(Jewish Group) Meet the 29-year-old Bukharian Jew who quit his Wall Street job to open a pickle shop
The first person in his family born in America, Edward Ilyasov spent his childhood in Hillcrest, Queens, watching cooking shows and dreaming of traveling the world.
Even as a young boy, Ilyasov, 29, felt he was destined to do something outside of the life path set for him by his parents and his community. He knew he didn’t want to grow up and become a pharmacist, dentist, barber or jeweler — popular professions among the members of Queens’ Bukharian Jewish community, a tight-knit enclave of some 70,000 Russian-speaking Jews who originally hail from Central Asia.
Still, as a child of divorced immigrants, Ilyasov’s primary career goal was to make money. So, after completing his undergraduate degree at Queen’s College and getting a master’s degree in financial engineering at Columbia University, Ilyasov headed to Wall Street to work as a financial analyst for Deutsche Bank and Santander Bank.
But after five years, despite the stable salary and parental approval, Ilyasov felt unfulfilled. So he decided to go from crunching numbers to crunching something a little more satisfying: pickles.
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LOVE pickles!!!
FYI: Bukharian Jews are Jews from Uzbekistan and neighboring Soviet republics. Many are Russian-speaking, and immigrated here in the '70s.
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