An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

  I wonder who he was and where that rabbi is now.

  The Afghan-German alliance actually began before the Nazi rise to power. I had no idea that after the first European tour of my hero, King Amanullah, Germany—not Britain (which crowded Afghanistan’s border in India)—became the country Afghanistan would favor. In 1923, according to the New York Times, the German “Lens and Co. had obtained an option for installing all the proposed railroads in Afghanistan. . . . German engineers are already en route to Amanullah’s country to make the necessary surveys.”

  In the 1930s Afghanistan began making deals with the Nazis. Understandings were reached, promises were made. Bank-i-Milli opened a branch in Berlin (!) that encouraged Afghan-German transactions. Trade increased between Nazi Germany and Afghanistan. Recall that initially the Soviets and the Nazis were allies; this meant that in accordance with their various trade agreements, all goods being transported overland to and from East and Central Asia would pass through Afghanistan.

  According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, “In the decade before the war, he [Zahir Shah] and his father [Nadir Shah] had sought development assistance from the Germans who had constructed a radio tower, a power plant, and a handful of small carpet factories and textile mills in Kabul, all of which were under a royal license.”

  In 1933 the Afghan authorities prohibited Jews from traveling without special permits and from engaging in any import-export businesses without a license. Such permits and licenses were of course withheld. According to Aharon, “Between the establishment of the Bank-i-Milli and the restrictions on trade, the Jews were hard-pressed to find sources of income.”

  In the late 1930s Afghanistan granted Germany the right to manage road construction in the country. Germany also began shipping equipment to be used in Afghan hydroelectric plants and textile mills; in return Afghanistan was sending Germany cotton and wool. According to Kashani, “Three hundred agents of the Third Reich assisted Afghanistan economically and also took part in overt incitement to anti-Semitism. . . . The Jews of Afghanistan had already in 1935 written to the Zionist authorities in Palestine about ‘the inciters’ who are Hitler’s men.”

  I now recall that my Afghan family had only German cars—

  Mercedes Benzes. They also had many German appliances made by Siemens, such as radios. I remember meeting many Germans in Kabul. They were all quite warm to me. That wife of the former mayor of Kabul—the one who helped me with one of my escape plans—was German.

  According to Aharon, from 1938 to 1945 Nazi Germany made payments to various Arab leaders—and to “Ghulham Siddique, the former Prime Minister of Afghanistan under King Amanullah.”

  The Jews of Afghanistan were quickly reduced to lives of squalor. They were also trapped. Some Jews, including the elderly chief rabbi, Mula Yakkov Simon-Tov, had already emigrated to Israel in 1922—he, poor soul, was murdered by rioting Arabs in 1936 in British Palestine. Mainly Jews were forbidden to leave the country until the late 1940s or early to mid-1950s.

  One must wonder why. Why would a Muslim kingdom want to hold on to impoverished Jews—from whom they could borrow no money and levy few taxes? What kind of hostages were these Afghan Jews?

  According to Aharon, in the 1940s Jewish men were drafted into the Afghan army but were not permitted to carry any weapons. Instead they were required to clean animal stalls and received no wages. Nevertheless Jews were required to pay a war tax (the harbiyyeh) because they “were ‘exempted’ from the military since they could not bear arms. What little money they had went to their military superiors in exchange for mercy.”

  Afghanistan was not a Nazi country—yet it not only impoverished its Jews, it also sheltered German Nazis after World War II.

  In his charming book, Afghan Interlude, published in 1957 (four years before I arrived), the British traveler Oliver Rudston de Baer, who was there in the mid-1950s, confirms that many Nazis had indeed found a safe haven in Afghanistan.

  He notes that the government underpaid the Germans as teachers, doctors, and engineers, because they “‘might consider it unwise to return to their countries.’ These people, of whom there were many, were completely in the power of the Afghan Government, for it was the Afghan Government, not their own, which protected them in return for their services.”

  De Baer once encountered a group of Germans who worked in a sugar factory in Baghlan. They were relaxing in a swimming pool. “Their unpleasantness on hearing that we were British convinced us that they were representatives of the many Nazis who, afraid to return to their own country, have settled in Afghanistan and are now busy doing innumerable technical jobs for the Government and who live in salutary fear that their residence permits may not be extended.”

  Photos of the Afghan army celebrating Afghan Independence Day in 1965 remind me of Hitler’s army. The soldiers march stiffly, step high—they are almost goose-stepping. There is definitely a European and Nazi influence here.

  The legendary warriors of Afghanistan do not look like European soldiers. I met some. They were tall, rugged, sweet, charming, low-key, turbaned men wearing loose-fitting clothing—who just happened to be deadly with a rifle and a knife.

  But just as I am slightly and irrationally nostalgic for a country in which I was held against my will—so too many Afghan Jews of that era still miss Herat and Kabul, just as the exiled Iraqi and Egyptian Jews miss their homes and ways of life in the Arab world.

  Many years later, safely perched in America, Afghan Jews insist that the Afghan government was helpful to its Jews.

