On Tuesday, December 2, 2025 SHAI and the Great Neck Public Library presented our first in a series of Author Talks centered on Persian Jewish history. Our first author, Dahlia Abraham-Klein, was interviewed by SHAI President Mojgan Cohanim Lancman.

Abraham-Klein is author of many books including Silk Road Vegetarian and Spiritual Kneading, among others. The particular book discussed at this event was The Stateless Central Asian Merchant: The Life Haim Aghajan Abraham.                                                                                       

It was a very exciting and informative event with the audience asking many curious questions, and this is briefly what was discussed:

Haim Abraham, born in 1897 in Turkmenistan, wrote out his memoir into a spiral-bound notebook covering a period of ninety years.

Abraham came from an enclave called the Jewish Triangle, which stretched across large parts of Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia. Due to continued persecution and spotty educational access, much of their history is not written down and barely part of the Jewish historical lexicon. Presented in this book is an invaluable memoir into a fascinating time period.

After Abraham passed away in 1999, the journal was discovered in his home, written in an ancient language: Judeo-Farsi which is Persian written in Aramaic script.

Years later, the journal was translated unearthing a time capsule nearly lost. The former years of Abraham’s life had a recurrent theme of Russian Tsarist, Bolshevik, and Soviet violence, which heavily affected his family’s viability. Abraham’s family were not nationals anywhere. They were forced to move from country to country in search of religious freedom and the economic opportunities that often went hand in hand as merchant class Jews. What Abraham did have, which was central to his endurance, was a community of relatives and friends in every city he traveled in the Jewish Triangle and beyond. The mutual responsibility inherent within the Jewish community was essential to establishing worldwide business ties and mobility and thus the survival and success of the Abraham family.