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Acclaimed Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has talked about being smothered by "the hell of communism" and how writing helped him survive one of the worst dictators in the old Eastern Bloc.

The veteran writer -- an eternal bridesmaid for a Nobel literature prize -- was awarded France's highest honour Monday.

Despite being branded a traitor by Albania's communist leaders when he defected to France in 1990, Kadare was accused by some of enjoying a privileged position under Enver Hoxha, who presided over Europe's most paranoid and isolated regime.

But the author of "Broken April" and "The General of the Dead Army" told AFP those years were "hell" -- a living nightmare from which he forged some of his greatest works.

"The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term. But literature transformed that into a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship," said the 87-year-old.

Several writers and artists were imprisoned and even executed under Hoxha's murderous rule. Kadare -- who came from the same small town and was made a member of parliament -- escaped prison but was targeted by the secret police.

He was sent into internal exile in 1975 after publishing a satirical poem called "The Red Pasha", a clear reference to the dictator.

In her memoirs, Hoxha's widow Nexhmije claimed the tyrant -- who fancied himself as a man of letters -- protected Kadare from other hardline Stalinists who wanted the head of the "bourgeois" writer.

His defenders say Kadare's genius was using allegory and metaphor to depict the horrors of what was going on around him in almost impossible circumstances.

- 'Always been true' -

"Writing under a dictatorship is very difficult, almost impossible, because it is impossible to write as you want to write," he told AFP.

"Which is why I am so grateful for literature, because it gives me the chance to overcome the impossible.

"I have always been true to my writing," he insisted. "It was the absolute goal of my life and it helped me get over all the difficulties. When art survives it triumphs," he said.

Kadare, who was made a grand officer of France's Legion of Honour by President Emmanuel Macron, drew a comparison with the late dissident Czech writer Milan Kundera, who also had to deny allegations he collaborated with the communists who banned his work.

"As Kundera said, 'Art never triumphs with its head bowed.'"

Kadare previously said that his fame both protected him and made him suspect.

Files from Hoxha's feared secret police the Sigurimi showed that he and his family were continually followed and persecuted.

Indeed recently uncovered papers quote Hoxha as describing the writer as a cursed "raven of doom" who brought him bad luck.

- Haunted by Hoxha -

That has not stopped some critics dismissing him as the "official dissident" the regime tolerated.

Yet several of Kadare's works written under Hoxha took aim at authoritarianism, often through the oblique lens of the Ottoman empire, which occupied Albania for five centuries, or classical allusions.

"The Palace of Dreams", published four years before the dictator's death in 1985, was banned as a veiled attack on the Politburo but not before it had become a bestseller.

Kadare said writers "must serve freedom". "The truth is not in my acts but in my books, which are a real literary testament," he told AFP in 2019.

Hoxha's looming presence haunts several of the writer's works, mostly notoriously "The Successor" which delved into the murky death of the dictator's closest ally, Mehmet Shehu, who was later denounced as a "foreign agent".

"Literature is my great and only love," Kadare told AFP in his Tirana apartment. "It has given sense to my life, given me courage to resist, happiness and the hope to overcome everything."

And he said he has never lost his appetite for storytelling.

"I write all the time. I write down ideas, little stories... Every time something is published it is like being born again, and it has always been like that for me.

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Writing triumphed over 'hell of communism', says Albania's Kadare - Yahoo News

THE first English language translation of Marx and Engelss Manifesto of the Communist Party opened with the following: A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism. All the powers of the Past have joined in a holy crusade to lay this ghost to rest the Pope and the Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police agents.

So we see that anti-communism has a long and sordid history. Indeed, Yanis Varoufakiss preface to a recent edition of the Communist Manifesto is an anti-communist and inaccurate diatribe, with phrases like card-carrying Stalinists and now defunct Communist regimes. He also claimed that the Communist Manifesto was commissioned by English revolutionaries which is blatantly untrue.

By contrast, AJP Taylors introduction to the 1967 Penguin edition states: Anti-communism causes more trouble in the world than ever communism does or did.

Anti-communism is a terrible form of bigotry with tragic consequences for humankind and it needs to be recognised as such. Other forms of bigotry like racism, sexism, and homophobia really start their transition from respectable, normal, acceptable and even policy, to being clearly understood to be out of order when the victims make a clear challenge. So far, we in Britain have not really called out home-grown anti-communism.

Addressing a World Marxist Review symposium in the late 1980s, the late Bert Ramelson, legendary former industrial organiser of the Communist Party said this: Anti-communism is often referred to as a subjective phenomenon but it is an objective factor in todays world. Anti-communist hysteria has been with us for four generations and it would be unrealistic to believe that anti-communism in the West has not struck deep roots in politics, ideology and consciousness.

