Everything Begins In Childhood

An old man and an old woman, as they say in fairy tales, “Once there lived an old man and an old woman…,” lived in one of the houses. When the weather was good, the old woman usually sat on a little wooden chair at the gate selling sunflower seeds. Just toasted, they were piled in a small bowl and smelled very appetizing.

The old man and the old woman didn’t have children. Sometimes, they invited local kids to visit and treated them to sunflower seeds. Their one-bedroom apartment was very poor – a table, a couple of chairs, a bed and a wardrobe, though they had a television.

I liked Shedovaya Street very much. It was wide and paved and had ariks on both sides. Stately oaks grew along the ariks. Somewhere up there, high above our heads, their branches came together forming a thick leafy arch.

It was particularly nice there when it rained or during a thunderstorm. Bolts of thunder could be heard, lightning flashed, rain drummed on the roofs and treetops, but all that was outside. I was in a different world where leaves didn’t rustle, the wind didn’t blow, and not a single drop of rain fell. I was protected by the giant oaks.

Shadov Street and our neighborhood were densely populated by Bukharan Jews. Our relatives also lived there – my grandpa’s younger brother, his nephews and their many children. We didn’t see them often, but on days of festivities or grief most of the extended family got together.

I had known since childhood that I, Mama, Papa, and our whole family, were Bukharan Jews. But I didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant. Only when I became an adult did I ask myself, “Who am I, after all? Why are people who have never lived in Bukhara are called Bukharan Jews?” The explanation turned out to be quite complicated. It took me very far from Bukhara, from Uzbekistan to ancient times.

* * *

In 586 B.C. an event took place that became one of the most important in the history of the Jewish people. That event was the Babylonian captivity.

The troops of the ruler of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed Jerusalem, and most of the population of Judea was driven away, to Babylon. Half a century later, Babylonia was conquered by the Persians. Jewish prisoners were allowed to return to their homeland. However, it is known that the majority of them stayed in Babylon. Throughout the centuries a distinctive ethnic commonality appeared. They didn’t assimilate with the Persians. On top of that, when the Romans finally defeated Judea, Babylonia became the world center of Jewish culture and science. The historical consciousness of the Jews was founded and developed there. Judaism became firmly established. Its spiritual culture expanded. It’s enough to remember that the Babylonian Talmud was developed there.

But our ancestors were not destined to make their new homeland there. Beginning in the fifth and sixth centuries A.C., events took place in Persia that brought many cruel persecutions against the Jews. A considerable number of Persian Jews gradually migrated to different countries, including the cities of Central Asia, Tash and Shash, as Tashkent was called in the ancient times, as well as Samarkand and Bukhara.

Bukhara was the center of a big powerful khanate in the Middle Ages. Commerce, crafts, arts, and sciences all thrived there, and it was where the largest Jewish community in Central Asia gradually came into being. I read somewhere that the first mention of it was in the thirteenth century.

That was possible because Bukhara was the resplendent capital of the largest Uzbek khanate. Much later, at the end of the eighteenth century, the name of that Jewish community, “Bukharan Jews,” came to refer to all the Jews of Central Asia, including Uzbek Jews.

Even if we begin counting from the eighteenth century, the Jews settled among the Uzbeks quite long ago. How could they not get along with each other? The Bukharan Jews adopted many Uzbek traditions. Their looks and behavior were similar to those of the Uzbeks. In our time, they could be educated in local schools and institutes. They took an active part in all spheres of the life of the Republic. But still… Bukhari, based on Farsi, which is related to Tadjik, remained their native tongue, while Uzbek belongs to the Turkic family of languages. The Jews spoke Bukhari at home and did their best to pass it on to their children. And they continued to practice their religion, Judaism. They observed ancient customs as much as they could. They settled close to each other, if possible, creating Jewish mahalli (communities). In a word, the Bukharan Jews did not turn into Uzbeks, they did not blend with them but created another distinctive ethnic community, another branch of the tree of nations.

The Yuabovs, my father’s parents, were among the Jews who had stayed in Persia and had not left during even the hardest of times. There had been quite a few people like them. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did my great-grandfather migrate by camel to Central Asia and settle in Tashkent.

