Where Have All the Jews Gone? Mass Migration from Independent Uzbekistan · 217reckoned 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