Back in the Old Country, Bukharan Jews lived among patriarchal societies where the husband ruled the household and sometimes enforced his will with a raised hand. After all, the Old Country qualified as what the writer V. S. Naipaul has called a “wife-beating society,” a description that fits most of the world's nations. But here Bukharan men, like those of many other immigrant groups, are confronting the values and laws of a new land and have discovered—sometimes after spending time in jail—that violence against wives is not acceptable.
That is why a delegation of three synagogue nobles set off some time ago to the home of a jewelry worker in Rego Park, the center of the Bukharan diaspora. The man, an immigrant in his late thirties, had experienced setbacks at work, his income diminishing in a seasonal job for which he was paid by the piece. His malaise was not helped by the fact that his wife was doing just fine at her bookkeeper's job and was evolving into the breadwinner. He ended up taking his frustration out on his wife and struck her several times in the course of an argument, leaving her black and blue. She called 911 and the police locked him up in Rikers Island until his wife dropped the charges. The Bukharan community—still forging its reputation among New Yorkers—was disgraced, as much by the jailing as by the hitting. Now, Rabbi Shlomo Nisanov, the bearded leader of Kehilat Sephardim of Ahavat Achim in Kew Gardens Hills, and two other emissaries, Gabi Aronov, who sells kosher meat, and Abraham Itzhakov, an elderly émigré who had been an apparatchik in Uzbekistan, needed to teach him about the rules of the American game—not to mention the right way for people to treat one another.
It was a delicate mission that tested the wile and sensitivity of the rabbi, a genial man who was raised in a suburb of Samarkand in Uzbekistan and came here in 1979 as an eight-year-old boy. Like many immigrants, he is enchanted with certain American expressions and uses them more often than he should—but to charming effect. He will describe a lavish wedding as “the whole nine yards,” and then use the same expression to describe the meager furnishings his family brought from Uzbekistan. Nisanov wanted to change the man's behavior without giving him a lecture that could make the man despise himself. He also did not want to unravel a family with three children. “You can't just make the guy feel bad” is the way Rabbi Nisanov put his dilemma to me. “When you clap, it takes two hands.”
At the meeting, the jeweler claimed that his wife deserved the punishment, that she did not “know how to respect her husband.” So the rabbi reminded him that he came from “a respectable family,” not one known for its loutish behavior. “Individuals are allowed to disagree, but that doesn't give me the right to beat you up,” the rabbi told him. “To raise a hand on another person, let alone your spouse, you are considered an evil person.” Finally, the rabbi was firm: “You can talk with words. You don't have to hit. No matter how many pressures you have, you don't pick up a hand against the wife and kids.”
The man seemed chastened, but the rabbi confided later that the man was most upset not by his own behavior but at his wife's offense against household protocol. “That he hit his wife didn't bother him—it bothered him that she called the police,” Nisanov said.
In listening to Nisanov, I realized how the Bukharans of central Queens have become a prime exhibit in the scarcely remarked-upon underside of the vaunted immigrant dream. Newcomers from most countries learn that immigration is brutal on families. As legal refugees from the former Soviet Union, the Bukharans can come over as families, unlike some of the migrants who spirit on their own across borders. But the strains are just as subversive. Bukharan wives typically land jobs before husbands. The men may have been engineers or government officials in the Old Country and reject jobs they feel are unworthy of them. The women are less finicky and will work at such messy, low-skill jobs as home health aide and cashier. Suddenly breadwinner roles are reversed. Even if the husbands reluctantly take jobs they feel are beneath them, the wives often end up earning more money. At work, the wives come to know accomplished and outspoken American women. Steadily, subtly, their relationships with their husbands shift. Some men chafe at their diminished status. A few—not many, but enough to worry the Bukharan community—take their anger out on their wives. “When you don't bring money home, you get angry and you don't know who to get angry at so you get angry at your family,” Rabbi Nisanov says. “If you get angry at your neighbor, he'll call the police. In your own family you're protected.”
