An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

  It was time. I met the man with the bus at a shop in the city. He was a nomad. I took off my glasses, and I wrapped my shawl around my head and face. I saw many people I knew, but they didn’t recognize or notice me. We got on the bus. It was a strange experience becoming invisible to others.

  Phyllis: That’s how women must feel in the burqa.

  Abdul-Kareem: Well, I didn’t notice. We sat way back in the bus. We went through five checkpoints on our way from Kabul to Jalalabad. My guide told me not to say anything, and he told all the officials that I was his son. I don’t know how we got through. At one point some Communist Youths had me stand up and looked under my seat.

  Phyllis: What was the nomad’s motivation for taking you?

  Abdul-Kareem: I gave him some money, not a lot. He didn’t mind taking me; he was going to Peshawar anyway. He also didn’t know who I was. He thought I was going to Peshawar on a business trip. After we arrived in Jalalabad we discussed our plans. The most important checkpoint, the one I was most afraid of, was right before the Khyber Pass. We planned to go by truck to a village right before the checkpoint.

  Then at midnight we would walk across the border to bypass the checkpoint. But when we got to Jalalabad, the curfew had already started. I stayed up all night. I smoked cigarette after cigarette. We left Jalalabad by bus at 10:30 in the morning. The bus went up to the Khyber Pass. It was crowded with chickens, bikes, and people. I was sitting on the floor in a crouched position. We came to the most dangerous checkpoint.

  This was a military checkpoint. Russian military personnel got on the bus and searched it. They looked under the seats, everything. There was a collection of tents guarded by men with machine guns. The boy sitting right in front of me, no older than eighteen, was taken off the bus and asked where he was going and why. He said that he was going to Peshawar to work as a knife sharpener; he even showed them his knife sharpener. They took him into the tent. Twenty minutes later he came back. His whole body was trembling. Then we came to the military checkpoint. They searched the whole bus but didn’t notice me.

  The nomad left me, and a sixteen-year-old kid met me to take me across the border. The boy told me there had been an event the other day. Some people from Kabul had come—two men and two women. And they just crossed the border—they didn’t stop, so the Russians fired at them with their Kalashnikovs. One man and one woman escaped. The other two were injured and captured. He told me, “So, whatever happens, don’t ever run.”

  He handed me an empty kerosene can. He said, “We are going over there to bring kerosene back. They are used to people crossing over into Pakistan from Afghanistan to bring back kerosene.” At the time there was a shortage of kerosene in Afghanistan. So we walked over to the kerosene tank. We came near a whole line of soldiers in uniforms with Kalashnikovs and pistols.

  As we approached them, the boy started using his kerosene can as a drum. He pushed me, playing. He put my hat at an angle, and he danced right through the line, pushing me along with him. No one stopped us. When we were 50 meters away [about 50 feet], he said, “That’s it. It is finished.” Then we walked toward Pakistan.

  I looked back at the checkpoint. Afghanistan was beautiful from the Pakistani side. Mostly it was all behind me. The boy changed my Afghanis for Pakistani rupees, and we got on the back of a minitruck leaving for Peshawar. I watched my country fade from the back window. I couldn’t believe it—I just couldn’t believe it. I was suddenly in a whole new world, with a whole new life. Afghanistan was the past. There was nothing, only myself, stripped of everything. The feeling of being free consumed me. I remember thinking, “Now I can breathe. I don’t have to worry.”

  Phyllis: That’s how I felt when I left—

  But true to form Abdul-Kareem does not hear me.

  Abdul-Kareem: I called my friend in Peshawar. Within five minutes he was there in his car. He didn’t recognize me. He took me home and his mother started crying. My clothes were already there. It was a posh house. I had a beautiful bathroom. I took a shower and changed. I felt like a human being again. I sent a telegram saying that I had made it.

  I ate for the first time in forty hours. I picked up the money that had been smuggled into Pakistan for me. I used my old passport, which had been given to me under the Daoud administration, and got a visa from my friend, David Block, who was a consul in the American embassy.

