Memories remade in Jonathan Gil Harris’ ‘The Girl from Fergana — Secrets of My Mother’s Chinese Tea Chest’

The worst secret is an open one. Jonathan Gil Harris invokes Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, ‘Purloined Letter’, where what was stolen was hidden in plain sight. For years, a large Chinese tea chest dominated their spare living room in New Zealand. His mother Stella forbade him from opening it. This chest, stuffed with envelopes and shoe boxes smelling of naphthalene, is what he uses to piece together her story.

‘The Girl from Fergana — Secrets of My Mother’s Chinese Tea Chest’ is a memoir that is tender, evocative and poignant. Stella left home in Warsaw to escape Nazi-occupied Poland, to be deported first to Siberia, and then to Russia-controlled Central Asia. The chest was all she had of her pre-war life — “souvenirs from worlds now closed off to her and us”. “Her trauma, like the tea chest, was always undeniably, forcefully present in my life,” he writes. “Yet its content, like those of the tea chest, was beyond scrutiny.” Until she began to lose her memory.

It belonged to her Uncle Joe — a trader, lover of everything refined, and her saviour. A generation later, Jonathan would follow in his footsteps to India.

The Girl from Fergana: Secrets of My Mother’s Chinese Tea Chest

by Jonathan Gil Harris.

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Pages 326. Rs 899

Stella began to forget English, the last language she learnt, retreating to Polish of her childhood and Hebrew when she was a teenager — neither language that Jonathan spoke well. She retreated into a world that he couldn’t follow — and the tea chest that contained the fragment of the “lost pasts” was the only place where he could look.

The language in she finally chatted was Uzbek. “My mother had never lived in Uzbekistan, but could speak Uzbek proficiently because for five years, her home had been in a mountain valley in Central Asia where Uzbek was just one of the many local tongues,” he writes. Her years in Fergana valley — where Mughal emperor Babur came from — shaped her. She lost her mother Lola, and learnt to survive by selling ribbons her uncle Joe used to parcel.

In this memoir, Jonathan also documents the public history of the Jews in Fergana. This was once a belt that had a Jewish presence going back 2,500 years. They were weeded out in Stalin’s reorganised Soviet Union.

Stella was an expert in folding paper. Her version of origami was tucking away what she wanted hidden. Jonathan has done just that. It is in finding the story that he lost that he makes sense of the complex pluralistic past.

A chronicle of connections emerges, like the famed carpets woven in Central Asia which the Jews had a monopoly of trade over. For over 1,500 years, rugs have been composed of threads not only of wool and silk, but also diverse cross-cultural traditions.

It is easy to get lost in the dazzling array of research — condensing thousands of years into a slender book. “So much of biblical Hebrew was made possible by the Persian rule over Western and Central Asia,” he writes. Pardes, which in Hebrew means orchard and paradise, is a Persian word for garden. Shosana, the word for lily, is derived from Shushan, the Achaemenid capital.

He conjures up the “ghosts” of Fergana where in the 4th century, the remains of several Jews were reburied in a trading hub near Uzgen where Stella lived. These bones, writes Jonathan, not only indicated that Jewish merchants prospered in the area but were an expression of a “blended phenomenon”.

Stella’s mother Lola died of cancer, refusing to give up her silver as she lay starving when they lived in Fergana. Her husband Nathan, his grandfather, had died of tuberculosis earlier. In the escape from Auschwitz, three of her family were not so lucky. Her cousin Lusia, a head-turning beauty, survived. Her son Viki, who Stella had treated like a human doll in the Polish city of Lwow in 1939, had been taken from her arms by Nazi soldiers. Lusia writes to Stella years after the war to tell her this story. A letter she burns. “Burning the letter was part of the pact Stella had made with her family’s history to keep its most violent details a secret, from herself as much as from us,” Jonathan writes.

A testimony to her survival, courage, grit, the book is also a witness to her life as she made and remade herself — the Polish Stella Freud, the Shulamith in Israel and the British Shulamith Harris, when she married her husband in Britain, coming back to Stella when they moved to New Zealand. The word Hebrew, he writes, derives from an ancient Egyptian word that refers to perpetual uprootedness.

This defined Stella’s life. But it is also the story of the uprootedness of her community. It is a reminder for them, as much as for everyone, of the power of collaboration, of absorption and of assimilation of shared stories.

He has woven his grief — deep and consuming — into something larger, the loss of a world where intermingling was a norm. The loss that he weaves, the weight that you carry in your chest as you read is personal as it is collective. It is brave, idealistic, deeply important.

Jonathan is also clear-eyed about his mother. She was “remade” by the ethnonationalism in Israel, “convinced that the Israeli military weren’t aggressors… but national heroes”. It led to painful arguments. “It was like her mind was partitioned like Palestine.”

On her life in the Valley, she “painted her Muslim neighbours as beloved friends… as a post-1948 Israeli, she cast them as mortal enemies”. It is this duality — of memory shaped, remade — that he explores, especially in these hyper-nationalist times.

— The writer is a literary critic