Twenty years ago, a young professor of literature and his wife left an uncertain life in Kosovo for a better one in America. That man was my father, and from the day he stepped on U.S. soil, my father has taken on a dual identity. One was the family man who worked long hours as a waiter to support his family. The other was the stubborn scholar, who felt in his heart an impulse to create. These two forces always balanced each other out, though that of the artist kept my father up late at night, typing away at his manuscript. What was remarkable to me then, as it still is to me now, is how could he have persisted when the odds looked like they were stacked up against him? Here was a literary man 4,000 miles away from his home country, who, for all his talents in his native tongue, could not speak English. This made it difficult for him to apply for teaching positions at the prestigious universities. Being the scholar that he was, he needed something, a match, to keep the fire in his heart alive.
That match was the “Mountain Wreath,” the Montenegrin epic composed by the Bishop-Prince P. P. Njegoš. Originally, this book was a gift that my mother gave my father on their one-month anniversary—half in love, half in jest. She knew that he had read the book in his youth, as many Yugoslavians were required to, and that he had hated it, but she still said to him, “This time you will forget that you hate it, and love it, because your wife gave it you as a gift.” With that odd logic born from love, it followed that my father actually started to like the book.
My parents left Kosovo at a particularly unsettling time, and stories about armies preparing to fight were not uncommon. On the day of their flight, as my parents were driving to the airport, having left a village that was nearing violence, my father remembered something which caused him to groan. My mother was afraid that he might have been hurt by someone in the village, but the source of his pain was the “Mountain Wreath,” which was still lying on the top of his desk at home. Fearing for their safety but unwilling to part with that precious gift, he left his wife in the care of a nearby relative and drove back into the village to retrieve his book. Having escaped with his book and his life, my father finally left Kosovo with his wife.
The “Mountain Wreath” —small, red, leather-bound—now stands at the corner of my father’s library. From the outside, it looks brand-new and unused; this is an illusion, however. Inside the book, there are underlines made with pencil, lightly pressed but clear; notes written here or there; page folds and tears—some are intentional, others bear witness to 1968 publishing. My father tells me that he loves this book because, as he writes alone in his room, he remembers the thoughtful gift that his wife gave him, and this brings him back to the early love that they both shared.
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