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This is the full transcription of podcast 'The Documentary Podcast' - Heart and Soul: The caretaker of Bukhara.
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Monica Whitlock. And for heart and soul, we've come to Bukhara in Uzbekistan to listen to a very special piece of music. I'm the head of Bukhara Jewish Community, Abram Ishakov, Abram Barisrich. Our mosque, our synagogue is 420 years old. It's the oldest one in Central Asia, our mosque, our synagogue. Yet the voice of the Torah has never ceased to resound here. And as long as I live, the Torah will always be heard. Abram Ishakov is the caretaker of the Mulla Mani Synagogue in Bukhara, one of the sacred cities of the Muslim world in Uzbekistan. Mulla Mani is a tiny place arranged around a courtyard opening off Sarafan Street, an alley in the heart of a medieval city famous for its ancient and beautiful mosques and madrasas. We have the Torah here. Our Torah is more than 1000 years old, ancient. One rarely sees such an old Torah in Central Asia or indeed in the world. This is (1/16)
the oldest scroll. It's kept in a glass-fronted cupboard with a padlock at the back of the synagogue. And what we can see is two velvet sides of the scroll. And inside it's very delicate. It's made of deer skin, vellum. And Abram says they take it out just for very special occasions. We come here every Shabbat, all holidays such as Passover, Sukkot, Shavout, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We learned everything as it was, just as our fathers' fathers taught us. I'm Monica Whitlock and this Heart and Soul from the BBC World Service is all about a prayer that Abram sang to me that day in Bukhara. It's called hakoni and it's a lament or mourning prayer for the dead. When Abram began, he put away his prayer book and sang by heart, not in the language of liturgy, Hebrew, but in that of community, Persian, his mother tongue and that of his city. Come friends, listen to the meaning of this Ghazal. Night has fallen and blessed life lies beneath the dust of death. Hakoni comes from the Arabic (2/16)
word hak or truth. It's sung, Abram says, by both Jews and Muslims of Bukhara. Dark and sonorous, its powerful images are drawn from classical Persian poetry or improvised so that every rendition is unique. Pity the mortal. A thousand times pity the mortal. One day he will pass behind the curtain of life. He will end his days devoured by snakes and scorpions. Only in Bukhara, you'll hear this, Abram says, only in Bukhara. What can hakoni tell us about Bukhara and its cultural world? And what, as Abram's community undergoes seismic change, is happening to hakoni? It's a very deep philosophy under this hakoni, I think. It should be extremely expressive and loud sound. Just like crying to the god. Benjamin Yusupov, musician and composer, lives in Israel, but he was born in Tajikistan and grew up with all the sounds of Central Asia in his ears. Hakoni, he says, connects us directly to the multicultural emirate of Bukhara that existed until the early 20th century when the Soviet Union (3/16)
absorbed Central Asia. Yes, Bukharian emirate, 18th, 19th century was a unique place where different ethnic groups and different religions live together and speak the same language. They influence each other, Muslims and Christians and Sufis and Jews, and Bukharian Jews and Muslims, Sufis sing this hakoni. Sometimes it was difficult to understand who is Jews and who is Muslims. The Jewish community was always a small minority but a deeply rooted one, certainly hundreds of years old and perhaps even as old as the Babylonian exile over 2,000 years ago. There were synagogues in towns and cities all over the region in living memory. My grandfather of my grandmother, four generations from me, was a very famous singer and player, Yousufi Gourg. He was a court musician of the last emirate of Bukhara, Yousufi Gourg. He lived in 1854 until 1942. I'm very proud to be his grand-grandson. I still have in my home his tambour, the instrument he played. Tambour is a kind of long-necked lute. You find (4/16)
it in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, all over the Caucasus and Central Asia. It's quite astonishing that Benjamin's family kept safe this tambour, their heirloom, through revolution, war and migration for perhaps a hundred years. While we were making this program we were thrilled to find this gramophone record of Yousufi Gourg, Benjamin's great-great-grandfather, playing and singing. It was made by the French recording company Paffé on an expedition to Central Asia in 1911 in the last years of the Bukharan emirate. He's singing a medieval Persian poem, a maqam, the classical music of the Bukharan court and of Central Asia more widely. Praise God he sings in Arabic. Many of the biggest stars of this musical world, like Yousufi Gourg, were Jewish. I think it's because living together and speaking the same language influenced each other. So how they sing, how they speak, how they eat, is more close to Muslims than, I don't know, German Jews or English Jews. European Jews is the same religions (5/16)
