Description
A son’s memoir of his father — Enver Hoxha, Albania’s wartime commander and long-time leader — written with the sincerest of memory.
In My Father, Enver Hoxha, Ilir Hoxha opens the doors of his family home, offering readers a portrait of his father not as the caricature of his famous political polemics, but as the man who raised children, taught respect and lived among them with simplicity. Against the tide of falsified memoirs and “instant dissidence” that flooded post-1990 Albania, this book insists on sincerity, memory and truth.
Here, the father is present in countless small details — teaching his son to salute a soldier correctly, playing billiards in Korça, writing letters during youth actions, joking about football and sharing his love of flowers. But this is no mere retreat into private life: the memoir weaves these family recollections with Albania’s tumultuous 20th century. Liberation from fascism, reconstruction from ruins, electrification, the emancipation of women and universal education — Ilir reminds readers that these achievements were inseparable from his father.
The book also confronts the dark aftermath of 1991-92, when the victorious commander of the National Liberation Army was vilified, his monument toppled and his grave desecrated in a macabre political spectacle. Ilir records these events not only as a son, but as a witness to a society trying to bury its martyrs, only to discover that memory and sacrifice cannot be erased. “It was a war of the living dead against the immortal dead,” he writes, “and corpses can never win. Victory lies with the martyrs, because their blood is in the foundation of Albania.”
Alongside these chapters of loss and defiance, there is warmth and humanity: the voices of grandchildren defending their grandfather against ill-willed propaganda, the loyalty of a wife who never left her husband’s side, the simple dignity of veterans guarding his grave. The narrative is punctuated with deep reflections on false claims, on the dangers of premature monuments, on the obscenities of post-socialist “democracy” and on the importance of never changing one’s “team of the heart” — one’s character and one’s flag.
My Father, Enver Hoxha is not an academic biography nor a work of apology. It is an intensely personal memoir written under persecution, in part even from prison. It is at once a family chronicle, a political testimony and a defence of historical memory — more than anything, the voice of a son who refuses to stay silent about his father, who insists on his right to family honour.