"The Golden Earring" is a chapter from Uzbek writer O'tkir Hoshimov’s popular memoir Dunyoning ishlari (Earthly things, 1982). Set in the years directly following World War II, Dunyoning ishlari is a linked collection of semi-fictionalized recollections—what today might be called autofiction. From superstition to neighbor drama, its setting has all the trappings of a remote village but is in fact a mahalla (neighborhood) in the capital’s old city. The lack of definition between city and countryside erodes socialist narratives of progress—even in Tashkent, the “showcase city” of Soviet Central Asia, there are few signs of modernization or women’s emancipation. With residents of the mahalla waiting (often in vain) for husbands and fathers to return from the front, the world of Dunyoning ishlari is eerily devoid of men—female-led, but still markedly patriarchal. Women, especially the narrator’s mother, shoulder the burden for all, and must rely on local practices and connections to survive. Fittingly, the story’s emotional climax comes during the kelin salom (bride’s greeting) at a neighbor’s wedding, when the ostracized mother must reintegrate herself into the only community she knows. With Dunyoning ishlari, Hoshimov took up a canonical Russian Soviet genre that traced a young man’s growth alongside Soviet achievements, but upended the genre’s conventions by foregrounding women’s lives and by crafting a recursive narrative that was truer to the chaotic atmosphere of the postwar years. “The Golden Earring” is also a document of a lost world: in 1966, most of Tashkent, including half the old city, was razed by an earthquake and rebuilt in Soviet style. It commemorates familial lines that no act of god or nature can shake loose. “The Golden Earring,” was published as part of a feature [https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/collection/matrilineal-inheritance-... for the journal Words Without Borders presented by the founders of Turkoslavia, a collective of literary translators united by a shared interest in Turkic and Slavic languages, and their many overlapping traits and histories which witness the porousness of nationalized borders. Turkoslavia publishes a biannual journal of poetry and prose [https://exchanges.uiowa.edu/turkoslavia/] that gives exposure to brilliant but often underrepresented authors writing in lesser translated languages. To learn more about the collective’s work, visit: www.turkoslavia.com.
Sabrina Jaszi is a writer, editor, and literary translator. She is the co-founder of the Turkoslavia translation collective and journal.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons