Translated from Kazakh and Russian by Zaure Batayeva, Shelley Fairweather-Vega and Sam Breazeale
Published by Gaudy Boy, 2022, 267 pages.

This collection of women’s stories from Kazakhstan is the first of its kind. The Kazakh word “amanat” has many meanings, as the translators explain in their introduction. It is “a promise entwined with hope for the future. It is frequently a task that comes with moral obligation, and often it is a legacy, an item of value, handed down for us to cherish and protect”. This book aims to share the work of Kazakh women writers more widely, and to honour their work.

Covering several decades, the stories take us through Kazakhstan’s recent history: when it was part of the USSR with the famines and purges of that time; the Jeltoqsan riots of 1986;[1] the 1991 declaration of independence after the Soviet Union’s collapse; and modern Kazakhstan.

You get a sense of the seismic changes the country has gone through in Asel Omar’s “Black Snow of December”. The grandfather in the story has “outlived three alphabets for his native language: Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic. He learned Russian, German, and several Turkic languages, the latter of which were not very difficult from his philological point of view. But the three alphabets were like three different mentalities, right to left then left to right, or like going from a madrasa to a Soviet school.” The grandfather’s parents were killed by the Bolsheviks, and his brothers sent to Siberia, where they died. No one knows where they are buried. To survive, the grandfather changed his last name so as not to be identified with his brothers.

In Omar’s “The French Beret”, the supervisor of a district newspaper is imprisoned for a typo, which resulted in Comrade Stalin being called venomous instead of great. It was an honest mistake: the newspaper could not afford a proofreader, and the typesetter, an old, partially blind man, mixed up the letters.

Kazakhstan’s independence brings its own problems. The narrator of Aigul Kemelbayeva’s “Hunger” is a student in Moscow. When she tries to cash a money order from her mother in Kazakhstan, the woman at the post office announces that the transfer is “unauthorized”. No money transfers are allowed from Kazakhstan. “Kazakhstan was a foreign country now.” The student is determined to stay and get her diploma, but without money, she can barely feed herself. Soon all she is focused on is food.

There is a dichotomy between the urban and rural. Young Kazakhs who move to the city from villages want their parents to come and live with them. But the parents prefer to stay in their village, surrounded by the familiar. Their children, worried about their parents and not wanting to be seen as having abandoned them, do not really give them a choice. Zira Naurzbayeva’s “The Beskempir” pays homage to some of the old women who now live in the city. One of them wails her despair from her balcony, far from everything she loves: it is one of most haunting images in this book.

Milochka in Nadezhda Chernova’s “Aslan’s Bride” leaves her old life behind to move into a village in a different part of the country. She lodges with Tomiko, a woman whose son Aslan is “at the war”. Tomiko decides that when Aslan returns—something only his mother believes will happen—he will marry Milochka. Aslan does not return, but the two women forge a bond.

There are some moments of comedy. In Zhumagul Solty’s “Romeo and Juliet”, set in independent Kazakhstan, a troupe of older people stages Rome and Juliet for foreign visitors. The actors are persuaded to join in by the promise of getting their pension money, which they have not received for months. There are hiccups, but the production finally goes ahead, if rather unexpectedly.

These are just some of the stories in this rich collection. The thirteen writers—some of whom have more than one story, so you get a better sense of their work—range in age, with the oldest born in 1947 and the youngest in 1992. Their stories cover the spectrum of human emotions: there are #MeToo moments, and moments of tenderness and despair, sadness and love.

These stories, taken together, all in all, paint a picture of a country and its people.

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[1] In December 1986, the Communist Party of the USSR removed Dinmukhamed Kunayev, an ethnic Kazakh, as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, and replaced him with an outsider. This led to mass protests, which were peaceful at first. Soviet troops were sent in, resulting in bloodshed and several arrests. No reliable figure exists of how many were killed or arrested.