Author : Nosh Mernacaj
Publisher :
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 32,2 MB
Release : 2021-06-13
Category :
ISBN :
The atrocities of Communism in the aftermath of World War II - all the way up to 1990s, especially the ones in the heart of Europe, are mostly unknown to the western reader. This memoir is a snapshot of Communist Albania from the author's experience. It is based on true events and real people and places.
Author : Lea Ypi
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 49,39 MB
Release : 2022-01-18
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0393867749
Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.
Author : Margo Rejmer
Publisher : MacLehose Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 40,29 MB
Release : 2022-11-10
Category :
ISBN : 9781529411478
Author : Fred Abrahams
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 24,90 MB
Release : 2018-10-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1479896683
In the early 1990s, Albania, arguably Europe’s most closed and repressive state, began a startling transition out of forty years of self-imposed Communist isolation. Albanians who were not allowed to practice religion, travel abroad, wear jeans, or read “decadent” Western literature began to devour the outside world. They opened cafés, companies, and newspapers. Previously banned rock music blared in the streets. Modern Albania offers a vivid history of the Albanian Communist regime’s fall and the trials and tribulations that led the country to become the state it is today. The book provides an in-depth look at the Communists' last Politburo meetings and the first student revolts, the fall of the Stalinist regime, the outflows of refugees, the crash of the massive pyramid-loan schemes, the war in neighboring Kosovo, and Albania’s relationship with the United States. Fred Abrahams weaves together personal experience from more than twenty years of work in Albania, interviews with key Albanians and foreigners who played a role in the country’s politics since 1990—including former Politburo members, opposition leaders, intelligence agents, diplomats, and founders of the Kosovo Liberation Army—and a close examination of hundreds of previously secret government records from Albania and the United States. A rich, narratively-driven account, Modern Albania gives readers a front-row seat to the dramatic events of the last battle of Cold War Europe.
Author : Human Rights Watch, Helsinki Staff
Publisher : Human Rights Watch
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 30,35 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Albania
ISBN : 9781564321602
Free and fair election
Author : Blendi Fevziu
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 446 pages
File Size : 31,51 MB
Release : 2016-02-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 085772908X
Stalinism, that particularly brutal phase of the Communist experience, came to an end in most of Europe with the death of Stalin in 1953. However, in one country - Albania - Stalinism survived virtually unscathed until 1990. The regime that the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha led from 1944 until his death in 1985 was incomparably severe. Such was the reign of terror that no audible voice of opposition or dissent ever arose in the Balkan state and Albania became isolated from the rest of the world and utterly inward-looking. Three decades after his death, the spectre of Hoxha still lingers over the country, yet many people – inside and outside Albania – know little about the man who ruled the country with an iron fist for so many decades. This book provides the first biography of Hoxha available in English. Using unseen documents and first-hand interviews, journalist Blendi Fevziu pieces together the life of a tyrannical ruler in a biography which will be essential reading for anyone interested in Balkan history and communist studies
Author : Haya Leah Molnar
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 16,10 MB
Release : 2010-03-30
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN : 1429944420
Eva Zimmermann is eight years old, and she has just discovered she is Jewish. Such is the life of an only child living in postwar Bucharest, a city that is changing in ever more frightening ways. Eva's family, full of eccentric and opinionated adults, will do absolutely anything to keep her safe—even if it means hiding her identity from her. With razor-sharp depictions of her animated relatives, Haya Leah Molnar's memoir of her childhood captures with touching precocity the very adult realities of living behind the iron curtain. Under a Red Sky is a 2011 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Author : Pajtim Statovci
Publisher : Pantheon
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 14,34 MB
Release : 2019
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1524747491
"The death of head of state Enver Hoxha and the loss of his father leave Bujar growing up in the ruins of Communist Albania and of his own family. Only his fearless best friend, Agim--who is facing his own realizations about his gender and sexuality--gives him hope for the future. Together the two decide to leave everything behind and try their luck in Italy. But the struggle to feel at home--in a foreign country and even in one's own body--will have corrosive effects, spurring a dangerous search for new identities"--
Author : Zef Pllumi
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 31,89 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0595452981
In 1944, Albania erupted in civil war. The communist party prevailed and acted quickly and brutally. By 1946, through executions, imprisonments, and mass banishments, the communists broke the back of Albania's freedom. A young Franciscan Catholic and man of heroic character in this time of inhumanity, Friar Zef Pllumi was arrested, brutally tortured, imprisoned, and sent to labor camps. Through deeply personal descriptions of shocking atrocities, Fr. Pllumi focuses on his extraordinary will to survive and his powerful faith. His intense desire to "live to tell" honors those martyred with Christ's name on their lips. Fr. Pllumi was initially released in 1949. Fr. Pllumi's memories are a brave confrontation of communism. His story's power lays in the fact that despite obscene efforts, the communist party could not succeed. As Fr. Pllumi states, "They think people are frightened before dying, but what they don't realize is that when you've arrived to a certain agonizing point, nothing is frightening anymore." Fr. Pllumi's historical memoir also delivers clear lessons for today. Amid the many horrors, differences in beliefs melted away. Christians, Muslims, Albanians, Italians, and French alike, although wounded physically, emotionally, and spiritually, were still alive to help each other and stand together and triumph for mankind.
Author : Luljeta Lleshanaku
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 135 pages
File Size : 15,72 MB
Release : 2018-04-24
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0811227537
Lleshanaku’s poems are “full of objects and souls, transformed and given wings in Chagall-like metaphor” (Sasha Dugdale, Poetry Nation Review) *Shortlist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize* “Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet’s native Albania. For Lleshanaku, the “unsaid, gestures” make up the negative space that “gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman—the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl on top of a shoulder.” It is the negative space “that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.” Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places—gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations—with subtle humor and profound insight, as a child discovering a world in a grain of sand.
