So, I began to think of the book as a collection of pieces, each inspired by something from the trunk. Respecting the pieces of the ark as fragments, rather than trying to impose chronological coherence on them, seemed to me a more honest way to come to terms with my mother’s broken memory and life.
How did your travels to the places where Stella lived influence the writing of this book?
My travels to Central Asia had a huge influence on the book. A vendor in the Bukhara market sang a song for me when he learned that I lived in India, I am a wanderer; a synagogue in Bukhara called ‘Synagoga Mosque’ (Synagogue Mosque); A synagogue in Samarkand that combines Persian-style art on its blue dome and Ottoman-style wood carving on its front door – encounters like these impressed upon me how any Central Asian history is not the single story of just one nation or culture or religion. It is also the result of over 2000 years of interactions conducted in markets, caravanserais, and on trade routes passing through sacred sites.
You have highlighted the past cultural and linguistic similarities between Jews and Persians. Israel and Iran are face to face today. What is the significance of such similarities in contemporary times?
These similarities can remind us that people we think of as completely ‘other’ may always have been a part of ‘us’. Persian elements as a result of the Silk Road interconnections have left countless traces not only in Jewish culture and identity, as I have mentioned, but also in Central Asian and Indian cultures and identities. Those who think their traditions should be ‘pure’ have made concerted efforts to reject and even erase such traces. But these, far from being foreign contaminants, are an inseparable part of who we are. They can’t be washed: whether we like it or not, we are all syncretists. Religious Jews who believe that their faith is based on the law use a term for law, dateWhich is Persian. And those who advocate speaking Indian Pure Sanskrit-oriented Hindi will find its world strangely colorless without ‘colour’ and will have to struggle to cook food without it. VegetableAnd have difficulty sleeping at night without it extension. All of these – and many other words – come from Persian. They do so not because of foreign invasions but because of encounters with Silk Road traders in the markets of Asia – another Persian term.
What inspired you to continually establish contemporary historical connections between Jews and other religio-cultural identities?
The danger of yearning for a ‘pure’ tradition, whether by Jews or Indians or anyone else, is that it all too readily responds to the reality of our syncretism with ethno-nationalist violence. Now we are seeing the consequences of that violence in Western Asia and closer to home.
How do you view the idea of ​​’ethnic nations’? This led to the arbitrary partition of the Fergana Valley between three different countries.
I believe that the idea of ​​the bounded ethnic nation state is the most poisonous import given to us by the West. Many of the problems in Asia, from Palestine and Syria to the Indian subcontinent, are the result of borders arbitrarily drawn by the European architects of modern nation states; The divisions that this has caused have often served to weaken relations between people who had lived together as neighbors for centuries, even though they spoke different languages ​​and prayed to different gods. This is certainly true of the Fergana Valley. For centuries, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz – and Jews, Kazakhs, Chinese, Gypsies and others – lived together. After its partition, the valley has endured communal violence and ethnic cleansing that had never happened in its two thousand years of borderless multiculturalism.
Did you face any difficult moments while writing this book?
It is not easy to present a book about your mother to the world. It’s not just that I was making public something that was very personal. I was always afraid that I wasn’t doing it right, and that often held me back. I’m sure my mother, being a Zionist, would have been deeply saddened by what I said about the massacre in Gaza. He would certainly have argued against my claim that it was the inevitable consequence of the partition of British Mandate Palestine and the establishment of the Jewish ethnic nation-state. Many people in my extended family are upset with my position on this, and it has been difficult. This has also caused more practical difficulty: I have struggled to find a publisher for the book in the US and UK, where my mention of ‘Gaza’ and ‘genocide’ in the same sentence has made press editors nervous that they will face charges of anti-Semitism, even though I am Jewish.
This is a rich memoir that contains a lot of history. Please name three books that influenced its writing.
First of all I would like to mention two books that have influenced me less as sources and more as models for the history of syncretism: first, Amitav Ghosh’s in an ancient landWhom I worship to the utmost extent of devotion. It tells of the medieval merchant Abraham ben Yizou, a Jew based in Cairo and Aden who had trading interests in the Malabar Coast of India, married a Nair Hindu woman and wrote Sufi poetry in Arabic. And second, alpha laila wa lailawhich we know in English as thousand and one nights. I love that its stories, the product of intimate exchanges between traders traveling across the Silk Road in the caravanserai of Baghdad, are made up of a story of political injustice – King Shahryar’s tyrannical actions against his wives and his subjects as his brilliant wife Shahrazad gradually overcomes them. I also want to mention a book that came out just as I was editing my final proof: Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary comes to me. That book affected me like no other; It has shown me how a good ‘memoir’ can artfully combine the personal and the political, even as it deals with one’s larger-than-life mother, with her muse and all her historical complexities, with the deepest love.
Mo. Farhan teaches English at Jamia Millia Islamia, the central university of New Delhi.
