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Hoxha's Holocaust

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  Albanian-American immigrant Nosh Mernacaj has written a mediocre but not entirely uninteresting memoir of rustic life with Growing Up in Communist Albania , self-published by the author this summer. He starts off on a bad footing with me when, in opening his book, he describes the ghoulish elation he felt in waking up in a fancy American hotel suite and hearing the US media report the death of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il (whose name he renders “Ill”) in 2011. His mother’s family were shabby Albanian gentry who cherished “imaginary titles from the highlands” and “had enjoyed living in riches for decades” prior to the ascendancy of Hoxha’s Party of Labor of Albania, and his father and uncles were part of the underground resistance to regime. Consequently, his family was “from a class of people called ‘Të Prekun’. The direct translation to English is ‘the touched’, which has a connotation similar to ‘the possessed’, as in being controlled by daemons. This was a label used to identify peop