The Stateless Central Asian Merchant: The Life of Haim Aghajan Abraham Based on his Journal 1897-1986
Mon, Sep 08
|Webinar
This historical memoir is based on the writings of Dahlia Abraham-Klein’s grandfather—an Afghan Bukharan Jewish merchant born in 1897 in Russian-occupied Turkmenistan. His story is preserved in a rare manuscript written in Judeo-Persian using Rashi script.
Time & Location
Sep 08, 2025, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Webinar
Guests
About the event
About the book:
Haim Abraham, born in 1897 in Turkmenistan, wrote out his memoir in a spiral-bound notebook covering a period of ninety years. After he passed away in 1999, the journals were 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…