What's more, Bukharans still have to cope with the same unhinging frustrations as other immigrants—their clumsiness with a strange language, their bewilderment at New York's convoluted grid of streets and subway tunnels, the isolation from families forsaken in the Old Country, the loss of cultural touchstones. Merely getting oneself understood is a daunting moment-to-moment challenge. With no other kin around, the pressures on a spouse to provide affection, companionship, wisdom, esteem, are more urgent. Minor disappointments can seem catastrophic; early stumblings foreshadow failure of the whole immigration enterprise. Children looking on at such inelegant bungling cannot help but sense the chasm between their parents and more rooted Americans, and sometimes lose respect.
I saw these tensions in my own parents' marriage, which barely survived the transplantation from Europe. My father's skills as a farmer were useless in New York, and he took the first job he could find—as a roustabout in that ironing-board-cover factory in Newark. My mother too snatched the first job she could find—sewing hats. As a woman in the 1950s, she would rather have stayed home and raised children. But now she was earning as much as he was—and, with overtime in Easter bonnet season, sometimes a good deal more. She lost whatever deference women of that era owed their husbands and was not timid about letting him know of her disappointment, sometimes in front of her children. That took a toll on my father's confidence. But though he sometimes brandished his arm in anger, he never struck her. He was not that kind of man. With only a fifth-grade education—typical of Polish peasants—he never found a better-paying, cerebrally taxing job and so never felt sure enough to parry her carping. He shrugged it off, which only made his children lose regard. Once, when I was a teenager, I was walking to synagogue with my mother and I could sense she was agitated. She recounted an argument with my father the night before and startled me by talking of divorce. She never took even a tentative step toward a breakup, and in time their marriage settled into what would prove a durable—and loving—bond. But to their son those first years after they immigrated were often filled with foreboding.
The problem of wife beating among the Bukharans is probably no greater than it is for any other immigrant communities and may even be less. I called people who work with other ethnicities such as Emira Habiby Browne, executive director of the Arab-American Family Support Center in Brooklyn, who told me Arab men are also frightened of losing power in the family. “The immigration experience lends itself to domestic violence,” she said straightforwardly.
Indeed, many of today's immigrants come from cultures where wife beating is so routine, women have come to rationalize it. A concise statement of the problem appears in the novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul's masterpiece about life among the ethnic Indians of Trinidad. Pondering what approach he should take toward his new wife, Biswas observes that most women were disappointed if the man did not dominate them with the threat of beatings. Biswas' sister-in-law “talked with pride of the beatings she had received from her short-lived husband. She regarded them as a necessary part of her training and often attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband.”
However widespread the problem, the Bukharans, tribal and intensely private, have not been happy having the problem aired in Jewish community newspapers. I had a long chat with Boris Kandov, president of the Congress of Bukharan Jews of the United States and Canada, and Lana Chanimova Levitin, often referred to as his minister for culture, over a formidable lunch at Uzbekistan Tandoori Bread in Kew Gardens. They filled me with tandoor-baked b
read stuffed with meat; a vegetable soup known as lagman; and palav, a rice dish laced with carrots and meat. Through much of the conversation, Kandov tried to divert me from the story I was working on, insisting that “this problem is in any community, especially immigrant community”: “There is a saying, you don't take the garbage out of your home,” he told me. “You clean your home, you sweep your home. You don't bring your problems outside.”
