The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo by Paula Huntley is an emotional and breathtaking memoir because it gives Huntley a chance to share her experiences in Kosovo with the rest of the world.
The spring of 1999 was one of the most unforgettable periods in Kosovo's history, as people from all around the world watched the NATO bombings and the ethnic Albanians—more than 850,000 of them—trying to leave Kosovo in order to immigrate to other countries. The immigrants carried horrific stories of Serbian inhumanity.
A year after all this, Huntley's husband, a professor of law from California, planned to go to Kosovo to help build a modern legal system. Even though she protested at first, Huntley ultimately chose to follow her husband to Kosovo.
“Anywhere but Kosovo,” she writes.
It was a hard decision for her to make. There was no reason for her to leave her beautiful and peaceful life in California and live for almost a year in a country that had seen great violence and hatred.
“What in God's name are we doing?” Huntley writes in the beginning of the book.
The book is a kind of journal in which Huntley describes her experience from the first moments when the plane lands in Kosovo till the end when with great sadness and tears in her eyes she has to say goodbye to her beloved students.
Kosovo was a big change for her, far from her beautiful little house on the cliff over the ocean.
“I feel filthy,” she writes. “The air is invisible, dust and soot … the acrid smell of garbage burning, the stench of rotting food littering streets and sidewalks.”
Kosovo needed help and she knew it; she wanted to offer something to the helpless people.
Soon Huntley volunteers to teach English in a private school in Prishtina. She does more than she is required. As she sees her student's unusual interest to learn, she becomes eager to teach them English.
She organizes an extracurricular group of students known as the Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo. As they read The Old Man and the Sea, they find many similarities between their lives and the life of the old man in the story.
Huntley's relationship with her students grows closer every day. She forms an unusual bond with them as they try to heal the scars left from the plagues of the war so they can begin a new life.
Huntley's origin affected the way her students saw her. She was American and was seen by them as a person that could make their dreams come true. “America is our dream,” explains one of her students.
For the students, America is the Promised Land, a country of technology, power and opportunity. They dream of it as the place they will go to make their lives better.
“I see that the students don't want to think of America as imperfect,” she writes.
The Kosovars do not trust Europe as much as they trust America. They believe that America will always be there for them.
“I am very much afraid that our interest is fickle,” Huntley writes. “After all, we are famous for our short attention span.”
This book contains a mixture of emotions. There are many funny moments where the students and Huntley try to break the cultural and language barriers. One of the funniest scenes is when Huntley reads in the menu “chicken buttocks on screwers.”
On the other hand, as the students open their hearts and describe the horrors they lived, the stories are heart-wrenching. They remember when they had to flee as the Serbs burned their homes and killed their family members.
Jehona, one of Huntely's students, describes with tears her shocking experiences as her family tried to escape with their lives.
“They put families on buses, but would close the doors separating some family members from others” Jehona said. “We tied our hands together so we couldn't be separated.”
Huntley makes the reader think that there are many events around the world that are far from our awareness. Most of all this book lets everyone recognize there are many things we take for granted what for others are unreachable dreams.
“It is also my hope that more of us Americans will become involved with the rest of the world” Huntley wrote in her Web site. “We need to learn about other people, learn what they think of us, try to understand, even if we don't agree with their points of view.”