The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi is the remarkable memoir of an Albanian girl, told in the first person starting when she was just seven years old. Ypi sees the world and her homeland through the perspective of her very complicated family.  Her grandmother, Nini, who lives with them, came from a family of inherited wealth who lost everything with changing Albanian governments.  Ypi’s father had Socialist leanings but was disillusioned under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Her mother was impatient with ideology and at odds with her father. She only comes into her own after the Communist government loses control in 1990, and she rises to prominence in the opposition Democratic Socialist party by the mid 1990’s.

Lea discovers that, from her earliest years, her schoolteachers have been spewing propaganda, and her parents (always arguing) and grandmother have been lying to her about their family biography, their life as suspect intellectuals and her grandfather’s torture and imprisonment on political grounds. Her family has spoken in code, referring to political prisons as University A or University K.  The child is torn between believing her government lackey teacher and subtle but conflicting signals picked up from her reticent but cynical family.

It is, above all, a coming-of-age tale that takes us from the end of Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist-style dictatorship through the difficulties of embarking on market-based liberalism, which clearly doesn’t hold all the answers. Throughout the memoir, always seen through Lea Ypi’s eyes and family experience, is the question of what it means to be free?  How much does the family into which we are born shape our values and our understanding of history?

The memoir plays off the philosophy of political scientist Francis Fukuyama and his concept that over time, governments undergo a natural evolution, gravitating toward liberal democracy. It reminds one of Martin Luther King’s line about the arc of history bending toward justice.  Sadly, as history unfolds in the memoir (which came out in 2021), that anticipated “end of history,” is not realized. It is far from certain that most if not all nations come to recognize the benefits of leaving behind the isms including authoritarianism. Clearly, as we view the United States today, such enlightened civil society and civil discourse are far from inevitable.

Ypi’s story avoids getting mired in these philosophical and theoretical abstractions. Through her family, we are left to ponder what compromises are necessary to survival, and which trade-offs are insupportable from a moral perspective?  How do we navigate between right and wrong, and are right and wrong absolutes?  It is a really good read, well worth your time and the several literary awards bestowed upon it.