* * *

But let’s return to Tashkent from our travels to the past… Mama and we reached Pedagogicheskaya Street, went down it and found ourselves in the very center of the city, crowded and bustling. Many streetcar and trolley lines crossed there. Taxis scurried around. The Central Department Store which towered over the center was surrounded by kiosks, canteens, and various repair shops. The Turkmen Bazaar was a stone’s throw from the center. It was not the biggest bazaar in town, but it was considered one of the best. It was strikingly clean. The air in its passageways, sprinkled with sand, was cool. Outdoor shops stretched, row after row, for about three hundred meters. Only collective farm members were allowed to open businesses there. Butchers, gardeners, craftsmen, and others had their stalls behind them.

The bazaar began operations very early and immediately turned into something of a beehive. The bazaar buzzed monotonously like a swarm of bees, and high thin voices soared above it. Those were tireless salespeople haranguing shoppers.

“Hey, opa, look at my strawberries. They’re so tender they’ll melt in your mouth! Try them!” a gardener tried to attract buyers.

“Come over here, folks! Everything’s from my own garden, as sweet as honey!” another gardener praised his fare.

Most sellers were elderly Uzbek men. They wore very similar attire –skullcap, chapan (long, quilted coat) and soft leather boots.

To say that it was customary to bargain at Asian bazaars is an understatement. It was a special ritual, a sort of skill, a game that spiced up the monotonous life. A price given by a seller was not just challenged. One needed to present an argument about why a price should be reduced. At the same time, the dignity of the seller and the produce was never debased.

Mama had a great command of that skill, and her Uzbek was perfect. She spoke it so well and grammatically correctly that people who conversed with her had no doubt that she was Uzbek. And generally, Mama who was tall and slender, with jet-black hair, was considered Uzbek at first sight. It often helped her get better prices. And it did help us that day.

* * *

We returned home after shopping. Mama had just started cooking when Emma began to whine and act capricious. She was sluggish on the way home, her cheeks red, her eyes crossed. It was clear without a thermometer that she had a fever.

Emma was often ill, now with the flu, now – pneumonia.

Seeing that Emma wasn’t well, Mama ran to bring the doctor, who lived nearby and visited us often.

“It’s the flu, a viral flu,” she said. “She must have got it at the kindergarten.”

She gave Emma an injection and warned Mama that she needed a shot every day. Seeing the doctor to the door, Mama gave her a bag of macaroni.

“Please, take it. I don’t have any money. It’s so embarrassing. We bother you so often.”

It was customary to pay visiting doctors or give them presents. But we had neither money nor nice things.

“Oh, c’mon, Ester,” the doctor was embarrassed. “You mustn’t.”

Pressing the bag of crunchy macaroni to her chest, Mama said, “I don’t have money to pay for injections. Please, send Emma to the hospital.”

An ambulance arrived in the evening. Emma understood that she would again be parted from her mama and began to cry, “Mama! Mommy! Don’t send me there alone! Please! Come with me!”

It was terribly noisy in the yard. Emma was crying and shouting. Jack was barking and straining at his leash. Confused, Valya and Misha were looking out of their window.

Mama, of course, couldn’t stand it any longer. She grabbed me by the hand, ran to the ambulance and persuaded the medics to allow her to accompany her daughter. We rode away.

I didn’t see the final scene, but I can reconstruct it for I had witnessed many of them.

It grew still. The yard went back to normal – a quiet, happy yard in which nothing was happening. Grandma Lisa walked slowly onto the porch.

“Misha! Valya! Why was the dog barking? Was someone here?”

Chapter 10. We shouldn’t live like this any longer

Tashkent was changing rapidly. Even I noticed it. Teams of construction workers from all the Republics in the Union came in after the earthquake. The city was overgrown with scaffolding. Cranes rose everywhere. It seemed to me that their booms looked like the barrels of huge cannons. Etched high against the sky, they spun from side to side as if looking for their target somewhere far away on the horizon. Each crane had an operator who would direct it to the proper place when prompted by a worker standing on the ground. A large curved hook would pick up a huge slab of reinforced concrete, and the crane would raise it to the very top of a building, rocking it like a swaddled baby. Their cables looked like very thin threads from afar, and it seemed that the loads they carried stayed in the air, held up by some magical force. I could have watched that amazing spectacle for hours.

