Mud Sweeter than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania

by Margo Rejmer, Zosia Krasodomska-Jones (Translator), Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the Polityka Passport Award

Winner of the Kościelski Award

A revelatory oral history of the people who suffered, rebelled, and survived under the secretive dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania, one of the twentieth century’s most brutal and Kafkaesque regimes, from award-winning Polish journalist Margo Rejmer.

For nearly half a century Albania was held captive by one man. A cruel dictator with a deep paranoid streak, Enver Hoxha sealed the country’s borders, severed alliances, and enacted a totalitarian regime of gulags and purges. Many thousands suffered and died in silence, a silence that lingers today: thirty years after the end of Hoxha’s regime, its victims are still waiting for justice.

In Mud Sweeter than Honey, Albanians break the silence. Margo Rejmer spent years in Albania gathering interviews that shed light on the four decades of Hoxha’s rule and virtually every walk of life: teachers and children, imprisoned and exiled writers, nuns and factory workers. She arranges the voices of her interlocutors into a chorus that bears witness to how ordinary people lived and died. We are immersed in desperate border crossings, prison revolts, and everyday struggles to make a living. We meet a writer who finds secret freedom in a tiny village library of banned books, overlooked by censors. We meet a man who still only speaks in a whisper, afraid of being overheard.

While Albanians endured surveillance, imprisonment, and torture under Hoxha, they also read books and fell in love, raised families and found ways to survive. In the tradition of Svetlana Alexievich, Mud Sweeter than Honey is our most vivid, intimate portrait available in English of this little-understood corner of Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632062833
Publisher:	Restless Books
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	750,749
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Małgorzata (Margo) Rejmer, born in 1985 in Warsaw, is an award-winning Polish novelist, reporter, and writer of short stories. Her books, which have been translated into eight languages, include the novel Toximia (2009) and two works of nonfiction: Bucharest: Dust and Blood (2013), which won the Newsweek Award for best book of 2014, the Gryfia Literary Award, and the TVP Kultura Award, and Mud Sweeter than Honey (2018), for which she was was awarded the Polityka Passport, the most prestigious prize in Poland for emerging artists, as well as the Arkady Fiedler Award. She holds the title of the Young Ambassador of the Polish Language. She lives in Warsaw and Tirana.

Zosia Krasodomska-Jones is a literary translator working from Polish. Since being selected for the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorship in 2018 with Antonia Lloyd-Jones, she has translated several books and collaborates regularly with online journals. Mud Sweeter than Honey is her first nonfiction translation. She holds dual British-Polish citizenship and lives in Brussels, Belgium.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry, and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

Table of Contents

Map of Albania viii

Key Events in the History of Albania ix

Introduction Tony Barber xiii

Part 1 Children of the Dictator

What Was Meant to Be Has Already Happened 5

The Ballad of Uncle Enver and the Blood That Was Shed 10

The Trial 12

The Happiest People in the World 24

Enver Is Forever in My Heart 36

Children of the Dictator 45

Part 2 Mud Sweeter than Honey

The Bad Boy 51

Mud Sweeter than Honey 66

Italian Songs 68

How We Used to Vote Bright and Early 80

By the Light of the Paraffin Lamp 83

Beauty Will Always Find a Way 95

A Tale About Shoes 105

Part 3 Circles

In a Whisper 111

The Enemies' Revolt 114

Until the Bird Returns 122

How a Child Prodigy Was Diminished 137

The Broken Tree 155

Everything and Nothing 159

Circles 166

Part 4 Stone on the Borden

Survival Strategies 179

A Stone on the Border 181

Freedom in the Village of Zogaj 190

The Zone 195

Everyone Is Born Free 197

The Many Deaths of Enver Hoxha 210

Are They People Like Us? 221

Part 5 The Fortress Crumbles

Pretty Papers 229

No One Feels Guilty 232

The Fortress Crumbles 242

How I Demolished Albania's Berlin Wall 245

The Sinking Ship 255

The Red Can 263

Author's Acknowledgments 267

Bibliography 271

Permissions 277

About the Contributors 285

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The powerful, often chilling stories in Mud Sweeter than Honey attest to the truth that even a regime as atrocious as Hoxha’s cannot triumph in the long run over the irrepressible human yearning for freedom and dignity.”

—From the Introduction by Tony Barber

“Mud Sweeter than Honey is a moving evocation of the 'everyday terror' systematically perpetrated over forty-one years of Albanian communism…. An illuminating if harrowing insight into life in a totalitarian state.”

—Clarissa de Waal, author of Albania: Portrait of a Country in Transition

“Polish journalist Margo Rejmer has pulled the veil back on history in this insightful narrative filled with interviews and observations about the people and their country. Albania has been called Europe’s North Korea. After reading this book, I can understand why. But that’s not the whole story…. This is also the story of a people who found a way to survive…. You’ll get so much out of reading Mud Sweeter than Honey that I can’t wait for you to start!”

—Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore (Spokane, WA)

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Mud Sweeter than Honey:

Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2021

2021 Foreword INDIES Finalist – History

Winner of the Polityka Passport Award

Winner of the Kościelski Award

Shortlisted for the Nike Prize

“Like Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose oral histories have documented political oppression, Rejmer allows the voices of everyday Albanians—writers and artists, teachers and farm workers, educated or barely schooled—to reveal the privations and fear under which they lived…. A gripping book of starkly revealing testimony.”

—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review, Best Nonfiction of 2021

“[An] incredibly moving collection of oral histories…. Important enough to be added to the history curriculum.”

