Filling a Void in my Family History

When my grandfather left Ukraine in the 1920s, he boarded the ship alone, leaving his parents and sisters behind. Not long after he arrived in the United States, his family sent him a group portrait with a note scrawled on the back.
My father kept that photo in the top drawer of his dresser. Sometimes when I was alone, I would take it out and study the faces of the children. These are my cousins, I would think. But I could not read the handwriting on the back, my grandfather had passed away when I was a young child, and I never learned anything about them or their fate. So, I grew up with a void; a hole in my family, my history, and even a missing piece in my understanding of who I was.
The possibility of filling that vacuum presented itself in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. I began to study Russian and considered traveling to Ukraine one day to find my family. In the meantime, I took a job teaching at a New York high school that had just been established to cater to the needs of newly-arriving Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants. Perhaps I would meet my long-lost family members there. Realistically, I did not think I would meet my actual cousins, but looked forward to connecting with my metaphorical cousins: The people who shared the same roots and history from which I had been separated when my grandfather left his home so many decades before.
As it turned out, the school was located in Queens, New York, in the very region where the largest population of Bukharan Jewish immigrants had resettled. The members of this community had lived through seventy years of Soviet rule. Yet, they hardly looked like the fair-skinned, Eastern European relatives in my grandfather’s family portrait; over the course of their long history in Central Asia, they had not eaten gefilte fish, spoken Yiddish or lived in shtetls.
Indeed, their religious and cultural practices were so different from my own, that when I met them, they struck me as strangers. Yet, they called themselves Jews. Our histories must have intersected somewhere in the past. This book, Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism, is the result of my efforts to figure out where and how.
In the process, I have not found my actual long-lost relatives. I have, however, found my distant Jewish cousins. By uncovering the mechanisms through which our religious practices, our histories and our sense of identity has remained connected, I have gained a deep, complex understanding of Jewish history. So too, I have discovered a compelling framework for understanding the structure of the Jewish universe and my own place within it. In that sense, my research among Bukharan Jews—and the writing of this book upon which it was based--has helped to fill the void left in the wake of my grandfather’s voyage to America.
My father kept that photo in the top drawer of his dresser. Sometimes when I was alone, I would take it out and study the faces of the children. These are my cousins, I would think. But I could not read the handwriting on the back, my grandfather had passed away when I was a young child, and I never learned anything about them or their fate. So, I grew up with a void; a hole in my family, my history, and even a missing piece in my understanding of who I was.
The possibility of filling that vacuum presented itself in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. I began to study Russian and considered traveling to Ukraine one day to find my family. In the meantime, I took a job teaching at a New York high school that had just been established to cater to the needs of newly-arriving Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants. Perhaps I would meet my long-lost family members there. Realistically, I did not think I would meet my actual cousins, but looked forward to connecting with my metaphorical cousins: The people who shared the same roots and history from which I had been separated when my grandfather left his home so many decades before.
As it turned out, the school was located in Queens, New York, in the very region where the largest population of Bukharan Jewish immigrants had resettled. The members of this community had lived through seventy years of Soviet rule. Yet, they hardly looked like the fair-skinned, Eastern European relatives in my grandfather’s family portrait; over the course of their long history in Central Asia, they had not eaten gefilte fish, spoken Yiddish or lived in shtetls.
Indeed, their religious and cultural practices were so different from my own, that when I met them, they struck me as strangers. Yet, they called themselves Jews. Our histories must have intersected somewhere in the past. This book, Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism, is the result of my efforts to figure out where and how.
In the process, I have not found my actual long-lost relatives. I have, however, found my distant Jewish cousins. By uncovering the mechanisms through which our religious practices, our histories and our sense of identity has remained connected, I have gained a deep, complex understanding of Jewish history. So too, I have discovered a compelling framework for understanding the structure of the Jewish universe and my own place within it. In that sense, my research among Bukharan Jews—and the writing of this book upon which it was based--has helped to fill the void left in the wake of my grandfather’s voyage to America.