This is a prejudiced review. I needed this book, and thankfully, someone wrote it. Did it answer my need? No. But it did add to my questions and so served the purpose of any book. It turned out that the writer shared my quest, if not my puzzlement. We walked the same road all humans take when we need to understand humanity: the Silk Road. Call it the Silk Roads as the author does, or the Silk Route or the Silk network, we travel it geographically or metaphorically in our search for understanding.

Mine began as a geographic quest. When I recently visited three cities on the Silk Road, I looked in vain for the ancient commonality of that road. These cities had retained only very recent memories. Their older past shone new and reconstructed, a hologram that might wink out at a thought.

The Girl From Fergana promised just the opposite. The eponymous girl has lost all recent memory from her illness and reveals instead an older tapestry. The contrast, I thought, might explain what puzzles me as the world explodes in unimaginable violence or trembles in uneasy truce: what is the wellspring of hate? Is it memory or event?

The premise is interesting and seductively told. The writer’s mother, Stella, slipping into the disarray of Alzheimer’s disease, loses recent memory and her most recent language, English. She begins to speak in a medley of languages: Polish, Hebrew, and surprisingly, Uzbek. “I was fascinated by the fragments of lost pasts that were now surfacing in other languages, exposed by the mental wrecking-ball of her condition,” explains the author.

Stella was born Stella Freud, and the most famous of Freuds is often cited in the text. My training makes me a cautious reader, and I balked at the comparison between Alzheimer’s and psychoanalysis. The disease is nothing as romantic as a dream, and the book cannot be read on that framework.

The Freudian interpretation of dreams relies on two questions: What are the materials of the dream? How do they act to produce the dream? Perhaps these questions can apply to this book, which explores the manifest part of Stella’s dream.

The gubbins of her dream are contained in a Chinese tea chest crammed with memorabilia. She has been very secretive about this chest, and it is almost transgressive to open it. A tea chest scented with camphor; it is an emblem of something beyond Stella’s own past. It is the latent fragment of her dream, the Jewish identity. The author then foists this identity on the Silk Road—“no other community other than the Jews can claim to have been a part of the commerce along the Silk Roads from their inception to their demise”—and devotes the rest of the book to substantiating this risible claim.

Stella’s tea chest is crammed with folded papers. Her paper-folding skills had often delighted her children. But now, to the author’s exploratory eye, the chest becomes a genizah, the Hebrew word for a temporary cache of paper, which, no matter what its content, carries the name of God and so may not be destroyed. This leads on to a brief review of genizot along the Silk Road.

The oldest literary repository on the Silk Road, though, is not quite a genizah. The Dunhuang corpus, discovered in 1900 and then savaged piecemeal by Western archaeologists from the grottoes of Taklamakan, is a collection of 60,000 manuscripts written over five centuries, beginning in 2 BCE. It testifies to the diversities of language, religion, and custom in Dunhuang, the westernmost town in the Hexi Corridor.

Stella’s Austrian-Hungarian genealogy had me swamped in begats, spooked by the ghosts of the Silk Road. Once they had been assimilated into the non-Jewish population after 1867, Stella’s forebears took up ancient Jewish trades, selling copper on the Silk Road. Her father, Natan, serenaded his love with a German song that had its roots in the Song of Songs, and what else could that erotic paean be but an inventory of merchandise on the Silk Road?

By now I felt like the Wedding Guest, transfixed by Professor Gil Harris’ less than glitt’ring prose, as every happenstance—from a gay uncle’s satin tie to Stella’s mother’s chypre perfume—evidenced an ancestral presence on the Silk Road. When Sigmund Freud makes a fleeting appearance, the author comments on his taste in carpets and eastern statuettes to remark: “...maybe his theory of the unconscious as the container of suppressed ancient memories… can be seen instead as an allegory of the suppressed Silk Road histories of Jews.”

The Nazi invasion of Warsaw in 1939 displaced Stella’s family. They fled to Lwów, to Stella’s grandparents. Attempting return, they were arrested as German sympathisers by the Russians and deported to Siberia. Stella’s mother, Lola, sank into depression. From now on, Stella and her sister Maryska would play mother to Lola, console and care for her. (I would have liked to linger on Stella’s experiences without being reminded that she was travelling the northernmost stretch of the Silk Road.) From Yagodnoye Camp, their family, along with 1,00,000 Polish Jews, was “relocated” to the newly created Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and deposited in the very heart of the Silk Road, Uzgen in the Fergana Valley.

Over the next five years, Stella would pioneer existence in unfamiliar surroundings, face the death of her parents, forge friendships, fight her way to adolescence, and foster her talent for mathematics. We are distracted from this indomitable personality by the ghosts of the Silk Road that the author keeps nudging to the forefront of the narrative.

And not unfairly, because Stella is mere excuse for this book, which seeks to explore the Eastern aspect of Jewish identity that escapes European narratives or else is mentioned only as a slur. The close symbiosis between Islam and Judaism is tracked through multiple potted histories. I wished for more about the network of scholarship that makes up my Silk Road, the dialogue of knowledge, in particular of medicine and botany, that laid a foundation for modern science in a peculiarly practical way. I wished for more of the poetry and fables that carried the Panchatantra so circuitously to La Fontaine.

All too soon, it is time to close the chest, with the puzzle still unanswered: Why did Stella choose to forget her years in Uzgen? Why did her Arab neighbours in Israel morph from Other into Enemy? Why did Europe, which inflicted every grief on her, still seem a welcoming home? These are questions relevant not just to Stella’s children but to the world as it watches this needless conflagration in the Persian Gulf. 

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. Twice in Nalanda, their latest novel, is now in bookshops.

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