but very, very different. So when you heard your grand-grandfather's voice on the recordings, how did you feel? Oh it's a very touching feeling. It's like you hear a history, you touch to the roots and it's just, no, it's a miracle. You give me his voice, it's unbelievable. I cannot explain it, it's some magic. The style of hakoni can be adapted to the great moments of life as well as death. We're listening to a party for a bride on the eve of her wedding in Samarkand. The star performer and honored guest is Abram Tolmasov, son of a legendary dynasty of Jewish musicians. Someone's picked up a frame drum or doira, the heartbeat of Central Asian music. Everyone's crowding around. Men in their shirt sleeves, women in bright silks and children, lots of children. As he sings, Tolmasov does something very distinctive to hakoni and to the region. He holds a saucer by the side of his mouth, moving it to and fro to modulate his long powerful phrases. Abram Ishaakov, the synagogue caretaker, (6/16)
grew up in the 1960s in a world that revered music and song. In our synagogue many great domolas have sung, master singers. When we were kids we'd be here listening, listening, listening to all the songs and melodies. We'd go to wedding parties, listening. We secretly put cassette recorders in our pockets and record on the sly. Then back home I would learn. Today all those elders are gone but their songs remain with me. If you speak Dari or Urdu or Uzbek you'll have caught how Abram sometimes says Masjid Mosque for Kanisha synagogue. It's just the natural blended way that many people hear talk. He uses mullah or domula when he's talking about respected elders or celebrated musicians. The singers he admired so much, like Tolmasov, were household names in Muslim and Jewish homes alike through the 20th century. You can feel that cultural connection in this recording. It's another wedding but this one's in Kokand in the east of Uzbekistan, closer to China. The star performer this time is (7/16)
Rahimohon Mazahidova. The party is Muslim and she's singing in Uzbek. The bride has appeared to greet her guests, lifting her gauzy white veil to each one. It's a ritual known as kalinsalon, marking her entry into her new home and her new life. Rahimohon plays the frame drum, the doira. She's free to improvise, blending religious tradition and folklore as she wishes. East music much more free. It's like a tree. You have thousands of leaves on the tree but every leaf is different. When you perform the same piece second time it's never the same. Yuhan Binaminov, that's my name. So in our neighborhood everybody was singing. Each door you will go you will find a star. Yuhan grew up in a musical Jewish family in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Tashkent was full of different cultures in those days. Central Asian peoples, of course Russians, but also Armenians and Greeks, Georgians and Koreans and many more. My grandmother used to sing and my grandfather used. My grandfather was an (8/16)
unbelievable singer. My grandfather, Daniel, he was great performer of hakoni. I learned from the funerals, with my grandfather, six, seven years old. The 1970s brought new ingredients to this rich musical soup. When I was 12 or 13, so we are young kids was listening Pink Floyd, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, you know what was with the big binocular was watching United States of America, England, the West. It was fascinating for us. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. As the USSR crumbled, many of the Soviet minorities began to leave, taking their chances in parts of the world they felt some connection to. The Greeks went to Greece, the Germans to Germany, the Chechens home to Chechnya, and the Bukharan Jews too sold up and left the neighborhoods that had been home for hundreds of years. I lived in Central Asia in the 1990s reporting for the BBC, and I remember my Bukharan Jewish neighbors arranging their household belongings in the road to sell. They didn't really want to go, (9/16)
they just hoped, believed that it might work out better for the kids. I still have their little teapot painted with blue and orange flowers and I do hope things worked out for them in Tel Aviv. Yuhan Benyaminov knew exactly where he was heading. When I left Uzbekistan, I was 27 years old. When I came to United States of America, people was like, they was open, you know, they was friendly. Hey, how you doing? How are you? I said, that's the freedom. That's the power. It was magic time when I came. That's how I feel. The Bukharans stuck together, mainly in New York, in the borough of Queens. Among them were some of the most famous Jewish musicians from all across Central Asia. They were much in demand. We don't have our own theater, we don't have our own TV or radio station. So what do we have? The only one place where we can meet each other? It's a wedding or funeral. I just pack my stuff, my clothes, my kids clothes, and that's it. We can't take nothing with us, even the jewelry. (10/16)