The whole city was obsessed with the ongoing construction work. The radio broadcast the achievements of construction workers almost every day. And that was the truth – their help was very noticeable. The Soviet government knew how to demonstrate its might, which it unfortunately chose not to demonstrate when it was needed to take care of its people. It demonstrated its might only when it was possible to brag, to show off to the whole world.

No matter what achievements were made in construction or how fast they were carried out, it could not solve the housing problem, which had been really critical even before the earthquake. It was just as critical as in any big city in the Soviet Union. And now, after the disaster, it seemed that all people could think and talk about was housing.

People who were left without a roof over their heads formed “live lines” at every agency. There was a crowd of people at one of the buildings near Turkmen Bazaar, which housed the commission that evaluated apartments to determine how safe they were, and people, concerned and worried, would wait there to learn how their fate would be decided. Those whose apartments had been damaged were offered the option of leaving Tashkent. They were offered apartments in other, less populated cities in the Republic, or even beyond its boundaries.

Summer arrived, and it was hot and dry, as usual, though it seemed abnormally sultry. Our yard would become a desert by ten in the morning. Quiet birds hid in the crowns of the trees. Jack, trying to escape the heat in the shade of his kennel, lay with his tongue out, breathing heavily. Even flies didn’t fly above the extremely hot, soft asphalt.

Father couldn’t stand the heat. For people with asthma it’s usually easier to breathe when the weather is dry, but he would gasp for breath. He was so weak he couldn’t walk. He was taken to the hospital again.

And since, before that, Father had managed to quarrel with Grandma Lisa, the old story began again – Mama was once again the target at which all arrows were shot…

“Hey, you, ignoramus!” my “intelligent” Uncle Misha called to her. “Rent an apartment somewhere else. I’m willing to pay your rent.”

Mama would only shrug her shoulders in response. She was ready to move anywhere, even to the ends of the earth. But where? And how?

Father was feeling better at the hospital. Once, when the doctor was making her rounds, she saw Mama and said with satisfaction, “Well, he’s feeling better and better. You can take him home.”

She expected Mama’s usual reply, “Oh, I’m so glad. Thank you, doctor.” But this time Mama proclaimed decisively, her voice unusually sharp, “I have nowhere to take him.”

“What do you mean?” the surprised doctor asked.

“Our apartment was damaged. We’re staying in a tent in his parents’ yard.”

It was my turn to be surprised. What tent were we staying in? Fortunately, I didn’t ask Mama about it.

“Why don’t you stay with his parents?” the doctor asked.

And Mama answered – this time in her normal voice – and it was the truth, “Who has need of him, ill as he is? They’ve turned him away.”

I looked at Father. He bent his head low and didn’t interfere in the conversation. And what could he say? He knew that Mama was right. It was necessary to move away, at all costs.

“All right,” the doctor said after a pause. “Summon an official from the Evaluation Commission and bring us a certificate. Then we’ll decide what to do about it.”

We went from the hospital to Turkmen Bazaar, and Mama applied for an inspection of our apartment.

Then we went home, and I was thinking that I would see the tent Mama had spoken about, but it wasn’t in the yard.

I stayed outside to play near the summer shower. The big yellow tank was filled through a hose attached to the spigot. Besides the shower head, it had a faucet below. It couldn’t be turned off properly and there was always a small puddle below it, which I found very useful. Pigeons drank water from it. It was also good for playing.

I was having a great time at the puddle when I heard muted blows. Boom-m… Boom-m… Boom-m. They were becoming louder and more frequent. They were coming from behind our door. Frightened, I rushed to the house and threw open the door. The blows, now very loud, were coming from the bedroom. I looked inside.

Mama, my mama, was standing on the bed, wielding an axe, which she held in both hands, rocking back and forth and smashing the wall with it.

