“Lo the devil with seven scarlet cloaks”

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 that day he stepped on U.S. soil, my father has taken on a dual identity. The first was the family man who worked long hours as awaiter to support his family. The second 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 is still is to me know, is how could he have persisted when the odds looked like they were stacked up against him. Here was a literary man 4000 miles away from his home country, who, far all his talents in his native tongue, could not speak English. This last fact made it very hard for him to apply for teaching positions at the prestigious universities. 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 “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, and see his culture in a different light.
When it was time to leave Kosovo, it was 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 had just remembered something which caused him to make a painful groan. My mother was frightened that he might have been hurt by someone in the village, but the source of his dread was the “Mountain Wreath” that he had left on the top of his desk at home. Fearing for their safety but unwilling to part with that precious gift, he left his wife by a relative and drove back into the village to retrieve his book. Having escaped with his life and his book, my father and his wife finally left Kosovo.
That book, for all the wisdom it contains, meant as much as it did to my father because it had validated his hard work so that he and his family could prosper.

My father, the emigré (here shown at 30)