Free is a great memoir. It takes its place for me next to those of my other two favorites: James Reston's "Deadline" and Katherine Graham's "Personal History". Each of these memoirs tells a unique human story in unforgettable, candid prose. But each does something else: they cause me to reflect on aspects of my own life.
Lea Ypi's horrific portrayal of the civil war going on in Albania in 1997 feeds in a macabre horrific all -too human way to the humanitarian disaster going on now in Ukraine, the cataclysmic turn to the past in Russia, and the infernal continuing deadly repression of the Palestinians quest for independence by Israel.
The author writes: “Nobody understands anything. It’s like a whole country committing suicide. Just when it looked like things were getting better, it all went downhill. Now that we are all falling from a precipice, there is no way back. It’s so much worse than 1990. At least there was hope and democracy then. Now there is nothing, just a curse.”
Yet Ypi does not leave us off the hook. She goes on to recall what she tells her students teaching Marxism at the London School of Economics. It is, she describes, “a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress and history, of how we adapt to circumstances but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realize their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing is also oppressive. And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.”A call to the ultimate duty: trying to do what is right. Giving all people the opportunity to succeed as best we can.She talks to friends at school about her growing up in Albania, first a communist, then a socialist country. They reject the socialism which she had. It wasn’t real. “There was only one thing to do,” they said. “Forget it.” She was reluctant to forget it, not out of nostalgia, not because the concepts she had grown up with were so deeply rooted that it was impossible to disentangle herself but because, “If there was one history, if there was one lesson to be taken from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say ‘what you had was not the real thing,’ applying that to both socialism and liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsibility. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies created in the name of great ideas, and we don’t have to reflect, apologize and learn.”
So it is with the circumstances in which I have lived we all live. Life is not perfect; it’s never been perfect; it never will be perfect. We just have to make the most out of it that we can. I return as I often have to what I hope my grandchildren will be able to say about me and my wife, Francie. “They did the best they could under the circumstances.” To be clear, I’m not sure we always do; sometimes we’re too ready to give up, feel sorry for ourselves, retreat into gloom. But usually we do pull back, try to see our better selves and follow our better instincts.
In the book’s Epilogue, the author turns very personal. She reveals that her mother wondered, even if silently, how she (Lea) could be teaching socialism and Marxism. Only once did she draw attention to a cousin’s remark that my grandfather did not spend 15 years locked up in prison so that I would leave Albania to defend socialism. “I knew this is what she thought. I always wanted to clarify, didn’t know where to start. I thought it would take a book to answer. This is that book.
At first, it was going to be a philosophical book about the overlapping ideas of freedom and the Liberal and Socialist traditions, but when I started writing, ideas turned into people—the people who made me who I am. They loved and fought each other; they had different conceptions of themselves, and of their obligations. They were, as Marx writes, the product of social relations for which they were not responsible. Still, they tried to rise above them. They thought they had succeeded, but when their aspirations became reality, their dreams turned into my disillusionment.”
“My family equated socialism with denial: the denial of who they wanted to be, the right to make mistakes and learn from them, to explore the world on one’s own terms. I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit privilege, selfish enrichment, cultivating illusions or turning a blind eye toward justice. In some ways, I have gone full circle. When you see a system change once, you start believing that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic, they were not cynical, they did not believe that things fall into place if you just let them take their course. If I do nothing, their efforts will have been wasted, their lives will have been meaningless.”
Lea writes with deep feeling. “My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape. Both fall short of that ideal. But their failures took distinctive forms, and without being able to understand them, we will remain divided. I wrote my story to explain, to reconcile and to continue the struggle.”Yes, continue the struggle. That is our responsibility. That is our opportunity.
I would conclude these excerpts and perspectives with a short endorsement for this luminous memoir another writer offered and which I echo: “A lyrical memoir of deep and affecting power, the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope.”
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