‘Linguistic compatriots’: on the relationship between Tajik and Judeo-Tajik language and literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper follows the traces of Tajik and Judeo-Tajik literature in the early Soviet period and compares some prominent works and biographies of Tajik and Bukharan Jewish writers. In the 1920s and 1930s, national literatures were heavily supported by the Party and the state and used as vehicles for propagating the new ideology, creating Soviet nationalities (the Tajiks) and national minorities (the Bukharan Jews). For a period that lasted about ten years, parallels and mutual influences within an emerging scene of Tajik and Bukharan Jewish literature are well documented. While this laboratory of Soviet nation-building continued with the Tajiks, the Judeo-Tajik project was stopped in the late 1930s. From then until the end of the Soviet period, Bukharan Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals contributed to mainstream Tajik culture.