Understandably, the community's leaders would rather the media focus on the thousands of solid families and of children who have gone on to college and become doctors and engineers. Kandov himself is a shining model. In sixteen years here, he has built a fleet of 500 cars— Prime Time Limousine. Levitin, who came in 1972 from Samarkand, is a thriving real estate broker on Long Island. One daughter graduated from Columbia University and a second was studying at Fordham. Bukharans in general are proud of their thirty kosher restaurants, where families gather nightly for weddings, birthdays, and memorial services, dining on kebab while listening to musicians in brocaded silk caftans play the lute-like tar and hand drums. They would rather attention be paid to a six-story, $7 million building that has risen in Forest Hills and combines a synagogue, cultural center, and museum. It is the seat of their chief rabbi, Yitzhak Yehoshua, and houses twenty Torah scrolls donated by Bukharans. They would prefer a focus on a new $7.3 million yeshiva in Rego Park, the Jewish Gymnasium, where children of Bukharan families—observant, as most are, or not—study for free. Both institutions were financed by Bukharans around the world such as Lev Leviev, who, according to Forbes, controls the world's largest source of rough diamonds and is worth $2.6 billion.
Until they came here in large numbers, Bukharans were obscure even to most American Jews, whose roots are in Eastern and Central Europe. The Bukharans trace their lineage to the Jews who stayed in Central Asia after the Hebrew exile in Babylonia ended in 538 B.C. They lived in scattered settlements along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route linking China and the Mediterranean, serving as merchants, silk dyers, and court musicians. In virtual isolation from world Jewry, even the Sephardim, whom they most resemble, they cultivated idiosyncratic traditions, sometimes absorbed from the surrounding Near Eastern cultures. They preserved these traditions under Muslim potentates for a millennium, and under the czars, and kept them alive even when the Communist commissars forbade public worship. They also sustained their peculiar dialect, Bukhari, a variation of Persian flavored with Uzbek, Tajik, and Hebrew, though they spoke Russian as well. Even pogroms did not destroy the community. Levitin, the cultural minister, recalled how Muslims brazenly burned Jewish houses and raped women during the Six Days' War of 1967. Communist officials stood by.
Bukharans trickled to the United States in the 1970s along with other Soviet dissidents. Then, after the collapse of Soviet rule and the instability that allowed a hostile Muslim fundamentalism to flourish, thousands more Bukharans immigrated here or to Israel. Americans greeted them warily, sometimes disparaging them as bumpkins with a clannishness that allowed three families to live in a single apartment, not grasping that that was the Bukharan way. “We like to live next to each other,” Rabbi Nisanov said. “I live next door to my sister, three blocks from my mother. Six blocks over is my grandparents. My wife's cousin is three houses down. We congregate together, and everybody knows everything.”
There are, according to Kandov, 50,000 Bukharans in America, in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Colorado, though 40,000 live in New York. In Rego Park and Forest Hills, Bukharans have set up clusters of characteristic shops on Sixty-third Road and 108th Street, selling velvet caftans, brocaded caps, crusty tandoor-baked breads, and samosi pastries filled with nuts. One bakery, Beautiful Bukhara, is owned by a Bukharan, Misha Kandov, and his son Ruben, but their chief baker is a Muslim, Ramazan Samarov, they knew back home.
Much of communal life revolves around mourning ceremonies. Bukharans not only sit shiva—the seven Jewish days of mourning in which the closest blood relatives confine themselves to home—but friends and more distant relatives gather in restaurants for those seven days to raise money to pay for the funeral and aid the grieving family— and help the restaurant's business as well. Additional memorial services are held thirty days after the death, then monthly for the first year, then annually, again in restaurants or sometimes in halls that hold a thousand people. These are not somber affairs, but celebrations of a life zestfully lived that can last for hours, with poems to recall the deceased and absurd amounts of food. All this makes for an unusually insular community, not to mention a proliferation of restaurants.
During weekday prayer services, Bukharan men repeatedly drop coins for charity into a container. On Friday nights, instead of gefilte fish, Bukharans eat fried fish in garlic sauce, a delicacy said to date to the First Temple. Bukharans keep one foot in their homeland, where 25,000 of their brethren still live, sending packages of matzo for Passover and paying stipends to make sure graves are preserved.
