These are the hats that my mother and uncles bought when bartering to survive in Uzbekistan during the Holocaust years. My mother was only twelve years old and her brothers – 14 and 9 years of age – when she and her family left Horodenka, Ukraine in 1941 and took the long treacherous journey to…
(JTA) — Driving through this dusty desert city of many ornate and ancient mosques, Shirin Yakubov recalls the ruthlessness of her country’s recently deceased president of 25 years. “He killed all of them, every last one,” she says of Islam Karimov’s role in the 2005 police massacre of hundreds of suspected Islamists in the eastern…
As the sun set over Bukhara, Uzbekistan on a recent Friday evening, I joined the local community in welcoming the Sabbath. This was my first time back to the historic spot on the Silk Road since I first visited in the 1990s. At that time, Uzbekistan had just gained independence in the wake of the…
I don’t remember the name of the man who sold the dictionary to me. He was one of the many people I met in the 1990s who was getting rid of his belongings in advance of his migration from Bukhara. He invited me to his home and showed me the small stack of books on…
Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood last March hosted a celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Held at the National, a sprawling, glitzy entertainment palace off Brighton Beach Avenue, the celebration attracted an enthusiastic crowd of immigrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Under stage lights flashing red and green, lavishly costumed performers danced and sang to…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. It is said that a good firefighter arrives at the scene half an hour before the fire breaks out. So what about a good photojournalist? When the amateur German aviator Mathias Rust infiltrated the Soviet Union in 1987 and landed right in the middle of Red Square,…
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