The Girl from Fergana: Secrets of My Mother’s Chinese Tea Chest
JONATHAN GIL HARRIS
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When seven-year-old Stella flees her elegant Warsaw apartment with her family in 1939, little can she imagine that this is the last time she’s seeing her home. After crossing the Bug River to escape Nazi-occupied Poland and narrowly escaping deportation to Auschwitz, she endures a series of harrowing incidents before her journey brings her to the Fergana Valley—the heart of the ancient Silk Roads. There, among the ghosts of once-thriving trade routes where cultures intertwined and coexisted from China to Persia and India, the story of Stella becomes part of a much older one.
In The Girl from Fergana: Secrets of My Mother’s Chinese Tea Chest, Jonathan Gil Harris opens the lid of his mother’s treasured tea chest to uncover a life shaped by displacement. In this memoir, Harris intertwines a moving portrait of his mother with a sweeping chronicle of 2,500 years of Jewish presence and cultural exchange along the Silk Roads.
Blending personal memory with the history of the Silk Roads, the book describes lives belonging beyond borders, and laments the disappearance of a once connected world now fractured by hostile nation states. A book that is, at once, a poignant family memoir, a rediscovery of the author’s rich and complex Jewish heritage, and an elegy to the vanished cosmopolitan spirit of the Silk Roads, The Girl from Fergana is a triumph of storytelling and remembrance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JONATHAN GIL HARRIS is descended from a long line of migrants on both sides of his family. Born in New Zealand and educated in England, Harris lived in the US for twenty-three years before moving to India. His day-job is as a professor of Shakespeare; he has written five books on English Renaissance drama and ideas of the foreign. He is also an avid follower of Hindi cinema; his articles on Bollywood and globalisation have been published in the Hindustan Times. He now lives in Delhi, where he is Professor of English and Dean of Academic Affairs at Ashoka University.
INFORMATION
Published by Aleph, 2026
ISBN 978-9365234701
344 pages, Hardback