To the wider New York community, Bukharans are notable for the role they played in stabilizing Rego Park. When other whites were unwilling, they settled into the modern apartments in Lefrak City, a complex of twenty eighteen-story buildings and 25,000 tenants. As a result, they restored racial balance after a 1970s federal housing discrimination judgment brought in hundreds of poor black families and sent virtually all the complex's middle-class Jewish residents fleeing. By 1995 Lefrak could count 500 Jewish families who occupied roughly 10 percent of the apartments.
Whatever their triumphs here, the problem of spousal abuse has been a sore point and has galvanized the community's attention. Lali Janash, a case manager at the Esther Grunblatt Service Center for Russian Immigrants, blamed the problems on a failure to grasp American mores. “The problem is whatever was okay in Russia is not okay here,” she said. “The same as child abuse. To spank a child in Russia is okay.” Levitin recalled how different family life was in Central Asia, when kinfolk lived around a courtyard and the husband's mother was often the dominant woman. “The men would get anger and frustration out at their wives and the next day they would kiss her and bring her flowers,” she said. “The man wasn't ostracized. The mother-in-law would say to the wife, ‘Aren't you happy when he buys you something? So he hits you once or twice; it's not a big deal. If you take his love, you can take his abuse.’”
That mind-set persisted here—inflamed by the upheaval of transplantation. Although many barbers, jewelers, and professors resumed their occupations, many went to work as taxi drivers or factory workers; others could not find work. Rabbi Nisanov told me about a characteristic complaint he received from a twenty-five-year-old jeweler whose wife was a physical therapist. “How can I live with my wife when she's making fifteen thousand dollars more than me?” he told the rabbi. “She's going to start commanding me.”
In Rabbi Nisanov's shul I met many of these diminished men, Bukharans like his uncle, Abraham Itzhakov, who was, as Rabbi Nisanov described, the chief bookkeeper of Uzbekistan in a land where clout was crucial to a person's self-worth. He was in his early sixties when he came, still sturdy and fluent in eight languages—but not English. “Who's going to employ him?” Nisanov said. “But his knowledge is vast.”
Sometimes, Bukharan women told me, wives can provoke their husbands. At a communal celebration, I had a long conversation with Zoya Fuzailova Nisanov, the rabbi's mother. She described herself as an independent woman, someone who twenty years after she left Samarkand made a success of herself as a jewelry contractor. Nonetheless, she offered a good deal of sympathy for the men. Some men, she said, are indeed violent, unfaithful, or engaged in drug dealing. But sometimes, wives enticed by American freedoms and affluence goad their husbands on, Mrs. Nisanov claimed. “She says to him, ‘She has a car. Why don't I have? She has a fur coat. Why don't I have?’
“Women in this country find themselves faster than men,” she said. “But people don't realize that the family is more important than money. Sometimes you have money, you cannot bu
ild the family again.”
Then too, once in America, the women are more likely to fall back on the authorities for help. “In Bukhara, they never call the police,” she said. “Here they call the police.”
By the time I spoke to them, the Bukharans had arranged for several communal conferences on domestic violence with the help of the office of the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown. “We always have this problem, but now the women are speaking out, the rabbis are speaking out, and we're not just shoving it under the rug like we did before,” Rabbi Nisanov said. Levitin runs workshops on women's legal rights through her organization World of Women Immigrants. Another organization known as Beit Shalom—a peaceful home—holds twelve weeks of summertime workshops training women to counsel compatriots. Lessons for prospective brides and grooms start out with an Orthodox religious emphasis, teaching couples, for example, to abstain from sex during prescribed periods before and after menstruation. They then move on to pointers that might raise feminist eyebrows. They tell new grooms to be understanding of working wives who don't have supper ready when the husbands come home and urge them to salve their hunger by stopping at a coffee shop. They tell wives to be sensitive to husbands' moods and urge them to look their best, to realize, as instructor Leah Davidov told me, that when the husband is in the outside world “he sees women dressed nicely.”
The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York Page 18