Although my publications on Central Asian topics are limited, they involve several Turkic peoples and languages, poetry and music. While my social and cultural exposure involved Ottoman culture—broadly speaking—I was willing to devote myself to the newly emerging field of Central Asian Turkic studies, obtaining a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1980. The eminent Turkologist at Columbia, Karl Menges helped me through ancient Turkic texts, medieval Chaghatay and 19th century oral epics from South Siberia. This expertise granted me access to a substratum that connected several ethnic and musical cultures, stretching from Western China to Hungary and my ancestral Bessarabia. This latter territory, at times ruled by the Khans of the Crimea, was sometimes described by Russians as their “backyard Central Asia.”
Unfortunately the Soviet system—and even more so the Russian invasion of Afghanistan—virtually prohibited serious field work as I wrote my dissertation on the Uzbek oral epic. However the perestroika of the mid-1980s allowed me to visit even the most remote regions of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where oral epic still flourished. Guided by the noted ethnomusicologists Matyakubov for Uzbekistan and Kunanbaeva for Kazakhstan, I recorded many hours of performances of oral bards, and conducted in depth interviews. I also arranged for numerous lectures by these same scholars in the US, in which I acted as interpreter from Uzbek and Kazakh. At the same time I became aware of the emergence of an independent Turkmen literature during the 18th century, and I became one of the only Western scholars to translate and interpret the great poet Makhtumquli. With the help of the Uzbek poet and dissident Hamid Ismailov, I conducted primary literary research on the greatest figure of Central Asian literature—the Timurid Ali Shir Navai. It was by studying the romantic epics of Navai that I came to appreciate the incipient modernity of Moghul literature, with its earlier Timurid basis.
The unexpected mass emigration of Central Asian (“Bukharan”) Jewry brought the topic closer to home. During the mid-1990s I worked closely with Ilyas Mallayev, the greatest poet-musician of the Bukharans, arranging concerts and translating his ghazals from Persian and Uzbek. I collaborated with the East German musicologist Angelika Jung in her research on the Bukharan art music--the Shashmaqom--and I documented the unique paraliturgical Sabbath repertoire of the Malakov family of Shahrisabz.