Spektrum Iran

Abstrakt This text consists of two parts: a brief book introduction and a translation from the book, which constitutes the main part. The translation, rendered from Tajik Persian in accordance with the original style, is taken from the final chapter of the first volume of the two-volume memoir In the Stone Sack (1988/1989) by Mordechai ben Hijo Bachaev, alias Muhib (1911–2007). Muhib was a Persianophone writer, poet, translator, and cultural and language activist among the so-called Bukharan Jews in Central Asia, particularly in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In his memoirs, he describes in detail—and in a novelistic style—his life circumstances during the period of the Great Terror, the Stalinist campaign of persecution in the late 1930s, leading up to his imprisonment in 1938. However, the main aim of this text is to introduce one of the most influential figures in the history of Tajik-Persian language and literature among Bukharan Jews. This ethno-religious minority in Soviet Central Asia (1917–1935) constructed and developed a new “language” alongside and derived from Persian and its Central Asian variety, Tajiki—under the name “Bukharian Jewish.” This language was first written in Hebrew script, then in Latin, before being abandoned by government order in 1934. The last books in Bukharian Jewish continued to be published until around 1940. The number of speakers of this Tajik-Persian variety is estimated to have been around 85,000 by the end of 1987, with 45,000 residing in the USSR and 32,000 in Israel.