  I flew to Karachi and then to Istanbul. Once I arrived safely and reconnected with my wife and kids, I began studying Ottoman history at the university.

  He is an amazing survivor! He is hardy, hardworking, uncomplaining, ever hopeful. He is really so very Afghan.

  Phyllis: Where did you stay?

  Abdul-Kareem: My friends have a summer apartment by the sea that they never use.

  Phyllis: That is extraordinary! To begin again at midlife cannot be easy. By the way, what was it really like for you after I left?

  Abdul-Kareem: I was alone a long, long while. After I got remarried, I stayed away from my family. I would see my brothers maybe once a month, once every two months, until I completely divorced myself from the family.

  Phyllis: Do you want to talk about us?

  Abdul-Kareem: I have thought about us for eighteen years. Did you think about us?

  Phyllis: Yes, no, not really, of course.

  Abdul-Kareem: Well, I’ve thought a great deal about us. I have to carry the guilt. It’s my fault. You know I loved you more than I had ever loved anyone. Did you know that?

  Phyllis: Well, we were doomed from the moment you decided to take me to Afghanistan. The only thing you can blame yourself for was your need to return. You tried to have both me and a life in Afghanistan without realizing that you could never have both. That was an error of your youth, idealism, and your hubris. You thought you could do it.

  Abdul-Kareem: Yes. There were bound to be certain losses.

  There are awkward silences between us during this very long and rather formal interview. Whenever I bring up subjects such as polygamy, purdah, and the burqa, he absolutely refuses to discuss them. He says, flat out, “I will not talk about that,” or “That is not a subject I will comment on.”

  Given his sophistication and worldliness, I am at a loss. Would commenting on these subjects in some way dishonor him or his father or his country? Is this stubborn misogyny the one cherished custom he has brought out with him into exile?

  Or is he so understandably angry at the whole world and at his fate that he refuses to admit that Afghanistan—poor country!—is a primitive and barbarous region?

  I understand why Afghans and other Muslims feel suspicious and shamed by the do-good projects undertaken by infidel outsiders.

  But an international hands-off policy always dooms the women and the progressives. I wrestle with this conundrum constantly.

  While my ex-husband is not an uneducated or impoverished man, he is now in exile. However, he does not have to start from scratch. He knows the language—he once lived here for a decade. He has friends and many acquaintances. The question is, Will he ever stop missing what might have been—and what once existed for him in Afghanistan?

  In the mid-1970s I spent months working on a book proposal about exile, which, I predicted, might be the largest new state created by the twentieth century and the psychology of the twenty-first century.

  Many people are uprooted by war and poverty and by a desire to make a better life for themselves and their families. Some remain in refugee camps with absolutely no ability or incentive to make new lives; they just want their old lives back. Others happily emigrate but bring their customs and religious practices along with them. They keep to themselves. They live on the margins—or at the center but remain apart, different.

  Like Jews.

  Jews have prototypically lived in exile, but when necessary they have always moved, trading, selling, practicing
medicine, and settling in ever-new locations. Jews have been forced to flee again and again and have learned to call many places home.

  Now an untold number of impoverished and often illiterate refugees worldwide are similarly stateless. Most live in tents or in makeshift structures; they stand in hopelessly long lines, waiting for water, food, blankets, and medicine. Most do not move on; they cannot. They lack the necessary skills and resources. It is not their tradition.

  Wealthy and educated refugees, like Abdul-Kareem, are usually alright, at least for a while. They have bank accounts, contacts, even relatives on many continents.

  Abdul-Kareem has now joined the millions of immigrants who have come to America. His children will grow up as Americans. But he has become a biblical figure, a wanderer like a Jew, still dreaming of his golden castles elsewhere, of some past and future paradise that is now forever barred to him.

  Ten

  The Jews of Afghanistan

  As a child I was affectionately referred to as the “smartest boy” in Hebrew school. At that time an Orthodox Jewish girl had no future as a rabbi, scholar, or cantor, so when I was twelve, I abandoned my beloved Torah study for other passions.

