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.