Dahlia Abraham-Klein
Caravan of Hope: A Bukharan Woman’s Journey to Freedom
Great Neck, NY: Shamashi Press, 2023. ISBN: 979-8218178482
Reviewed by Leora Eisenberg1
Dahlia Abraham-Klein’s Caravan of Hope: A Bukharan Woman’s Journey to Freedom recounts Zina Abraham’s remarkable journey from Soviet Uzbekistan and Afghanistan to Israel, India, and, eventually, the United States. As a historian, I keep reflecting on the value of this book as a primary source. Although this is not an academic publication, Abraham-Klein responds to the call of scholars such as Thomas Loy to study the “Jewish triangle” (Iran, Afghanistan, and Transoxiana) and consider the mobility of Central Asian Jews.2 I hope that students and scholars of history will be able to use Caravan of Hope as a source in their future works on these topics.
The story follows Abraham-Klein’s mother, Zina Abraham (née Shamash). Though Zina’s mother, Dora, was born in what is now Kokand, Uzbekistan in 1906, before the establishment of Soviet rule, her father was sent to a Siberian labor camp in 1929 and was never heard from again. Dora was imprisoned not long after, in 1933, where she gave birth to our protagonist (who, at a gathering of religious women in Miami, cheekily says that “if you must know, I was born in a Russian prison”) (3). Her husband, Hasid, had been smuggled out of the USSR to Afghanistan just one year before to avoid government sanction for his involvement in the diamond business.
Shortly after their release from prison in 1934, the Bukharan Jewish mother-daughter pair traveled from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan, where they lived with Hasid as a family for over ten years. Though the local language, Dari, was mutually intelligible with their native Judeo-Tajik, the family encountered other problems in Afghanistan, where six more children were born. They originally lived in Herat, a major city in the west of the country, but anti-Semitic violence pushed them to join relatives in Kabul, the capital. Abraham-Klein describes the difficulties there: high-quality medical care was not widely available, and existing hospitals were only for men, forcing Dora to dress a deathly ill Zina as a boy in order to receive proper treatment. Afghanistan remains a dark spot in this story. When Doras’s second child, Zipora, which literally means “bird” in Hebrew, was born, she pleaded to God to “give us wings to fly away from Afghanistan” (34), which she refers as a “backward country” upon her arrival in Israel some time later (82).
As a teenager, shortly after World War Two, Zina left for Peshawar, a province of British India near the border where some members of her father’s family lived, to receive an education “under British influence and modernity” (65). The ensuing violence between Hindus and Muslims, however, pushed Zina out of Peshawar, soon to become part of the newly established Muslim state of Pakistan, and back to her family in Kabul. It is in this post-WWII moment that the entire family considers immigration to Israel by bus via Tehran, while the Shamash patriarch remained in Afghanistan for ten more years. Abraham-Klein describes Tehran as a “modern city” overwhelmed by Jewish refugees waiting for “the Israeli government [to] arrange [their] travel” (79). This was one of the most interesting parts of the story, especially in light of the theme of mobility, which I raise above. While scholars such as Suzanne Bardgett and Christine Schmidt examine Iran as a site of temporary Jewish resettlement during World War Two, we have yet to learn a great deal about the country as a transit site for aliyah afterwards. 3
Eventually, Dora and her children arrive in Israel in 1949, among the first families from Afghanistan. She is aware of “Israel’s eclectic Judaism that mirrored the diversity and observance of the world’s Jewish people,” and as a result, shields her family from non-Bukharans as well as from non-Jews in order to preserve their unique traditions: “… [m]y family has been persecuted for hundreds of years, and we had to run from country to country because we are Yahudis [Jews]… all this did not happen for us to come to Israel and assimilate” (85). Assimilation here is twofold, referring both to absorption into Israel’s non-Jewish (referred to as “non-kosher”) and non-Bukharan societies. This tension runs throughout the book, as well as for, I imagine, many Bukharan Jews today. It is in Israel, however, that Dora gives birth to her eighth (and last) child, and Zina marries her Afghan Jewish cousin Yehuda Abraham, whom she follows to Mumbai (referred to as Bombay) for his work where she gives birth to her daughter, Shirley. Soon after, in 1956, they move to Rego Park, New York, where Zina becomes a pillar of the Jewish community, before it became the center of Bukharan Jewish life that it is today following the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
While Caravan of Hope reveals a great deal about Bukharan Jewish life and mobility, I question some of the statements and characterizations made by the author. Uzbekistan, for example, is routinely characterized as oppressive. One of the first discussions between Dora and Hasid’s families, for example, was “about… the increasing oppression of Jews in Kokand [an Uzbek city] and the general area” (14), and the subtitle of the book itself, “A Bukharan Woman’s Journey to Freedom,” suggests the lack thereof in Soviet Uzbekistan. While it is undeniable that Jews faced considerable discrimination in certain periods, Abraham-Klein’s focus on Uzbekistan as an oppressive locale obscures the tremendous achievements of Jews, both Bukharan and Ashkenazi, in the republic, long after Zina and Dora’s flight. Many Bukharan Jews went on to be prominent professionals and, in certain cases, widely acclaimed representatives of Uzbek culture, such as the singer Muhabbat Shamayeva or dancers Isakhar and Margarita Oqilov. Further, the negative attitude toward Afghanistan, which I outline above, obscures the rich culture and achievements of its indigenous Jews while simultaneously bringing a great deal of attention to those of the Bukharans at the center of the story. Some more nuance would have been welcome.
Separately, a substantial number of grammatical errors detract from the book’s impressive narrative. “Soviet Uzbekistan,” for example, is repeatedly referred to as “Soviet Uzbek,” which is not the name of the republic (133). An additional consultation with a proofreader might have avoided these errors, allowing readers to fully enjoy Caravan of Hope. I look forward to seeing how other writers publish and preserve their families’ stories in similar books in the future.
1 Leora Eisenberg is a third-year Ph.D. student in Soviet history at Harvard University, where she is writing her dissertation on music and dance in Soviet Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2020 with a B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and is the recipient of prizes and awards, such as the Critical Language Scholarship, Streicker International Fellowship, Labouisse Prize, and others.
2 For more on this, see Thomas Loy, Bukharan Jews in the Soviet Union: Autobiographical Narrations of Mobility, Continuity and Change, (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2016).
3 Suzanne Bardgett, Christine Schmidt, and Dan Stone, “‘When We Came to Persia: It Was Like Resurrection’: Child Refugees in Tehran During World War II and Their Resettlement in Mandatory Palestine,” in Beyond Camps and Forced Labour, The Holocaust and Its Contexts (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2020), 125–43.