FOREWORD
Forewords can be of many types. To this one I would give the form of a “Note of Congratulations” to the author, Mrs. Merita Bajraktari McCormack, for this wonderful book, full of sensitivity and creativity. Immediately you feel a caring hand “carving” a nice piece of art and serving it to your soul. The feminine aroma is present in every story, regardless of the pain that the story is associated with.
The Author, who has a passionate love for literature, has brought herself into the creative writing field. This is her fourth published book. The first two are poetry volumes, all written in the Albanian language. Readers in Albania and abroad have received them very well. She has written a series of short stories book in Albanian and co-edited and co-authored a literature anthology as well.
Poetry is often a predecessor of other literature genres, it is, as to say, the baby hood of the literature and it is known even in times of antiquity that poetry never was a hurdle in someone’s road to becoming someone else other than a poet.
There, the soul’s inspirations have an unlimited space for expression in forms and schools of every kind. The poetry can be rhyming, strophe or free style, individual feelings beautifully expressed, reflecting feelings or perceptions, readable or unreadable emotions of the soul. In that area of poetry, Mrs. Bajraktari McCormack has been comfortable enough and has indeed, enjoyed a significant success of her own pen.
Now, she comes before her readers and takes up the challenge in a very difficult area.
Story telling requires more of a different effort and skills than that of writing poetry. Story writing requires building up the subject, requires a disciplined set up of the character lines and their development and plotting a consequent relevant ending. I do think and hope that this will be the wide appreciation that Merita faced and passed this challenge. She faces it with dignity and is indeed successful.
It has been unavoidable, even in these stories, to feel the high sensitivity of spiritual sufferings of a woman that seeks freedom, more than what the severe reality gave in Albania under the communist regime. It is that reality where this woman, her family and friends, her loved ones and those of her youthful dreams, badly suffered, trying to build up their lives and survive.
It is in the stories that you come across in this book that appear the fates of simple people in the flat decades of an isolated Enverian regime[1] reflected in the society of utopia and paranoia . In all stories, you can feel from far or near, present or passed the weight of the dictatorship, the element of absurd discrimination. You can feel by reading these stories how strong was the suffering, and how much Albanian people went through during those fifty years of isolation and dictatorship[2].
The style of story telling is a classic one. Reading, one feels a nice story line coming through and you notice a straight line engulfing large spaces and time. They go from the childhood and town of lilac up to the “shining lights” of the west. Some how the book has elements of an autobiography, and this author, as many others, could not escape the rule as her experiences, likewise those of many of her compatriots who emigrated, have been many and she choose telling them.
The stories are a pleasure to read and if someone asked me to pick up the best, I could have not! I like every one of them. Further more I would continue the thought stated out in the first paragraph, I would wish again, success to my “little cousin” and compatriot in Long Island, whom I met after I last saw her in Albania. I found her again surrounded by many good books and her wonderful husband, their lovely children and fresh stories to tell! Congratulations!
Pëllumb Kulla
New York
[1] Form of severe communism under Enver Hoxha
[2] The dictatorship of Enver Hoxha Regime- 1945-90
