Jonathan Gil Harris Excavates Silk Road Pluralism Through His Mother's Chinese Tea Chest in ‘The Girl from Fergana’

A camphor-scented Chinese tea chest sat in Jonathan Gil Harris's childhood living room, its contents strictly forbidden. His mother Stella had forbidden him to open this "highly public container of her most private secrets", folded memorabilia from worlds closed off by war. Only when Alzheimer's began dismantling her memory could Harris finally unseal this archive.

The Girl from Fergana: Secrets of My Mother's Chinese Tea Chest braids a Polish Jewish girl's survival story with 2,500 years of Jewish life along the Silk Roads. Family history folded within civilisational history, personal grief within historical erasure.

The Archive Speaks What Memory Cannot

Harris writes that "to write a person's memoir...one needs to commune with their ghosts and trace the movement of ripple effects that have been hundreds, and even thousands of years in the making." The tea chest becomes his governing metaphor, a Silk Roads artefact whose surface depicts the monk Xuanzang's journey through the valley where Stella would later live.

In our conversation, Harris explains how the book evolved, "It was only when I sifted through the previously sealed contents that I realized her story had fascinating dimensions beyond what I had thought I knew." He discovered that Uzgen, where Stella spent the war, had been ruled by Babur, and that she spoke "Uzbek and Tajik" picked up in the bazaar.

As Harris tells us, "I began to realize that Judaism and Jewish identity hadn't originated, fully formed, in ancient Israel. Rather, they developed along the Silk Roads in conversation with other cultures, languages and faiths—especially Zoroastrianism and, later, Islam."

Two Stories, Intricately Woven

Seven-year-old Stella's 1939 escape from Warsaw, hidden under hay, bribing sentries with vodka whilst wearing shoes "stuffed with jewellery", reads like a thriller. The sentries cursed them: "Idżta i zginta (Go and perish)!" Yet Harris excavates deeper histories. The Bug River Stella crossed had been Scythian territory, where nomadic peoples "helped oversee the trade of the early Silk Roads".

Uzgen had been a crucible of Jewish-Muslim coexistence. Bukharan Jews prayed in "Sinagoga Masjidi", Synagogue Mosques. In our interview, Harris illustrates this with carpet-making, "nomadic Turkic-speaking farmers would spin wool, then take it to Persian-speaking Sart weavers...who would get it dyed by Jewish artisans." These transactions, he argues, "have been largely forgotten with the Soviet partition".

Most moving is Kamrakhan, the Uzbek girl who befriended Stella. Sixty-six years later, Stella remembered "the smell of her clothes in winter...associated with the warmth of her hugs". Harris writes that in those embraces, "something of the neighbourly ethos of the Silk Roads had touched Stella too".

A Counter-History for Our Fractured Present

When we asked how this past speaks to our present moment of hardened borders, Harris was frank, "The urge to nationalize carpets as much as cultures comes from a partitioning mindset that is proving every bit as toxic as the political partitions inflicted by western imperial powers on Central Asia, South Asia and the Middle East." He doesn't romanticise the Silk Roads. "There's no way we can fully resurrect" them, he acknowledges, yet these histories can "still teach us about how what we consider to be 'natural' about nations, identities and relations to others are, in fact, very recent constructions."

The book's stakes are highest on Israel-Palestine. In our interview, Harris describes himself as "utterly heart-smashed, to use Arundhati Roy's resonant phrase" by "the death of my mother, and...the genocide in Gaza". The villain, he states unflinchingly, is ethnonationalism, "and that will trouble some of my Zionist family and friends."

Harris frames Stella's journey as a historical fork. "Until 1948," he explains, "the European Jewish world had been ideologically divided between the Zionists...and the Bundists, who...prioritized solidarity between Jews and all other peoples who have suffered systematic persecution." Stella was adopted by a Bundist family in Uzgen who "inculcated in her a strong sense of global justice". Yet after Palestine's partition in 1948, she became a Zionist, understandably, as "having lost her parents, she saw the Jewish nation-state as providing security to her in the way her mother and father might have done." Still, Harris sees Bundism "and the possibility of a joint Palestinian-Jewish territory, as the missed chance that history didn't take."

Luminous Limitations, Enduring Gifts

Harris's prose shimmers with metaphoric richness, though occasionally it borders on over-elaboration. The extended meditation on mulberry trees, whilst symbolically resonant, feels laboured. More problematic is the occasional tendency towards nostalgic cosmopolitanism that doesn't always grapple with the violence characterising those trading networks.

Yet these are minor cavils against a work of profound imagination. Harris's treatment of Alzheimer's is exquisite. He compares Stella to a star: "because they are light years away, we see them only at a lag, how they were a long time ago and not as they are now." As her memory crumbled, earlier languages surfaced, Polish, Hebrew, Uzbek, revealing "fragments of lost pasts...exposed by the mental wrecking-ball of her condition". When we asked what he hopes Indian readers take away, Harris offered, "I hope...that they might recognize how Indian history does not stop at its borders." For two thousand years, the Silk Roads connected these regions "linguistically, culturally and religiously". "Inasmuch as The Girl from Fergana is about a rich history of pluralism and cultural exchange shattered by partition and ethnonationalism, I think that it is in many ways my most Indian book."

The Girl from Fergana is that rare achievement: a family memoir becoming a meditation on living together across difference. In excavating one woman's tea chest, Harris gives us a counter-archive to our age of walls, a reminder that "our lived experience of pluralism remains at odds with certain political narratives that value uniformity of language and faith rather than conversations across difference."

Stella died peacefully on 9 March 2024. One of the last things she said, despite being racked by pain, was in Polish: "Jesteś taki kochany (You are so lovely)." This book is his gift to her, and to us all.