—Tim Stanley, The Telegraph, five-star review

“It is a pioneering, necessary book of such uncompromising clarity that even readers familiar with the broad outlines of Albania’s recent past are likely to find its contents shocking. Statistics can give a glimpse of the story … but Rejmer’s first-person accounts add degrees of searing detail that such figures cannot convey….. Perhaps Rejmer’s most original contribution is her assessment of the psychological impact of Albanian communism.... Margo Rejmer’s successful marshalling of multiple voices in Mud Sweeter Than Honey demonstrates one method of digging more deeply.”

—Roderick Bailey, Literary Review

“Mud Sweeter than Honey by Polish journalist and fiction writer Margo Rejmer is a bone-chilling portrait of life under Europe’s most despotic post–World War II dictator, a story of decades of state-directed terror that most Americans are unfamiliar with and from which much of modern Europe turned away. She descends from the literary lineage of Nobel laureates Herta Müller and Svetlana Alexievich. Like Alexievich, she recounts the story of a place and time by animating native voices, but she also reports stories from outside her homeland…. After a few short chapters in her own voice, Rejmer transitions to the stories of Hoxha’s survivors told in their voices, the voices that were silenced under Hoxha’s reign of terror, with the author serving as their linguistic alchemist. This storytelling collaboration requires confidence and trust, an artistic antidote to the repression and paranoia essential to Hoxha’s rule. The result is as close to a literary redressing of trauma as a single book can offer.”

—Nina Herzog, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Margo Rejmer [has earned] widespread praise for both her meticulous reportage and her discerningly detailed narratives…. The worlds depicted are all at once worn with secrecy, curious with hope, and bold with the human instinct for survival…. [Rejmer] lets the lived experience of Albanians speak for themselves, until the whole spectrum comes into view; from victims to survivors, heroes to collaborators, Rejmer puts to the page their pain and doubts, their own attempts at dealing with the different roles reality forced them into, their bitterness at the lack of justice in today’s Albania…. Indeed, the voices, rendered in English by a seamless translation, stay with the reader long after the book’s final pages.”

—Filip Noubel, Asymptote

“Margo Rejmer, the Polish writer who assembled this extraordinary book, offers a ‘polyphonic’ account of the victims of Albanian communism in the style of Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer…. As the journalist Tony Barber notes in his introduction, it serves as an ‘essential reminder’ of dark days in the Balkans.”

—Ian Thomson, The Spectator

“Mud Sweeter Than Honey transports the reader to a very specific place and time: Albania in the second half of the 20th century. Margo Rejmer’s book – translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones — chronicles life in Albania under the decades-long rule of Enver Hoxha. It’s a striking dispatch of one nation’s lived experiences.”

—Tobias Carroll, InsideHook, “The 10 Books You Should Be Reading This November”

“Mud Sweeter Than Honey is a moving evocation of the 'everyday terror' systematically perpetrated over 41 years of Albanian communism. The author, a Polish journalist and writer, brings together survivors' accounts of life under Albania's ruthless dictator, Enver Hoxha. Despite the inevitable bleakness, the author's skillful interviewing allows those recounting their experiences to engage us in their absorbing narratives. An illuminating if harrowing insight into life in a totalitarian state.”

—Clarissa de Waal, author of Albania: Portrait of a Country in Transition

“Rejmer’s is a fine collection and one that ... picks up on a theme of disappointment in the wake of communism’s collapse.”

—Tim Judah, Financial Times

“One finds a jaw dropping world within…. An unforgettable account of life in a prison state.”

—Strong Words Magazine, Best Books of 2021

“Mud Sweeter than Honey serves as an essential reminder that to move on from a painful national past should never mean to forget it or brush it aside…. The powerful, often chilling stories in Mud Sweeter than Honey attest to the truth that even a regime as atrocious as Hoxha’s cannot triumph in the long run over the irrepressible human yearning for freedom and dignity.”

—From the Introduction by Tony Barber

From the Publisher

★ 2021-08-25
A moving portrait of a nation under siege.

Based on interviews with Albanians from all walks of life, award-winning novelist and reporter Rejmer bears shattering witness to the country’s 47 years of communist dictatorship. Although some considered Enver Hoxha (1908-1985) “as kind as a father and as infallible as God”—“the greatest Albanian in the history of our nation,” one man exclaimed—most of the interviewees suffered deeply during his rule. Under Hoxha, a paranoid, ruthless leader, more than 30,000 were incarcerated as political prisoners; more than 6,000 murdered; and 59,000 detained. “I wrote this book with the victims in mind,” Rejmer says, “and also those who claim that the people who suffered are lying, exaggerating, and trying to extort money by stretching the truth. In Albania, no one who was responsible for issuing sentences and torturing prisoners has ever been convicted.” Like Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose oral histories have documented political oppression, Rejmer allows the voices of everyday Albanians—writers and artists, teachers and farm workers, educated or barely schooled—to reveal the privations and fear under which they lived. “You felt as if you were being raped on a daily basis,” one man told her. “Every single day you lost your sense of security and dignity.” Friends and family informed on one another to the ubiquitous Sigurimi, the secret police. One student, betrayed by a friend, was arrested for praising the poetry of a Franciscan priest who had been deemed an enemy of the people. Everyone was forced to parrot propaganda extolling Albania as paradise on Earth even though cities were crumbling, food was scarce, barbed wire surrounded them, religion was outlawed, and “eager spies” enforced the threat of arrest, imprisonment, and torture. “Equality in the communist system was a sham,” one man said, with society divided into “those who had a little and those who had nothing.”

A gripping book of starkly revealing testimony.

Kirkus Reviews