92

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FOR THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY
in the making of medicinal products we have been
inspired and directed by one guiding principle:

The
priceless ingredient
of every product is the
honor and integrity
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THE HOUSE OF
SQUIBB

E. R. SQUIBB & SONS, NEW YORK

Manufacturing Chemists to the Medical Profession since 1858

©1934 E. R. Squibb & Sons

In an Emir's Harem

[CONTINUED FROM PAGE 91]

with its mosques and minarets, its
dusty streets and crowded bazaars.
For such a trip they would be heavily
guarded by the old women and beard-
less men and they would put on their
heavy black veils, the *paranja*, down
to their very ankles. Maybe a few
coins for sweets would be in their
childish hands. Thus lived the wives
of the great Emir Alim-Khan, whom
Zevar said the girls called Zara, but of
whom some of them were so fright-
ened that they had never looked into
his face.

For Zevar after five years escape
came. One day the Emir presented
her as a gift to one of his favorites,
a minister of the court named Astanakol
who was seventy-five years old and
had ninety other wives. This was in
1917, the year that the revolution
broke out in far-off Moscow and
rumbled its slow way toward Asia.

In Bukhara itself, under the very
nose of the Emir, the youths in 1917
were joining an association called the
Young Bukharans, intending to over-
throw the tyranny of Alim-Khan.
Zevar's brother joined and was
killed. In the face of the gathering
storm aged Astanakol fled with all
his wives to Hatirji, a city near Tash-
kent. There in 1922 he died, shortly
after the fall of the Emir and just be-
fore the historic formation of the
People's Republic of Bukhara.

For to Central Asia—Khiva, Tur-
keran Bukhara—those distant, wild
and semi-independent colonies of the
Tzar, the Russian revolution of 1917
did not arrive until 1922, 1923, 1924.
But when it did, suddenly the doors
of the harem were broken. For Zevar
a new world began. The revolution
had come!

THAT STRANGE Bolshevik rev-
olution commenced at once smash-
ing the customs of hundreds and
hundreds of years, shattering the old-
est traditions of the Orient, deposing
beys and emirs, unfrocking mullahs,
educating children and freeing women.
Everywhere—in Bukhara, in Samar-
kand, in Ferghana, in Osh—women
were leaving the harems, casting off
their veils, walking alone in the
streets, working in factories and going
to school. Of all things hitherto re-
served for men—going to school!

Zevar learned to read and write at
twenty-six. She learned to count
money and figure. She got a job. She
no longer hid her face from the world.
She belonged to herself. She was free
to do as she chose.

"It's better than the Emir's harem,"
she said to me.

Zevar, after her freedom began, not
only married again but she did some-
thing much more amazing for the east
—she got a divorce! It was unheard
of in the old days, impossible for a
woman to get rid of a man. Always
then it was the husband who had the
privilege of getting rid of her. But
the young man that Zevar married
would not learn to read and write,
she told me, would not learn to im-
prove himself, so she divorced him.

Now she lives alone with the child
she bore. She works in the red tea
house with its posters of Lenin and its
slogans of Stalin on the wall. She has
a little home. She comes and goes as
she chooses. She doesn't often think
of the Emir and his harem. If she
does, she probably calls him an old
"bourgeois," which is as insulting a
term as one can use in a Soviet State.

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Woman's Home Companion September 1934