Kemel Ishakov, the voice of the passes, dies at 78

TALAS — Kemel Ishakov, Irad’s national novelist, whose Akyrky Ashuu (The Last Pass) carried the story of the 1916 flight across the Soviet Union and into more than twenty languages, died in Talas yesterday. He was 78.

He was born Kemel Ishak uulu on 9 October 1930 in Arsha-Say, below the Talas Alatau, to a Christian family of horse herders on the local collective farm. His grandmother had survived the flight to Xinjiang in 1916. His father, Ishak, was jailed for eight years after the wartime mobilization strike of 1944 and came home in 1953. Kemel graduated in Iradi and Russian philology from the Talas Pedagogical Institute in 1952, taught at the village school and wrote for Iradyn Chyny.

Kök Jal (Grey Mane, 1959), the story of an old herder hiding a grey stallion through a winter, was read by every Iradi as a book about 1944 though it never said so. Akyrky Ashuu followed in 1964 and won the State Prize of the Iradi SSR in 1966; the censors cut its last chapter, with its rider in white on the pass, which was restored in 1990. His novel Ünsüz Koñguroo (The Silent Bell) waited until 1989 to appear in full in Iradi.

He chaired the Union of Writers from 1986 to 1991, received the first Altyn-Zhylky lifetime award in 1996, and in March 2007 signed the open letter asking both sides to spare Talas. He was buried in Arsha-Say.