Free

In December 1990, eleven-year-old Lea Ypi was walking home from school in the coastal Albanian city of Durrës when she stumbled into a street protest. Fleeing the chaos, she took shelter behind a bronze statue of Stalin near the Palace of Culture, only to discover that the statue's head had been stolen. Ypi could not understand what the protesters wanted. She had grown up believing that Albania, a Stalinist state that broke with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and China in succession, was already one of the freest countries on earth. Her moral education teacher, Nora, had taught her that socialism granted genuine freedom and that the ruling Albanian Party of Labour was leading the country toward communism. For the first time, Ypi wondered whether freedom might be something her country had yet to achieve.

When she arrived home, her family's behavior deepened her confusion. Her grandmother Nini scolded her in French, a language Nini had spoken to Ypi since infancy as a private act of rebellion whose meaning Ypi did not yet grasp. Her father, Zafo, whispered the word "protest" rather than using the state television term "hooligans." When a history assignment about Albania's tenth prime minister, a wartime collaborator named Xhaferr Ypi who shared her surname and her father's first name, provoked her refusal to attend school, her mother, Doli, unexpectedly defended the man, suggesting he might have been trying to save lives. The exchange left Ypi suspicious for the first time that her parents did not share her devotion to the Party.

Ypi's memoir recounts her childhood and adolescence during the final years of Albanian socialism and the turbulent transition to liberal democracy. Under the Socialist system, every citizen's life was governed by "biography," one's class and family history, which determined what one could study, where one could work, and whom one could marry. Zafo was gifted in mathematics but barred from studying it because of his biography; after Nini convinced a medical panel he would kill himself, he was permitted to study forestry instead. Doli grew up in extreme poverty, was forced to study mathematics for financial reasons, and became the national chess champion.

Family conversations were saturated with coded references Ypi could not decode. Relatives discussed who "graduated" from which "university" and debated whether certain "teachers" were too harsh. A new cousin, Erion, arrived with the message that his grandfather Ahmet had "got his degree," and the family agonized over whether to make contact, fearing consequences for Zafo's job. A recurring story about Ypi's grandfather Asllan shaking hands with Haki, an infamously severe "teacher," after completing his own "degree" provoked intense debate about forgiveness and complicity. Young Ypi absorbed these fragments without understanding them.

Ypi's childhood was shaped by the rituals of socialism: queuing for groceries and navigating the neighborly relationships essential for survival. A Coca-Cola can, a rare status symbol displayed alongside photos of leader Enver Hoxha, caused a bitter falling-out between Doli and their neighbor Donika Papas. Donika's husband, Mihal, a partisan veteran and local Party official, was deeply entwined with the family's life. When Ypi blurted out during a dinner that her parents did not love Uncle Enver because they refused to display his photo, Mihal sternly rebuked her. The death of Hoxha in April 1985 produced Ypi's first collision between personal grief and family indifference. Nini revealed she personally knew Hoxha, that he and Asllan had been friends, and extracted a promise that Ypi would never tell anyone the family did not love Uncle Enver.

Ypi's encounters with the outside world were mediated through unreliable television signals, an educational program called "Foreign Languages at Home," and rare sightings of tourists whom Nora warned children never to approach. Nini, born as a pasha's niece in the Ottoman-era city of Salonica, spoke French to Ypi from birth, earning Ypi the mocking nickname "Comrade Mamuazel" from neighborhood bully Flamur. Late at night, Nini and her cousin Cocotte chatted in French and Greek, evoking a vanished cosmopolitan world.

