216 · Alanna E. Cooper
a sturdy tree from the ground, their migration initiated the dramatic rup-
ture that would follow. When a man left with his wife, for example, her
sister might soon follow, and then that sister’s parents-in-law, then their
siblings, those siblings’ children, and so the chain of migration continued.
By the time I arrived in 1993, everyone I met had a child, parent, sibling,
or cousin in the United States or Israel.
Those who remained behind watched as the homes of their friends,
relatives, and neighbors were sold off, one by one, to Muslim families.
Mazal commented, “It’s terrible what has happened in [the Jewish ma-
hallah in] Bukhara in the last few years. It used to be that only Jews lived
here.... People would bring out benches and sit on the streets and talk.
Now people don’t know where they’ll be tomorrow.” Likewise, fifteen-
year-old Nelya told me nostalgically of the days when she and her friends
would roam freely through the narrow streets of Samarkand’s Jewish
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