mahallah. Now their movements were more circumscribed as they were
living among outsiders and no longer felt the neighborhood belonged to
them. Although inhabiting the same space that they always had, the Jews
rapidly became strangers in their own homes.
The paradox of this chain migration, which was occurring in the con-
text of new religious freedoms offered to the Jews in the post-Soviet era,
and the influx of monies from various international non-profit organiza-
tions, was pronounced and painful. One middle-aged man explained,
“Now it’s easy for Jews to live here. We can speak our language [He-
brew], and pray in our synagogues. We don’t want to leave now, but we
do anyway. It’s not because of the United States that we are leaving, but
because of our relatives who call for us.” In other words: we are not going
because we want to live in the United States per se, or because we want to
leave Uzbekistan. We are going because our relatives have left. This was
a common trope. People who were preparing to immigrate often told me
that they felt compelled to leave because their relatives had. Rafael ex-
plained, “Early on, many people left out of foolishness, and now we have
to follow them.” Another woman said simply, “We are leaving because
we are leaving.”
Despite the powerful pull exerted by relatives who had left, the deci-
sion to leave was complicated by a similar counterforce: another set of
kinship ties, tugging those who still remained in Central Asia to stay
exactly where they are. Among Bukharan Jews, family relationships are
Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan · 217
reckoned not only among the living but among the deceased as well.
Long after they are gone, they continue to hover amid their extended kin
groups—who honor them, speak about them, and pray in their mem-
ory—on a frequent and regular basis. Memorial services are held so of-
ten that the deceased—whose framed images preside over the space in
which these events occur—appear almost as active agents, continuing to
maintain their social networks even in death. They also mingle with the
living through their continued presence in the Jewish quarter.
In Samarkand, those who live in the Jewish mahallah inhabit the neigh-
borhood’s twelve districts. Everyone knows, though, that there is an ad-
jacent “thirteenth district”: the cemetery where the souls of their relatives
reside. On my first visit to Samarkand, my hosts made sure that this site
was included in my itinerary. “You haven’t seen all of Jewish Samarkand
until you’ve been to the cemetery,” they told me. They were not urging
me to visit the cemetery to pay homage to the leaders and heroes buried
there or to learn about the city’s Jewish past. Rather, they were point-
ing out that my collection of ethnographic information about Bukharan
Jewish life in the present was not complete until I visited the thirteenth
district.
Wandering among the gravestones of the Uzbekistan’s crowded Jew-
ish burial grounds, I sensed an eerie similarity to my experiences at large
social gatherings, where I attempted to sort out the names and relation-
ships between the guests. In the cemetery, vivid etchings portray who
is buried beneath each shiny onyx headstone: a tall soldier standing
erect, a round-faced smiling baby, a middle-aged man with a mustache,
an elderly lady covered in a scarf beside an elderly man in a karakul
hat. Meandering among these monuments, one cannot help but wonder
about the lives and character traits of each of these figures, whose fea-
tures are engraved in fine detail on their grave markers. Like hosts at a
social event, cemetery caretakers help answer these questions. Parading
around with the visitors, they stop at the stones of various individuals
to introduce them by telling where they were born, what they did for a
living, and who their family members were and by recounting a story
about them. I do not know what sorts of tales cemetery caretakers told
prior to 1989, but in the midst of mass migration, there was one single,
often-repeated theme: that of abandonment. “Here Rafael Abramov is
buried. His son has moved to Phoenix and his daughter to Tel Aviv. His
218 · Alanna E. Cooper
brother died here ten years ago, and his sister moved with her family to
New York. Everyone is gone now. There is no one left to visit his grave.”
Those making the decision to immigrate know this story of abandon-
ment well. They hear it when they visit the cemeteries, and they hear it
at memorial services. An eloquent orator summarized this message at
one of the many such services I attended: “A man does not die when his
heart stops or when he closes his eyelids. A man does not die when he
is wrapped in a shroud or when he is put into the grave. He dies when
his grave is [left untended and] grown over with grass.” Admonishing
people not to leave their deceased behind, he pleaded with those who—
despite the warning—would choose to go anyway. “Do not forget the
graves of your deceased,” he cautioned, entreating people to return often
to visit those whom they have left behind in the cemetery.
Abandoning the deceased is a serious issue that people took into con-
sideration when deciding whether or not to emigrate. When I asked fifty-
six-year-old Uri, for example, if he planned to leave, he was still unsure.
“Well, you can’t just up and go so quickly. I have relatives who have left
and a neighbor who plans to, but our ancestors are buried here in the
cemeteries. We have a history here.” In my conversations with Boris on
the same topic, he lowered his head as he spoke about his reluctance to
leave the site of his father’s burial, and he wondered if he might move
his father’s remains with him to the United States. Dora, on the other
hand, had resolved to emigrate, but not without regret. “All of my family
members are buried together. We are leaving these graves behind.” Some
elderly people expressed fears about their own burial in a foreign land.
Several told me they were afraid to leave because they had heard that in
Israel and the United States their remains would be scattered rather than
given a proper burial. Despite reassurance that the deceased are buried in
cemeteries in Israel and the United States just as they are in Uzbekistan,
there was no alleviating the existential dread of dispersion. With the rup-
ture of the tightly bound connection between history, place, community,
and personal identity, the individual would, in fact, come undone—even
without the physical scattering of the body’s remains.
In sum, the powerful pull to emigrate—exerted by the living branches
of the family tree—was countered by the tug to remain. Eventually, the
Bukharan Jewish population in Uzbekistan did become dislodged, its
branches and leaves scattering in the winds of social and political change.
Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan · 219
But this process did not occur without resistance from the powerful root
system that had been holding the population steady for centuries.
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