By Visar Zhiti
Part Four
Plaques and Sacks…!
Follows from the previous issue
IN THE WAR AND POST-WAR
Foundational in Letters…!
Ernest Koliqi (1903 – 1975)
He would leave…!
…teacher, poet, writer, translator, minister of education… born in Shkodër, when Albania was preparing to emerge from the long Ottoman captivity, in the third year of the last century, in a May full of warm petals like kisses, among which that one is mixed – the kiss of Judas. He would acquire vast knowledge in Italy and Croatia, a bearer of tradition and a molder of literary innovations, a founder of the modern in short stories, a stylist and a seeker of the word, so much so that it seems as if he collected them like rare medicinal plants in the Northern mountains; a connoisseur of life, of the mechanism of conflicts, of the sorrows of non-resolution, of twilight and light in the paths of man, especially the alleys of Shkodër, which he loved so much that he made it the emblem of his song…!
When he was appointed Minister of Education (1939), he was the one who institutionally brought Albanian education to Kosovo, sending 200 of the best-prepared teachers, opening the first high school there in 1941, while here, 200 others – not teachers, but communists – with Yugoslav help, had just created a party that would establish the heaviest dictatorship, abandoning Kosovo, which would later condemn the Koliqis and their work…!
The end of the war would find him with the works of Albanology in Italy, with the roads of return to the homeland closed forever after being sentenced to death in absentia. During his forced political exile, Ernest Koliqi would not cease working: he founded the Chair of Albanology in Rome, launched journals, united the diaspora, revived the Arbëresh spirit, compiled anthologies of nationwide poetry, closely followed the political and cultural life in the homeland, wrote poems and novels, and would secretly influence even later major works of Albanian literature. He died suddenly in December 1975, in Rome. His remains still rest there, in the Monumental Cemetery.
Nationalists: Stavro Skëndi (1905 – 1989)
…another Albanian of Ventotene, a friend of the visionaries of a United Europe, interned as an active opponent of the Italian occupation. As soon as he was released from that wind-swept island of pain, he went to continue the struggle for the country’s liberation, joining ‘Balli Kombëtar’. He had studied at the American Robert College in Istanbul (I find that the writer Orhan Pamuk, the first Turkish Nobel laureate, later graduated there as well), then completed university studies in international relations in Geneva. He returned home and gave lectures at the Commercial School.
During World War II, he joined the ‘Balli Kombëtar’ front. The communists could not forgive him for this, especially since he was against revolutions and favored evolution – scientific and cultural development for Albania.
He went to the USA in 1946, worked at Columbia University, dedicated himself to Albanology, and published studies and books on Albania – on the economy and the politics of isolation, the Renaissance, the alphabet, poetry, and broader Balkan literature, etc.
His life summarized 8 decades of the country’s history: the Declaration of Independence, the Monarchy, WWII, the establishment of communism (which he viewed as a national tragedy), and emigration, the activities of the diaspora. He was deeply shaken and saddened by the closure of his homeland and the oppression of intellectuals and artists like the entire people…! He died in New York in the same year the Berlin Wall collapsed and the communist empire and the dictatorship in his homeland began to fall.
The Writer Isuf Luzaj (1913 – 2000)
…sold his olive groves in Vlorë to study abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he defended two doctorates, in philosophy and literature. At home, he worked at the ‘Normale’ of Elbasan and the Lyceum of Korçë. His first poetic collection, “Rrëfime” (Confessions), failed to circulate; they stopped the author as well because of the poem “Nero.”
As an active opponent, they displaced him to Italy, to the island of the condemned, Ventotene. With the intervention of the Minister of Education, Ernest Koliqi, he was released from prison and returned to join the nationalists fighting for liberation, just as fratricide and betrayals had begun. After their defeat at the war’s end, he fled, leaving his family behind. In Italy, he was sentenced under suspicion of killing an Italian general during the war. With the help of Sandro Pertini – the future President of Italy, whom he had met in Ventotene – he worked at the Vatican Library.
Fate led him to Argentina, where a philosophy professor with a Sorbonne degree was needed. He would meet the writer Jorge L. Borges. After 18 years of work there, he was invited to the USA, where he was elected head of ‘Balli Kombëtar’ at the New York Congress.
Isuf Luzaj, alongside the title “Professor Emeritus,” also received the “Professor of America” award, presented by President Reagan himself. He lectured at American universities: Harvard, Columbia, New Hampshire, Indiana, etc. He was appointed chair of 87 professors at the University of Illinois. He left 32 volumes in manuscript – poetry, philosophy, history, diaries, novels, etc. – all unknown in the homeland, but also all condemned.