To be precise, that wasn’t my mama; it was someone else. My mama was always kind, tender and quiet. The one who was banging the axe against the wall was mean, scary and dangerous. She repeated some sort of incantation in a voice that wasn’t like Mama’s at all as she continued smashing the wall, “It’s impossible… It’s impossible… It’s impossible…”

Plaster was flying in all directions. White dust covered the floor, the beds, the windows. Dishes rattled in the cupboard. The broken wall clock began ticking again, as if it remembered that scary night in April. I stood by the doorpost, my body trembling with every blow of the axe.

Mama sat down on the bed, panting. Her breathing returned to normal as her distorted face smoothed out and became my mama’s face again. She looked at me, almost calmly, and said, “Well, Son, now we have a damaged apartment. We’ll stay in a tent in the yard.”

She chuckled and looked around.

Cracks gaped in every corner of the bedroom and on the damaged walls.

Shouting could be heard in the courtyard. Grandma Lisa burst into the bedroom. Her bedroom was next to ours behind the wall. The axe blows must surely have been felt there. But when she ran into our bedroom, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

“Ibi, ne muram! Chi kari?! (God, prolong my life! What have you done?!)” she shouted.

Mama picked up the axe and walked right past Grandma.

“At least now I’ll be rid of you.”

Chapter 11. We have moved!!!

Something Mama had been dreaming about for a long time happened on one of the first days of December,1966. It was a miracle, performed by her will and her hands – we left the old house. We also left Tashkent. We moved to Chirchik.

That town was only 30 kilometers away from Tashkent. Father had chosen it himself. Firstly, it was not far away, and if something had happened to him, his relatives – at least that’s what he thought – would help Mama. Secondly, Chirchik was a town of new construction projects, so it wouldn’t be difficult to find work. And, sure enough, Father soon began teaching P.E. at Secondary School 19, and Mama was hired as a seamstress at Guncha knitting factory.

We took up residence in the settlement of Yubilayny – that was the name of a micro-district of Chirchik. We had our own apartment! It was new, in a new building. We had three rooms and a veranda enclosed in glass. We were allotted a garden plot in front of our windows near the entrance to the building, as were all the other ground floor tenants. There was a rose bush, a cherry tree, and a poplar in our small garden.

However, I wasn’t very interested in the garden. I was filled and overwhelmed with new impressions. There was a Greek family in the same building with us. A Ukrainian family, the Kulikovs, was above us. There were Crimean Tatars, the Zinedinovs, on the third floor, and above them, the Ilyasovs… In a word, our part of the building, just like all the other parts was a bit international. That was something new for me.

Naturally, the neighbors all made each other’s acquaintance quickly, and soon there were gatherings at the entrance every evening. The exchange of news, and gossip, of course, began. Dora, an elderly Greek woman who lived on our floor, was the principal gossipmonger. In the evening, when the weather was warm, she emerged from the building, without fail.

Dora, a corpulent woman, used to plop her heavy body onto the bench and begin grinding coffee or black pepper in a small hand-held coffee grinder. She delighted in chatting, over the whir of her grinder, with anybody who showed up. She definitely had the gift of a street orator. Not a single resident of our building passed her by without stopping to listen and being drawn into a conversation. It would become noisy. Curious faces would appear in windows and on verandas. The meeting would become not only well-attended but also multi-storied.

My mama was the only one who avoided those gatherings. She had never cared for discussing other people’s affairs, and the conversations under the windows always took on a personal nature, thanks to Dora. I soon learned that my father’s personality was discussed on a regular basis. I heard it myself many times while hiding behind the open window of our veranda. Alas, no kind word about him ever reached my ears.

Soon, I had new friends in Chirchik. They were the Kulikov brothers, seven-year-old Kolya and six-year-old Sasha from the apartment one flight up. The Zinedinov brothers, Rustem who was a first grader, and six-year-old Edem, the same age as Sasha and me, lived above the Kulikovs. Five kids from the same entrance – what could be better? We immediately found common interests and figured out what games we enjoyed the most. One of them was certainly “the war game.” But apart from that old game, familiar to children all over the world – and unfortunately, not only children – I learned a new, no less absorbing game called Cracker.

