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Telling it like it is

Once upon a time in a small New England town, an elementary school kid found two books about Albanian children and their lives in the mountains of a faraway country. He became forever interested in that land so different from his home by a rocky shore. That kid was me. Over the years I read everything I could find about Albania. That didn’t amount to much. I slowly built up a collection of books on the country, finally surpassing most libraries�. I listened to Albanian music, I met some Albanians, and read at last most of the works of Ismail Kadare that were translated into English. In 1996 my wife and I traveled to Albania, just roaming around by ourselves. I really liked the people there, the land was beautiful too, but the country had been trashed by the long Communist rule that had then collapsed into near-anarchy. A year later, civil war erupted. What was it like to live there? What did people think? Not being able to speak Albanian, I found out only a little.

I met a woman with an English-Albanian dictionary in Tirana. Not a big deal, but she explained that a few years previously, if she had it without authorization, it could have led to ten years in prison. I saw the smashed factories all over the country and innumerable pillboxes for defending the country from attacks that never came. They said that the 750,000 or so of those concrete igloos represented the same number of apartments never built. Like anybody else, I saw photos of the packed ships with Albanians heading across to Italy on a desperate run for a better life. And when I was young and not so young, I drove through Virginia and Kentucky and saw with sadness the shacks that served as homes for African-Americans. I saw Mexican immigrants picking vegetables in the sun in California and listened to some bastard bragging how he used to beat them up for fun. A man I hardly knew had to sell his home to pay the bills he got because he had a serious heart attack. My Indian wife and I were refused service at American motels and restaurants back in the day. The police followed our car till we left town. What about African-American lives? I want to shout “is there no end to this crap?�
Jumping to the task at hand, let me say that this is just a wonderful book. Not only does it answer my two questions above (at least from one Albanian’s point of view), but it is so clear and simply written that it reminded me of Shaker furniture. (OK, that may not occur to many readers.) It is the memoir of a girl growing up in the 1980s, who was eleven years old when Albania ceased to be a “Communist� country and began to move away from socialist solutions to human problems and towards capitalist or “liberal� ones. “Free� is a wonderfully succinct and down-to-earth treatise on that transition and how people lived through it. The ideals of the two separate systems on the surface seem to have a lot of similarity—I mean, they want to make people free and happy, to organize society in the best way. But, how they propose to do it differs completely. And, as she so perfectly shows, neither system turns out to be very successful in realizing its ideals. Albania under Enver Hoxha was in some ways a nightmare of oppression while claiming to be a paradise. As a kid, she believed in it wholeheartedly. Western countries and the capitalist system that came to Albania after 1990 claimed to live in freedom, but “while all animals were free, some animals were freer than others� to paraphrase a certain well-known author, and the top ignored the fact that they lived off the labor of the rest. She and her family lived years of confusion. What you are going to learn, if you take up this excellent book, is the nature of the two beasts as they operated in Albania. I doubt if there will ever be a finer exposition of life growing up in two opposite, yet strangely similar systems.
And by the way, history did not end.