Everybody move out. Nina Maidahan, a celebrated singer, left Uzbekistan with her whole family, including her elderly mother, Belor. Born in 1911, Belor had performed at the court of Bukhara since she was a child. Her long hair plaited into 120 narrow braids that swung as she moved. My mother used to dance all around. My mother had a beautiful voice and she was very famous, many years. In New York in old age, Belor continued to dance and sing, but that 120 plaits were gone. She adapted to the new world. She was wearing the heels, lipstick, and singing that time before she passed away. Then Nina sang hakoni for us in honor of her mother, a lament that starts, Mother dear to my heart, what should I do now without you? During that prayers, we're using melodies, which is Buhani and Tajik and Uzbek. Still in community synagogues, we're still singing that. I think hakoni, it's a unique mix. It's like a jazz. And unaccompanied, improvised, sorrowful sometimes, maybe we could say, a kind of (11/16)
blues. If I'm singing, Father John, my lovely father, where I'm going to find the contours of your face. He's saying, where I'm going to find the smell of your hair, you know, smell of your hands. Me, I still remember my father is alive. My mother's, but I still remember smell of his hands. It's always was fish, which is he love, and beer, which is he drink after work. And the karatsin, because he used to work in the factory. And this smell, I remember. And since you moved to America, what's happened to the music? How has it changed? We had respect for our own music. But right now, much younger generation, they don't want to hear at all of the Bukharian songs. Hakkoni only reminds them of the sad days. I mean, the funerals. Please do not sing. So does that mean that young girls now are not learning to sing? We don't have almost nobody female who can sing hakoni like I sing. We was very Bukharian. Now we're American Bukharian. We used to be Bukharian American. Now we are American (12/16)
Bukharian. It's good and not good for us. We assimilate here. We assimilate very fast. We addicted to west. I hear and remember still what was happened in Bukhara and try to keep this tradition. It's 30 years since Benjamin Yusupov, musician and composer, left Tajikistan half a lifetime ago. He lives in Tel Aviv now and is composer in residence of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Some years ago, he was asked to compose a special piece after the death of a well-known Bukharian Jewish businessman in New York. He decided to compose a hakoni, but not as anyone had heard it before. He used voice, the Central Asian instruments he grew up with, and European strings and woodwind. Hakoni is so strong, so, how to say it, very, very expressive. I wanted to bring together crossroads between Jews and Muslims, between the modern and history, between tonality and harsh sounds, between the life and sound from the past. Also, some crossing between western music and eastern music. I'm proud that I can (13/16)
continue this tradition of hakoni, maybe in more modern form. I'm very happy that I just continue some chain of our culture. Yuhan and Nina are adding links to that chain too. Oh, she will sing. Nina still performs at weddings and funerals, her powerful voice filling halls of hundreds of people. And Yuhan too, pop, traditional, hakoni, intagic, Russian, Uzbek, he sings them all. And Yuhan is opening a Bukharian radio station. He plans to broadcast the old songs with new translations to reach the new generation. So listen out if you're in New York. You know, since I'm here, I never go back. I'm here 40, almost 47 years. My family live in Israel, most of them, and my kids, my children, my great-grandchildren, I have five of them, and we all live here. So where is home for you? I think my home is here, America. I love it. And Yuhan, what does he enjoy when he goes, not home maybe, but back? Day before yesterday I asked myself, I enjoy the hospitality of people, very easy and very polite (14/16)
atmosphere. I enjoy that our cemetery is still alive, and I enjoy that the Muslim people, they still respect us, and they keep our bodies in their land. A lot of the community have left now, but why have you stayed? The reason I stayed in Bukhara, it suits me here. We still have good relations with everyone, thank God. Muslims respect us. For example, when I walk in the street, no one remarks on it. Everyone greets me. If I had two lives, I might go over there to live my second life, but a human being comes to this world once. I have been Abram Borisovich here for 74 years. When would I become Abram Borisovich over there? How long would it take for them to know me? It suits me here. What else do I need? You who have heaps of riches, you who have piles of gold, in the face of death you are undone. You may wear the finest crown on your head, you may be king of all the world, when death calls you are undone. You may be like the strong Samson, like Solomon, knowing and wise, in the face of (15/16)
death undone. You can walk like a peacock, have the voice of a nightingale, but in the face of death undone. Know it, my friends, believe it. Life is a gift soon spent. Let us treasure our time together. You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. In The Caretaker of Bukhara, Paul Bama at Music on Earth Productions made the recording of Rahimahon Mazahidova in Kokand. The presenter and producer was Monica Whitlock. (16/16)