In the spring, as soon as water appeared, clay would begin to accumulate at the bottom of the ariks. We would make something like a flatbread out of it, putting a shallow dent in the center of it. That was a “cracker.” Then, you just needed to lift it with the dented side down and throw it on the asphalt with all your might. Pakh-kh! It sounded like a gunshot. And if the five of us threw two crackers each, at the same time… a burst of machine-gun fire was nothing compared to that. The ground where we played was between two buildings under construction, with a distance of about forty meters between them. It formed a kind of echo chamber, and the noise resounded like thunderclaps.

Our “shooting” could hardly have pleased the adults, but that didn’t bother us. On the contrary, if any of the neighbors dared to reproach us for such pranks, a particularly loud and long cannonade would be heard under their windows.

We gradually began to familiarize ourselves with the new town. It took a quite a while.

Unlike Tashkent, Chirchik was a very new town. It had appeared in 1935 with the consolidation of a few workers settlements created for the construction of the Chirchik Hydropower Station and the chemical plant, but construction was not limited to the plant, the first chemical plant in Uzbekistan. They also built a plant to process metals with high melting points and a plant that manufactured electric transformers. Footwear and sewing factories appeared. By the time we arrived, Chirchik was a big industrial center with about 25 industrial enterprises. There was also the din of tanks, the muted thuds of shots fired, reverberating through the wide valley speckled with hills on the outskirts of town when field exercises at the tank school, the largest in Uzbekistan, would take place.

That was the extraordinary town we had moved to. Our building, just like the whole of Chirchik, was multiethnic because even people from other republics moved there when they heard there was a new town with big construction projects underway, where workers with various skills and professions were in demand.

The town was dominated by the chemical plant, which was located not far from the entrance to town on the Tashkent side, surrounded by a high brick wall topped with barbed wire. Poisonous yellow smoke spewed out of its chimneys, day and night. On windless days, a column of smoke rose permanently into the sky like a thick twisted rope, or rather like a monstrous brush that painted the entire firmament with its poisonous yellow hue. That yellow hue accumulated to form paunchy, festering clouds.

When a north wind would begin to blow, and that happened quite often – for the valley studded with hills didn’t protect the town from cold winds – an unpleasant pungent odor spread throughout Chirchik. It would cause a tickling sensation in the throat and make your eyes water. The grass and leaves would turn yellow after a rain. And trees and small gardens in the vicinity of the plant were an absolutely unnatural shade.

All the citizens knew that the plant’s exhaust was poisonous and that there were no filters on the chimneys for protection. I never heard about any attempts by citizens to do anything to stop the plant from poisoning them. Workers at the plant were happy to receive free milk at work. Any protest was out of the question. The all-powerful plant had strategic significance. If necessary, it could be easily switched over within a day to produce military raw materials.

* * *

But for the smoke, Chirchik was a rather cozy and attractive town. It was divided into two parts by the Chirchik River, or “the canal,” as it was called there. Its banks had been coated with cement inside the city limits to prevent erosion. The Chirchik was a turbulent mountain river generously replenished by snow that melted on the spurs of the Tian Shan mountains. As soon as high water arrived in the spring, brooks, torrents, and waterfalls gushed down, flooding and carrying along everything in their path. After turning into a river, the stream rushed about like an anxious mother who had lost her children and was prepared to search every nook and cranny and overcome every obstacle. That was why they had to cement the banks of the river within the city limits.

Leaves rustled on trees, the roses were fragrant, and water babbled merrily in the ariks that ran beside paths and sidewalks. I would notice all of that later, when I grew up. At that time, we were little kids and traveled only as far as our kindergarten or school.

Emma’s and my kindergarten, which was named Buratino (Pinocchio), was not much different from the one in Tashkent. We had the same kinds of classes and were taken outside to play in similar pavilions. Of course, there were no get-togethers with our favorite mouse anymore. But a golden eagle, a proud bird, lived in a big cage in the yard. It peered at us with disdain, turned away from us haughtily when we tried to talk to it, and paid little attention to our attempts to feed it bread. Those attempts were unsuccessful because the holes in the wire cage were too small.