  But the Torah was where I first read about Jews as an Eastern people. Our patriarch, Abraham, and matriarch, Sarah, both came from Haran and traveled to Ur Kasdim, which was in Mesopotamia, probably in contemporary Iraq. Thereafter Abraham and Sarah lived in Hebron, Jerusalem, and Bersheva, cities in Canaan, the Promised Land, and in Egypt.

  Abraham and Sarah’s son and grandsons, Yitzhak (Isaac), Esav, and Ya’akov/Israel (Jacob), married wives from Aram Naharayim, near Haran, and Nahor, which were in Mesopotamia between two rivers, probably the Tigris and the Euphrates. Ya’akov/Israel lived there with his two wives, Leah and Rachel; his two concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah; their eleven children; and his father-in-law, Laban. He did so for twenty years. Esav married Canaanite wives. Abraham and Hagar’s son, Ishmael, lived in Paran, in the Sinai desert.

  My ancestors once worshipped idols and were known as “wandering Aramaeans,” Semites, Hebrews, Canaanites, inhabitants of ancient Israel: Arab Jews.

  I remember that my notebook (or machberes) had a picture of the great scholar and philosopher Maimonides on the cover in a turban.

  Perhaps I thought that Muslims and Jews were similar or at least different from Christians in the same way. Thus I took the long route to Jerusalem—by way of Kabul.

  The story of my people is complicated. European Jews are known as Ashkenazi Jews—but some European Jews are known as Sephardic Jews; they are Jews who fled Christian or Muslim persecution in Spain and Portugal and were thereafter either persecuted elsewhere in Christian Europe or allowed to live comfortable-enough lives there for periods of time. And/or they then fled Europe for the Ottoman Empire (the Arab Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey), where they were welcomed. They also came to the United States.

  Some Jews also lived continuously in Jerusalem and in the cities of ancient Israel.

  I knew that Jewish and Muslim lives had been intertwined for millennia. I had no idea that historically Muslims had viewed themselves as superior to all infidels, but especially to Jews, whom they tolerated but also tithed, impoverished, humiliated, persecuted, exiled, and massacred.

  Nevertheless I thought that the Jews of Islam (the phrase is Bernard Lewis’s) got along rather well with Muslims. Despite my wild secular rebellion, the image of Jews as Torah-era figures remained imprinted on my heart.

  Most Afghans still look as if they are living in a biblical era—they have long beards, wear turbans and veils, ride donkeys, and travel in camel caravans.

  Afghanistan has been a fully Islamic country only since the fourteenth century. As I have noted, before that Afghanistan sheltered Zoroastrians, pagans, Buddhists, and Hindus—all of whom were either preceded by or existed simultaneously with Islam. Jews were also there.

  After the Babylonian exile, some Jews found their way to Persia. In time, some “Persian” Jews returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the Second Temple; many remained in Persia, and some fled to Afghanistan. Legend also has it that the Afghan Pushtuns have always viewed themselves as “Bani Israel,” the sons of a lost Jewish tribe.

  Abdul-Kareem is a Pushtun.

  According to the historian Vartan Gregorian in The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946, “The history of the Jewish community in Afghanistan is similar to that of the Hindus. The community, whose roots in Afghanistan were very old, was constantly rejuvenated by immigrations from Bukhara, Persia, and [Russian] Georgia.”

  Hebrew inscriptions that date to 750 CE appear on mountain rocks along the Silk Road between Herat and Kabul. In 1962, the year after I left, a group of Italian archeologists announced their discovery of one hundred Jewish gravestones in the Herat area that date to the eleventh century.

  According to Gregorian, in 1736 “a large number of Jews were resettled in Afghanistan by [the first] Nadir Shah, who sought thereby to encourage Indo-Persian trade.”

