In 1990, when I first heard about Albanian Catholic writers, I

felt a sense of déjà vu. The Berlin Wall had fallen, but for

many

of us who followed events in the former Communist states, it

was unclear how profound or permanent the damage to the cultures

of those countries would prove to be. Indeed at that time,

Albania, which lagged behind the rest of Eastern Europe in

gaining its freedom, was still oppressed by the one-party

dictatorship of Ramiz Alia, successor to the infamous Enver

Hoxha. Under the latter, Albania had become the only officially

atheist state in the world, and religious culture had been

rigorously and murderously suppressed. As late as 1972, a

Catholic priest, Fr. Shtjefën Kurti, was executed for baptizing a

child in Albania. The very concept of Albanian Catholic

intellectuals seemed inextricably linked to the worst excesses of

leftist totalitarianism.

My perception of an apparent historical echo

had its source in a research paper I

had written as a university

student on the Spanish dialects of the Sephardic Jews, known as

Judeo-Spanish and Ladino. I had learned, in scholarly

libraries, about a whole printed literature of novels, poetry, plays,

popular ballads, proverbs, religious works, and journalism

that had once been read and appreciated by hundreds of thousands

of Jews in the Balkans—in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, as

well as