“History of Albania” – Tajar Zavalani (1903 – 1966)
The Zavalanis were known as a prominent clan with patriotic traditions in the city of Bitola (Manastir), in Macedonia, but “North” as it is called today by the insistence of the Greeks, while we can easily call it South Macedonia…! At the start of the last century, there were no Albanian schools, so Tajar’s father, editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Bashkimi i Kombit” published in the city (1907), sent little Tajar to the French school opened by the Catholic missionaries, the “Marist Brothers.” Meanwhile, he learned Albanian from one of the Qiriazi family, who would later open the first Albanian female school in Korçë. During WWI, after the French bombed and burned Bitola, Tajar went to Thessaloniki to continue his studies and would be the “youngest laureate in French universities.” In 1922, he came to Tirana to start work at the Foreign Ministry and was appointed Secretary of the Albanian Legation in Rome, where he was contaminated by communist ideas. He went to the Soviet Union in 1925 to study science and politics under the pseudonym “Zoniev.”
In Russia, they executed his brother, Hysen Zavalani, in the “anti-Stalinist events of 1937-38 in Saratov.” Tajar, meanwhile, had fled to Switzerland and returned to his father in Thessaloniki as an anti-communist. In Albania since 1933, he worked as a journalist and translator, during the brilliance of writers Mitrush Kuteli, Ernest Koliqi, Migjeni, Branko Merxhani, Petro Marko, Vedat Kokona, etc., and the newspapers and journals “Illyria”, “Minerva”, “Bota e re”, “Përpjekja shqiptare”, “Koha e Re”, “Besa”, “Shtypi”, “Shkëndija”, “Leka”, “Vatra”, “Rilindja” were being published. All this richness, not just in titles, but in modern ideas and thoughts. Tajar Zavalani and his wife were interned in Italy because he had translated Gorky’s “Mother” – and not only that – but they escaped to France and then to England. Since the years of WWII, Tajar began work at the BBC in London, in the Albanian Section of the Service for Europe, and held a series of conferences on Albania.
He would be a member of the PEN Club, founded by the Nobel laureate writer John Galsworthy to protect writers from persecution and sentencing, and he would be elected General Secretary of the PEN Club for Writers in Exile, for those coming from enslaved countries. In the journal they published, “Arena,” he would publish Albanian literature and translate even from Gjergj Fishta. In the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), he would be a delegate of the Albanian Committee, a duty he held until the end of his life. Yet he belongs primarily to the world of books and translation, where he is a founder. Here is what he brought into Albanian, in order: “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “Anna Karenina” by Tolstoy, Chekhov’s “Novellas,” Gorky’s “Mother,” “The Lady of the Camellias” by Alexandre Dumas-fils, “Tartarin of Tarascon” by Alphonse Daudet, “Gobseck” by Balzac. He left in print as he was fleeing Albania, “The Life of Napoleon” by E. Ludwig, the Albanian section of “Larousse”, etc.
In exile, he translated from Russian into French the book by Colonel G.A. Tokaev, “My Memories of Stalin’s Paradise” (Mes memoires – Le Paradis de Stalin), published in Paris in 1957. He also released the book in English “How strong is Russia?”, where he showed the world that the “White Bear” is not as dangerous as it seems or pretends to be, that Soviet Russia is weak everywhere from within. Zavalani’s vast work carries literary and linguistic values, rich in vocabulary; the morphology there weaves the Tosk dialect with forms of Gheg – that verbal “ue” rings like elegiac music for the dictatorship that would fall later and for the language.
As an original work, of great and special importance remains “History of Albania,” a two-volume monument published in Albanian in London, covering times from the Illyrians to the power of the communists and ending with the sixties of the last century, until Tajar Zavalani died in 1966, precisely when the work was released…! This masterpiece has the misty depths of the distant past and the clear foresight for the future as an epilogue: “The day will come, sooner or later, when even democracy will triumph over the communist dictatorship and conditions will be created to unite Albanians within the ethnic borders of their millennial homeland,” – so ends his history by the brilliant European erudite, our Tajar Zavalani, who himself became a “History of Albania.”