On 12 December 1990, Albania was declared a multiparty state, and Ypi's parents revealed the truth. The "universities" were prisons and deportation sites. "Degrees" were sentences. "Teachers" were torturers. "Expulsion" meant execution. "Dropping out" meant suicide. The former prime minister Xhaferr Ypi was Ypi's great-grandfather. Asllan, who studied law at the Sorbonne and wanted to join the anti-Fascist international brigades in Spain, spent 15 years in prison. Doli's grandfather threw himself from the fifth-floor window of the Party headquarters, once the family's own property, in 1947 while trying to escape torture. Nini told the full story of her life: born in 1918, educated at the French Lycée in Salonica, married to Asllan after meeting him at King Zog's wedding, she refused to emigrate after the war and endured decades of loss. She insisted that dignity had nothing to do with money and that French was her gesture of noncompliance. The first opposition newspaper appeared with the declaration: "Only the truth is free, and only when the truth is revealed does freedom become true" (116).

The book's second half follows the chaotic transition to liberal democracy. The first free elections brought disappointment as the former Communists won decisively. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker visited, telling a crowd of 300,000 that "Freedom works" (132). The prescription for transformation was "shock therapy": balancing budgets, liberalizing prices, eliminating subsidies, and privatizing state enterprises. Nini received a letter offering help reclaiming family properties in Greece. In Salonica, she revisited her father's grave and childhood home with stoic dignity, but lawyers explained the near-impossibility of recovering anything.

The mass exodus from Albania began in 1991. Ypi's friend Elona, recently turned 13, left on a commandeered cargo ship with Arian, an older boy from the neighborhood. In August, nearly 20,000 people crowded onto the Vlora, a cargo ship returned from Cuba; in Bari, they were locked in a stadium and deported. Both parents lost their jobs. Zafo's forestry office closed as forests were chopped down for heating fuel. Doli joined the opposition Democratic Party, becoming a leader in its women's association and pursuing restitution of confiscated properties. Their philosophies sharpened: Doli believed in private property and competition; Zafo believed in redistribution but could not name any society where it worked.

Ypi's teenage years were shaped by hyperactivism in the civil society organizations that replaced the Party as the framework of public life. She joined the Open Society Institute's debating teams, the Red Cross, and an AIDS awareness campaign. Volunteering at a Red Cross orphanage, she learned that Elona was working as a prostitute in Italy, controlled by Arian, who was involved in trafficking. Zafo was promoted to general director of the port, where he faced the moral agony of implementing structural reforms demanded by the World Bank, an international financial institution. Hundreds of Romany workers gathered outside the family house begging him not to fire them. He never signed the dismissal orders, discovering that the new system constrained him just as the old one did. Meanwhile, pyramid investment schemes absorbed more than two-thirds of the population's savings. Zafo ran for Parliament and won but found the role paralyzing.

When the schemes collapsed in early 1997, protests escalated into civil war. Ypi's diary entries documented the disintegration: frozen accounts, the prime minister's resignation, a state of emergency, then violence reaching Durrës. She watched neighbors carry Kalashnikovs up the hill and lost her voice for days. Her mother and younger brother, Lani, escaped to Italy by boat; her father was trapped in Parliament in Tirana. Flamur accidentally killed himself playing with a pistol he thought was unloaded. On 29 March, an Italian military vessel sank a boat near Otranto carrying approximately 100 Albanians, mostly women and children, killing around 80. Ypi recovered her voice by shouting alone in the ransacked Royal Palace and read *War and Peace* to survive the waiting.

When schools briefly reopened, Ypi took her final exams amid bomb threats and attended her prom at a gang-controlled hotel. She announced her decision to study philosophy, alarming her father, who quoted Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it" (255). They made a pact: the family would support philosophy if she stayed away from Marx. Ypi left Albania by boat across the Adriatic and never returned to live there.

In the epilogue, Ypi describes teaching Marx at the London School of Economics. Zafo died of an asthma attack in Tirana; Nini died shortly after. Doli's decades-long fight to reclaim family properties eventually succeeded. At university in Italy, Ypi's Western Socialist friends dismissed her experiences as irrelevant to "real socialism." When Ypi read Das Kapital, every abstract economic category took on the flesh and blood of her own relatives. She concludes that both the socialist world of her parents and the liberal world she inhabits fall short of the ideal of freedom, but understanding both failures is necessary to "reflect, apologize and learn" (262).