  The early history of Jews in Afghanistan is still being discovered and continues to make world headlines. In 2011–12 a treasure trove of Jewish written material from the eleventh century was found in a cave in northern Afghanistan. According to one scholar, some of the Torah scrolls contain Babylonian vocalization, which “seems to point to a ninth century CE dating.” (Vocalization refers to how the Torah is chanted, the melodic style.)

  Despite this rather long Jewish history in Afghanistan, when I was in Kabul, I did not meet a single Jew. At the time it did not strike me as odd.

  Abdul-Kareem was the first Muslim I had ever known. When he courted me, he was tender, solicitous, and honorable. He seemed more adult than most college students, more responsible. Perhaps this was because he was four or five years older than other college students and had lived on his own for many years—as a stranger in a strange land. Perhaps Afghan men become serious at younger ages.

  When Abdul-Kareem and I were a couple, I would have told you that the biblical Isaac and Ishmael were both Abraham’s sons and were therefore half-brothers and that the persecution of Jews, first by the Roman Catholic Church, then by the genocidal Nazis in Europe, had been far more consequential expressions of Jew hatred than anything that might have happened in the Muslim world.

  I believed that Jews had found refuge from the worst moments of the European Catholic Inquisition in Muslim lands; indeed many had.

  When Abdul-Kareem and I were together, no books were available in English about Jews in Afghanistan, and few books were available about Jews in Muslim lands. My otherwise excellent college education did not include a single course about the religions, histories, and customs of the Islamic world or about religious minorities in Muslim countries.

  Over the years I steadily amassed a small library of books by Western travelers to Islamic countries. I treasure this literature. It has allowed me to continue my travels. After 9/11, when I revisited these books, I was shocked and disheartened. Some of the most gallant Western adventurers glorified Arab Muslims and Christians but hated their Arab Jewish counterparts.

  The great nineteenth-century British traveler Sir Richard Burton (Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah), romanticized Arabs (and other “natives”) but was highly critical of Jews; he actually accused them of human sacrifice in his controversial book, The Jew, the Gypsy and el-Islam.

  The French traveler Pierre Loti also glorified Arabs and, like Sir Richard, often dressed like one. In 1878, in a book titled Jerusalem, Loti described the indigenous Jewish worshippers of Jerusalem as having sinister eyes; he viewed their faces as having an “uncanny ugliness” given to “base, crafty, ignoble expressions . . . truly, the crucifixion of Jesus has left an indelible stigma.”

  Freya Stark is another dashing and well-known British traveler and author
who traveled to Afghanistan. She also despised the Jews and condemned their attempts at post-Holocaust survival. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Stark published her book East Is West, in which she consistently equates “Fascist Rome” with “Zionist Jerusalem”; she describes Tel Aviv as having “ruthless vitality,” and she views the “Arabs as David and the Jews as Goliath.”

  Much to my delight, I discovered that the great British traveler and author T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia) was not an anti-Semite. Lawrence, the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was actually a Zionist. He viewed the Jewish national enterprise as a nonimperial endeavor and as potentially beneficial to the Arabs he so loved and whom he had assisted in their revolt against the Ottoman Empire.

  However, many European Christian travelers to Muslim lands hated Jews. Perhaps life had indeed been safer for Jews among the Muslims—at least during certain periods when the Inquisition was at its height in Europe. Well, then, the Jews were right to have fled to Muslim lands. But the more I read, the more confused I became.

  The Jewish leaders in Muslim countries—the upper-caste Jews, so to speak—were usually wealthy, educated, skilled, and cosmopolitan. Such Jews enjoyed almost fairy-tale lives in Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Istanbul, and Teheran, but most of the Jews of Islam were poor and led desperate wretched lives.

  In 1918 Edith Wharton visited Morocco. Wharton documented the injustices suffered by the local Moroccan Jewish population at the hands of their Muslim compatriots: “North African Jews are still compelled to live in ghettos, [mellahs] into which they are locked at night, as in France and Germany in the Middle Ages, and until lately the men have been compelled to go unarmed . . . to take off their shoes when they passed near a mosque or a saint’s tomb, and in various other ways to manifest their subjection to the ruling race.”