  Jack Abraham was born in Afghanistan and lived there until he was eleven. In 1964 his father built the only remaining synagogue in Kabul. Radio Free Europe quotes Abraham as saying, “We never had persecution in Afghanistan. And the government was very helpful to us. If there was any kind of a thing happening out on the street, they would inform the Jews, ‘Take it easy, don’t go to work’ on these particular days because people were talking negative, and they would put police outside our doors for protection.”

  While the government may not have passed laws against practicing Judaism, why did the negativity in the streets require police guards at Jewish doors?

  Sara Aharon ultimately concludes that the restrictions and expulsions were mainly because of “the Afghan regime’s internal, insidious jealousy of the Jews and their supposed affluence.” Thus, the Afghan government wanted to punish both the Jews and the Hindus in Afghanistan precisely because they had been successful entrepreneurs.

  After 9/11 Afghanistan was in the news every day. It still is. Most newspapers carry at least one, usually two, articles on events taking place in Kabul or Kandahar or Mazar-i-Sharif.

  After 9/11 journalists interviewed every Afghan they could find, anyone who knew anything about the country that had sheltered bin Laden. The media also interviewed Afghan Jews. Like many of the Jews of Islam, Afghanistan’s Jews tended to remember their country fondly.

  In 2001 Jacob Nasirov, who was born in Kabul and served as the rabbi of Congregation Anshei Shalom in Queens, told Felicia R. Lee of the New York Times that Afghan Jews are sad for “what was and what could have been in a once-beautiful country where Jews had lived for 2,000 years. The Jews were not insiders, but they were tolerated and allowed to establish their own businesses, to practice their faith.”

  Another member of the congregation, Michael Aharon, told Lee that the “Jews of Afghanistan had a very good life. When I see what has happened to this country in the last ten years, especially when I see kids without shoes, it really hurts me.”

  I am both puzzled and moved that these Jews still feel such fondness for Afghanistan, especially considering the nature of their impoverishment, followed by their captivity there, and eventual flight.

  Perhaps I should not be surprised.

  Jews have always yearned for Jerusal
em, from which they’d been exiled many times, but they also yearned for each and every one of the countries where they had been persecuted and where their ancestors once lived and are still buried.

  Biblical Jews wept bitter tears after leaving Egypt, where they had been the pharaoh’s slaves. They missed what they were used to: the food, the smells—everything familiar, as opposed to the unknown wilderness and the fierce challenges that freedom imposes.

  Andre Aciman in Out of Egypt: A Memoir and Jean Naggar in Sipping from the Nile write with love and nostalgia for the Egypt they had to flee. Like Lucette Lagnado, author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit and The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn, these writers had charming and cultured extended families who had lived in the Ottoman Empire for many centuries.

  According to Rabbi Angel, despite being impoverished and perennially endangered, the Jews of Islam still enjoyed a deep sense of community, continuity, religiosity, and dignity—and this is what these Jews find lacking in new and more modern places and times.

  Abdul-Kareem had loved me, he had loved a Jew. I do not doubt this. I loved him, too—although everything changed after my first month in Kabul.

  We were not Romeo and Juliet; we were not Nino and Ali, the beloved fictional creations of Kurban Said, aka Lev Nussimbaum. Nino is a blonde Circassian princess; Ali is a dashing Muslim warrior. They meet and live in Baku. As Kurban Said, Nussimbaum longed to unite the Muslim East and the Judeo-Christian West. His love story is set in the Caucasus just before the Russian Revolution.

  Looking back, knowing what I now know, I must ask: How could Abdul-Kareem have been so foolish, so blithe, as to have brought a Jewish American bride back to a country that had impoverished its small population of Jews and granted safe haven to German Nazis? Did he think that the rules of history would never apply to us?

  In 2011, Abdul-Kareem proudly told me that when he was the deputy minister of culture, he had negotiated treaties with UNESCO that would give “landmark status” to ancient sites in Afghanistan. Abdul-Kareem insisted that whatever foreign archeologists would discover should remain in Afghanistan and that the world body would fund both restoration and archiving. In this context he had restored the synagogues of Herat and Kabul. They are all empty now. One has been converted into an Islamic school for boys. I tell him this. He says nothing.

  I ask Abdul-Kareem, “Why did the Jews leave Afghanistan?”

  “Gee, I have no idea. Probably they up and left because they wanted to go to Israel anyway.”

  Like his mother before him, Abdul-Kareem claims to have no idea why Afghan Jews left Afghanistan. Is this sheer ignorance or deadly denial?

  Ah, but who am I to condemn or mourn the plight of Jews in Muslim lands? What standing do I have? I am a Jew who quietly and privately converted to Islam while I was in captivity. I did so not at the edge of a sword but merely in the hope that doing so might make my miserable life more bearable in purdah.

  No. I did so because I was terrified about what might happen to me if I refused to do so.

  I was a secular antireligious rebel. One religion seemed as foolish and dangerous to me as the other. But obviously I was ashamed, embarrassed, by what I’d done. I never mentioned it to my parents or told any other living being. I did not take this conversion seriously. And I managed to forget all about it for many years.

  I am writing about it here for the first time.

