My Father’s
Prayers
A Refugee’s Continuing
Search or Freedom
by Peter Lumaj, ESQ
Page Publishing, Inc. New York, New York
Price: $25.95/softcover, 208 pages
Ben Johnson once said that the prospect of execution in the
morning “concentrates the mind wonderfully.” So did communism in Albania, and
elsewhere among captive nations, during Peter Lumaj’s formative years.
My Father’s Prayers
is subtitled A Refugee’s Continuing
Search for Freedom. Peter Lumaj is precisely the storm tossed refugee that the
Statue of Liberty in upper New York bay welcomes with her lifted torch: “Give
me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Lady Liberty boasts, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Albania, located in the Baltic region, bordered by
Montinegro, Kosovo, Macedonia and Greece, is washed by the Adriatic and lies
opposite Italy’s boot heel. Following World War II and the defeat of Nazi
Germany, Albania was forced into the Soviet orbit, as was Poland, Ukraine and
other of the Baltic States. Stalin smiled on Enver Hoxha, who emerged as the
leader of the newly established People's Republic of Albania. It was not
until Stalin’s death in 1953 that the country began its painful march towards
liberty. Albania’s convalescence was long and wearying.
In 1945, the country initiated an Agrarian Reform Law which
allowed the state to nationalize (read: expropriate) all property owned by
religious groups. Resistance was futile; many believers were arrested and
executed. In 1949, a new Decree on Religious Communities required that all religious
activities be sanctioned by the state alone, and in 1967 Hoxha proudly boasted
that Albania had become the world’s first atheist state. Churches were
converted into cultural centers for young people. That same year, a law banned
all fascist, warmongerish, antisocialist groups. In 1990, Hoxha’s statute was toppled by
students in Tirana, the capital city of Albania.
Soviet Stalinism was the crucible within which the Lumaj
family – Catholic and, before Albania was throttled by Stalinist stooges, one of
the largest family groups in northern Albania – was constantly tested.
The orbit of Lumaj’s father, a strong-willed but cautious
anti-communist, was more powerful than that of the communist ruling
class in Albania. It was under his father’s influence that Lumaj and two of his
brothers decided to escape and strike a path to America. In such cases, there
are always casualties. Lumaj’s father and others in his family disappeared in
an Albanian concentration camp, and it seemed that the last remains of the once
proud and independent Lumaj clan had been decimated.
In so many ways, Lumaj’s love of America parallels that of
filmmaker Elia Kazan, an Anatolian Greek born in Constantinople who fled to
America and was able to impress the pain endured by his family upon a film,
highly autobiographical, titled “America, America.” One of the refugees says to
another that America, seen from the hungry hearts of immigrants searching for
liberty, is “an emotive idea” or, in Lumaj’s formulation, the prayers of his
father.
Crossing the border into the Socialist Republic of
Yugoslavia, Lumaj was sentenced to 30 days in jail for having illegally
crossed the Yugoslav border. Transported later to a refugee camp in Belgrade that
had been penetrated by CIA agents, Lumaj met John, who invited him to take a
meal at a restaurant when Lumaj was on work furlough. It was John who told him
that Lumaj’s family had been taken to a concentration camp in Albania soon
after his escape. Under his father’s
guiding star, he told John the endpoint of his journey would be America.
On the way back to the camp, he was apprehended by two Yugoslav
UDB agents and beaten so badly he ended up in the hospital. Later, at the
American Embassy in Belgrade, where Lumaj and his brothers were filling out immigration
forms, he once again encountered John, who was in charge of the refugee
screening process.
“As he came to the end of my application, he asked me only
one simple question. Why did I choose the United States three times in the section
where it asked me to rank my relocation choices? Why hadn’t I chosen a second
or third choice? I told him firmly that we had left Albania with the intent of
becoming Americans, and that we didn’t want to go anywhere else.
“John smiled, knowing the misery we had suffered thus far to
get to this point, and said simply, ‘Welcome to America.’”
Owing to his father’s prayers, Peter Lumaj began his process of assimilation
to the United States in the old country, a route traveled by many other
immigrants. A few years after having landed in New York, he became a lawyer,
and in 2014 he ran on the Republican ticket for Secretary of State in
Connecticut, losing by a slim margin.
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