…others would also leave from those who were making history and writing history – fighters, high patriots, prime ministers, ministers, writers, scientists, anthropologists, thinkers, journalists, etc.; it was emptying… Mehdi bej Frashëri, Father Zef Valentini (Italian), Branko Merxhani, Ago Agaj, Kol Bib Mirakaj, Abaz Ermënji, Namik Resuli, Sejfi Protopapa, Kadri Cakrani, Xhelal Koprenca, Mentor Çoku, Tahir Kolgjini, Reshat Agaj, Ismail Boçari, Gjon Sinishtaj, etc.! But who was the first director of the National Library, Karl Gurakuqi? He would leave too. Terror had entered even the books…!
…sentenced to death in the homeland, they would flee wherever they could: to Italy, Turkey, Egypt, to nowhere, as far as possible from evil, to France, England, the USA… so they could fight freely and, differently from anywhere else, write…! They would not be able to return to a homeland without freedom. And those who had remained outside – the famous painters Ibrahim Kodra, Lin Delija, the world-famous photographer Gjon Mili, the researcher and writer Nermin Vlora Falaschi, etc. And the escapes would continue…!
Great Missionaries of Faith…
Fan Noli: Exiled to the USA, an archbishop who would serve in Boston, who would proclaim the Autocephaly of the Albanian Orthodox Church; a poet and the genius translator of Shakespeare, Khayyam, Cervantes, etc.; a musician and orator… and he would never want to return (says the raven: “never more”) to the homeland where he had been a deputy and prime minister, which he left in agony under the communist dictatorship, even though he was previously devoted “to Bolshevism,” but repentant…! Along with Faik Konica, they are foundations of the “Vatra” of Albanians in the USA, in support of the national cause..!
Baba Rexhepi: …exiled to the USA, head of the Bektashis, sentenced to death in the homeland as an opponent by the victors who would establish the communist regime. In Boston, he would build the first teqe, a friend of Fan Noli, so he too could gather Albanians without distinction, to keep the fire of patriotism alive.
Mother Teresa: …the girl with the beautiful name Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, the Albanian Catholic nun, who would go far, far away to India and become ‘Mother Teresa of Calcutta’, the most famous woman on the planet, in service of the poorest of the poor everywhere, who would also receive the ‘Nobel’ Peace Prize. But they would not allow her to enter Albania, not even to meet her mother in Tirana, not as a missionary – no – because she was seen as an escapee, as an agent of the Vatican. She would pray to God constantly for Albania too.
“THE LIBRARY OF EXILE”
A painful and ruinous departure. The leaders were leaving. They had left 500 years ago like this – the Arbëresh – an exodus as in the Bible, because after the death of the Leader of the Nation, Gjergj Kastrioti – Skanderbeg, the castles were falling one by one and the Ottoman Empire was conquering the homeland. It was like an endless plague…! And now again another plague. The communist empire was swallowing everything again. Having its center in its great cold, it was a glacier empire. And the leaders of the country were leaving through the winds toward the West…!
Their war would be with books. With memory and knowledge. And with hope in God. And there would be created what in publications abroad, forbidden in socialist Albania, would be so touchingly called the “Library of Exile.” The European erudite, Tajar Zavalani, in his important but forgotten work, “History of Albania” (published in London in 1966, with reddish covers and the black eagle of Skanderbeg at the top, found mostly in the Libraries of Exile among those who fled to the USA…), in volume II of the work, with those yellowed pages, on page 306, writes:
“Education based on the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism is incompatible not only with the discoveries of modern science but also with the facts of national history that highlight the successes of Albanian nationalism. For the communists, the war against nationalism had begun during the foreign occupation and continued after they came to power. Flag Day was replaced with the following day to celebrate the ‘victory of the communists’ through the National Liberation movement. The flag of Skanderbeg was bastardized by attaching the yellow star of the Soviets. The masterpieces of national literature, like Fishta’s ‘Lahuta’, were forbidden to be read in schools or privately. The works of Lenin and Stalin, the poems and romances of Russian writers in service to the Bolshevik party, became mandatory reading material for Albanians, old and young.”
TWO SYMBOLIC POEMS
The call for union vs. the satire of division.
THE TWO OPPONENTS
“THE EPIC OF BALLI KOMBËTAR”
War, the second of the world. And two poems were published in little Albania, about the war as well, but different in many things, in spirit and content, in their appeal, and even in the fate of the authors. They had ‘Balli Kombëtar’ in common. Both were distributed as tracts during the War. The first must be that of Hekuran Zhiti, “The Two Opponents,” an elegy published in several newspapers; we find it in “Lajmëtari i Lirisë – Oshëtima e Korçës,” February 1944. The second is “The Epic of Balli Kombëtar,” a satire by the writer Shefqet Musaraj, which became very well-known after the War, being republished from time to time and included in all school textbooks. Its author, from a partisan, became a writer of socialist realism. The author of the first, an activist of ‘Balli Kombëtar’, suffered badly, partly because of the poem; after the War, he was arrested, persecuted, etc., and the poem vanished and was forgotten. We do not know if the two “opponent” authors knew each other, but surely they must have read these two poems of one another.