  As I’ve said: I will never forgive myself.

  However, the 9/11 attacks upon America forced me to confront my long-ago experience in a new and even more serious way.

  Eleven

  9/11

  Where were you on 9/11?

  There was a time when people asked where you were only about the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Everyone remembered where they were and what they had been doing at that moment, as if time itself stopped when the fatal shots rang out in Dallas.

  On November 22, 1963, I was at work. I left early. Later I bought my first-ever television set. I told the journalist Jack Newfield, my late friend and colleague, “I want to be able to watch the coming assassinations live, as they happen.”

  Our nation would bear witness to at least four more high-profile assassinations within the next half-decade.

  President Kennedy’s presumed killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed two days later, on November 24, 1963—during a perp walk on live television. His killer, a Texas nightclub operator, Jack Ruby, was arrested, tried, and convicted; he died in jail in 1967.

  These murders were like sordid wax museum exhibits, grisly horror shows, but they were history. They were played and replayed on national television. These events would forever haunt the memories and imagination of my generation.

  A little more than a year after JFK’s assassination, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X, also known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, was gunned down by fellow Nation of Islam members in New York City due to his public condemnation of Elijah Muahammed.

  On April 4, 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis by the white supremacist James Earl Ray.

  A mere two months later, on June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles by a Palestinian, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who still remains incarcerated in California. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sirhan’s defense argued that he had been “psychologically scarred” by his exposure to the Israeli war for independence. An ad for a pro-Israel march had started “a fire burning inside him,” and Sirhan became enraged when Senator Kennedy promised military support to Israel.

  These immensely promising national figures, relatively young men (the oldest was JFK, who was forty-six), were all murdered. Our nation reeled, perpetually in shock. None of the killers showed any remorse.

  This was the turbulent yet liberating decade in which I came of age after my captivity in Afghanistan.

  Where were you on 9/11?

  I was at home. I sat very still on my couch, transfixed before my television screen, afraid to move, afraid to miss anything, afraid to get up, knowing that when I got to my feet the old world would be forever gone, forever changed, and that we’d be facing a new and more dangerous world and time.

  I was then living in Park Slope, in my hometown of Brooklyn, and my next-door neighbor, Anja Osang-Reich, was a German journalist who worked for Der Spiegel. By midafternoon we had both wandered out into our front yards. Anja remembers that I said, “Now we are all Israelis.”

  She wrote it down, and years later she interviewed me for a book she was writing about her experience of 9/11.

  I knew in my bones that ordinary life would change for civilians everywhere: The world’s airports would soon resemble Israeli consulates and embassies with metal detectors and elaborate screenings.

  Like Israelis, American children have grown up knowing they are not automatically safe in their country or in their world. They understand the need for security at airports; they do not protest having to take off their little shoes and stand for a long while in a long line.

  9/11 was also a turning point for American intellectuals and activists. Some blamed America and felt the jihadists were justified in mass-murdering civilians. Others, like myself, strongly disagreed.

  One friend insisted that the people who worked in the World Trade Center could not possibly be innocent.

  “How could they be,” she said, “when so many people are starving to death and homeless, here and around the world?”

  “Are you saying that we are all guilty because we live in America? Do you believe that America itself is somehow existentially guilty and deserves to be brought down?”

  “Well,” she said, laughing, “you’ve put it rather well.”

  Her heartlessness eerily paralleled the heartlessness of the 9/11 jihadis
ts.

  The Muslim warriors who carried out the attacks were young: Their average age was twenty-four. Their visas were mostly six-month “tourist/

  business” visas that were approved by the State Department regardless of red flags in their applications. Fifteen were Saudis, the others were from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon.

  These jihadists viewed the West and Western values as repulsive and dangerous. They despised the idea of human and individual rights, free speech, religious freedom, separation of state and religion, women’s rights, gay rights, and a host of other rights and privileges, including the right to sex before marriage, the right not to marry, and the right to choose one’s marital partner.

  My heartless friend stands for all these values.

  And therefore she was among all those who swiftly demonized anyone who dared say that Muslim Islamists had launched a war. Anyone who criticized Islamist terrorism was a “racist conservative” and an Islamophobe.

  Ironically such a label was also applied to ex-Muslim dissidents like the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Indian-born Ibn Warraq, Egyptian-born Nonie Darwish, and the Syrian Americans Dr. Wafa Sultan and Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser.

  9/11 changed everything. It changed us all.

  I will never forget what happened on 9/11. I can still smell the air: It was a sickening combination of industrial fuels, hate, and human suffering. Scorched souls, acrid and agonizing, burned my throat and my eyes and my mind.

  9/11 was also a personal wake-up call. I felt as if Afghanistan had followed me back to America. Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Omar Abdel-Rahman, and Ayman al-Zawahiri had hatched this lethal scheme in their hideout in Afghanistan, where they were under the protection of the Afghan warlord Mullah Mohammed Omar.

  Bin Laden called the 9/11 assault on America “blessed attacks” against the “infidel . . . the new Jewish-Christian crusade.” He further explained that he had targeted the Pentagon and the Twin Towers because of American support for Israel.