Gershom Gorenberg

The air and dust blasting through the windows of the decrepit Lada were ferociously hot. The four-lane blacktop stretched eastward through the cotton fields of accidentally independent Uzbekistan.

Yakub, the wild Tajik-speaking Jewish driver I'd hired in Bukhara when the cold-faced men at OVIR ordered me to leave town, kept his foot pressed on the gas, waving his big hands above the wheel as he shouted at my translator in the back seat. Occasionally he tried out the handful of Hebrew words he'd learned visiting Israel a year before. "Israel, good! Audi, Subaru, OK!" Night was falling. I was sweaty, filthy, and anxious to get back to Samarkand, where I'd stashed a week's worth of notebooks in my friend Igor's house to cut the chances of the KGB confiscating them.

A roadblock appeared before us: a metal gate across the asphalt, three cops by the roadside. Yakub pulled over and jumped out. Cops made me nervous; I knew my documents weren't in order. The former Soviet official who'd issued my visa in Tel Aviv in exchange for small unmarked bills had written only "Tashkent" on it, not "Bukhara" or "Samarkand," which under Soviet laws still in force in Uzbekistan meant I had no right to be in this part of the country.

Yakub spoke with the police and returned to the car. "Ask him what the hell they're looking for," I told my translator, Meir.

"Guns," came the answer, as we pulled out. "People are bringing lots of guns up from Afghanistan."

"Who? Political groups?"

"No, criminals," Yakub said. "Guys who stop taxis at night, kill the driver, throw the body out. And highway bandits." He leaned down and picked something up from the car floor. In the dim light I saw a foot-long knife. Yakub smiled, switched to Hebrew: "I no fear."

This is the kind of journalistic experience that is fun mostly in the retelling. It was summer 1992. I was able to travel to Uzbekistan for The Report to write about life in Central Asia's Jewish quarters only because the Soviet Union had evaporated the winter before, only because the Jewish Agency was sending aliyah flights every other week to Tashkent, only because local Jews were ridiculously eager to host me in their homes. Three years later, when I wanted to go back, a Tashkent friend told me that almost all the Jews had left. Igor, a Zionist activist, chose America. The regime was sending goons to beat up locals who helped foreign journalists. The window had opened and closed.

We expected none of this when The Jerusalem Report began. We could no more expect the Soviet collapse than we could prophesy Rabin shaking hands with Arafat - or being murdered. Soviet emigration had begun; we couldn't know if it would continue. Since then, a million Jews have joined those happy to be free in Israel or the U.S. - and those displaced from where their grandmothers lived. We are as likely to be surprised by the next 10 years. We only go for the ride, and if you give us the chance, tell the story.