The poem “The Two Opponents” is a tragedy of fratricide; it couldn’t be otherwise in a time of war, with the mourning 10 and 11-syllable verses, with AA rhyming couplets, like the very proximity it sought when Albanians were divided in a civil war between partisans and ‘ballists’. The poem had such an echo that it was dramatized under the name “The Embrace of the Two Opponents,” that which was missing, and was performed on many stages in our cities, even in the capital, at Cinema “Kosova.” It was a desperate call for union, for by killing each other, we have killed Mother Albania.
The poem “The Epic of Balli Kombëtar” is a satire in a time of war, with popular 5-6 syllable verses, with ABCB rhymes, which tickle while bleeding at the same time like knife tips. The Organization of Balli Kombëtar and its exponents, national personalities, are mocked, ridiculing them with the means allowed by a satirical poem. And this poem was dramatized late by the state theater of the victors, and the luxury editions were illustrated with caricatures, while the other poem, forgotten, had meanwhile been sent to the paper factory to be recycled into white cardboard. Some worker dared to pull it from the teeth of the machinery, hid it, and gave it to the author’s family when the dictatorship fell.
It was staged again in the theater, where the author had worked as an actor, and was republished in the posthumous book of poems. A painter composed three large canvases from the poem. Works, just like people, stand facing one another. As precursors of the feelings of the two fronts of later poetry: one of the victors, full of noise and celebrations, and another, secret, underground, scarce, and full of night…!
The poet and researcher, Professor Agim Vinca, in the work “The Structure of the Development of Albanian Poetry (1945-1980)”, Prishtina 1997, in the chapter “Poetry as a Moral Act,” writes:
“An interesting creation of the war time, the antipode of the poem ‘The Epic of Balli Kombëtar’ by Shefqet Musaraj, can be considered the poem ‘The Embrace of the Two Opponents’ by Hekuran Zhiti… This poem (…) sees the war and its antagonisms in Albania not on the ideological and political plane, but on the national one. The author senses that the divisions and fratricides that began during the war will continue after it… the verses where they are apostrophized are among the most beautiful of the poem: ‘How it happened to Kosovo and wretched Chameria / They dreamed of freedom, they became a dream themselves’.”
The history of literature must accept both poems, as poems and as indicators of a time, in the current understanding just as the descendants of the authors are.
WHEN THE CAPITAL WAS BEING LIBERATED, A MASSACRE…
…even before Albania was liberated from the Nazi-fascist occupiers, the nearing victors were continuing the killings and executions.
Knock on the houses of Tirana’s intellectuals and empty the volley of bullets into the chest… fighting was going on to take the capital, Tirana, – I have written in my book, “Messengers of Europe. Anthology of the Slain,”
19 or 20 days of fighting. The partisan brigades, I, VIII, IV, etc., threw themselves into the assault, frontal war with German Nazis, from neighborhood to neighborhood, building by building, body to body. German tanks in front of the Old Mosque, the minaret of which fell, near the “Zingoni” shop were vomiting fire…! And benefiting from the heavy rain and the darkness of November 16, 3,000 Germans, their armored machinery, took the road toward the North and on November 17, Tirana dawned liberated…!
…loud knocking on doors, tearing them open… partisans… unbelievable, they were not looking for hidden Germans, if there were any, but… intellectuals… your name?… come with us… stop the words!… come… where, perhaps they are needed as translators, as intermediaries, for… the victory celebration, to prepare speeches… 5 days left and the capital would be liberated… where are they taking them, where… there, the journalist Nebil Çika, the publishers Muntaz and Vesim Kokalari, brothers of the writer Musine Kokalari… there too… they are not communists, no… They became many… 15… 19… 20… more… by order of Enver Hoxha… of his comrades… enmity… jealousy… they are not taking them to prison, no, but to Hotel “Bristol”… there where even Einstein stayed, before going to the USA, he took an Albanian passport they say, and here the Jews were protected, not one was handed over, even others came from the Balkans, Europe, they found shelter and bread here… the Albanian government… besa, the Kanun, the guest, the other… they want honoring and protecting. But with these of ours, the known intellectuals, what will they do, why did they take them to the basement… they locked them… and…! Memorie.al
Follows in the next issue
