Qesher Book Club: The Stateless Central Asian Merchant

About the Talk

Haim Abraham, born in 1897 in Turkmenistan, wrote out his memoir into a spiral-bound notebook covering a period of ninety years. After he passed away in 1999, the journal was discovered in his home, written in an ancient language: Judeo-Farsi.

Years later, the journals were translated, unearthing a time capsule nearly lost. The former years of Abraham's life had a recurrent theme of Russian Tsarist, Bolshevik, and Soviet violence, which heavily affected his family's viability. Abraham's family were not nationals anywhere. They were forced to move from country to country in search of religious freedom and the economic opportunities that often went hand in hand as merchant class Jews. What Abraham did have, which was central to his endurance, was a community of relatives and friends in every city he traveled. The mutual responsibility inherent within the Jewish community was essential to establishing worldwide business ties and…