Anti-communism is also anti-humanity, for it impedes the development or progress of society to its full potential and keeps us in a dystopian rat race. The last sentence of Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto reads: In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Anti-communism blocks our goal of achieving what John Lennon sings about in his classic track Imagine.

We call it out in other countries but not here, it seems. We demonstrated outside the Ukranian embassy in 2014 when that regime had banned the Communist Party. We need to do more of that sort of thing.

New members of Nato and the EU feel no shame in outlawing communist symbols, the most recent being Finland, that exemplar of social democracy. Anti-communist legislation is still on the statute books of a number of states in the US; Texas forbids members of the CPUSA from standing in elections to its local and state legislatures.

It was only in 1991 that Communist Party members were no longer denied jobs in Britains Civil Service departments.

In this country, the first place to tackle anti-communism is the labour movement. Officialdom within the Labour Party and trade unions, with notable exceptions, carried on a crusade against the Communist Party from its formation.

The Communist Party History Group, in the Appendix to Noreen Branson and Bill Moores July 1990 pamphlet Labour-Communist Relations 1920-1951, listed 71 organisations on the proscribed list, of which only two were fascist the rest were the sort that Communist Party members were or might be part of.

In 1933, Labour proscribed the European Anti-fascist Congress and in 1934 the Relief Committee for Victims of German and Austrian Fascism and in 1941 it proscribed the Anti-Fascist Relief Committee and in 1950 the League for Democracy in Greece. Aside from banning organisations which opposed fascism, it also banned 41 peace and solidarity organisations, although CND was too big to ban.

The post-war Labour government led by Clement Attlee was involved in fighting communism in Greece and Malaya, and during the McCarthy era, he wrote in the US quarterly review Foreign Affairs: We are pardonably annoyed at being instructed by a beginner like McCarthy. The British Labour Party has had nearly 40 years of fighting communism in Britain.

In the Chicago Daily Tribune he wrote, The British Labour Party and I myself have been vigorously opposing the Communist Party in this country ever since its formation long before Senator McCarthy was ever heard of.

Instead of being ashamed of his anti-communism, he proclaimed it. This was despite British communists having held up a banner saying British Battalion Major Attlee Company International Brigade. He dishonoured those who had honoured him.

Let us make clear our rejection of and contempt for anti-communism wherever it rears its ugly head.

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Opinion Showing anti-communism the red card - Morning Star Online

Interest in revolutionary politics is on the rise, with up to 20% of young people describing communism as their ideal economic system.

When the Minnesota Daily published a hit piece, we Students for Socialist Revolution were shocked to find no trace of our political ideas in it. Instead, the article was full of lies backed up by social media and blog posts.

Instead of a story on why communism is surging in popularity with college students, the Daily chose to publish a piece that would not look out of place at TMZ or some other gossip rag.

One of the main criticisms levied against the International Marxist Tendency, our parent organization, was that it charges money.

The fraternities and sororities on campus charge students thousands of dollars a semester to affiliate. Out-of-state tuition at the University of Minnesota is $33,818 a year. The University of Minnesota Foundation has an endowment of $3.3 billion. How that money is distributed is unclear. Meanwhile, students with loans after a four-year degree from the University have an average student debt balance of over $25,000.

At least in our student group, unlike everywhere else under capitalism, we all vote how things are run.

Who does it really serve to attack a left-wing student organization?

The Daily has joined the right-wingers in saying our student group should not be allowed to operate on campus.

This is a political attack on communist students.

The Daily took at face-value the accusations from students, two of whom went on record, that the International Marxist Tendency supports rapists. It references an incident of abuse that was investigated by the Canadian section, over a year ago. The abuser was expelled within eight days of the complaint.

A public statement by the Canadian chapter was published at the time, responding in full to these allegations and detailing the concrete steps taken. While the Daily linked this statement in the original online version of the column, none of its contents were directly quoted in the opinion column itself. Thus, important context was de facto left out, and a one-sided picture was presented.

The International Marxist Tendency takes cases of abuse very seriously. Can the same be said of the University or any other capitalist institution?

In 2017 fewer than half of sexual assault cases were investigated by Minnesota colleges and universities. In 2016, the University paid off a settlement of $500,000 to protect the football team from allegations of rape.

Students for Socialist Revolution fights against all forms of oppression including transphobia, for an end to sexual harassment and the liberation of all of humanity. No one should be able to bribe their way into a sexual act or get out of the consequences of being found out by handing their victims a wad of cash or a promotion.

Millions of youth in the U.S. are realizing there are no small solutions to these big problems and that humanity has the resources, science and technology to provide a dignified existence to every human on this planet. A better world is possible and we must organize to make it a reality. Vandalized posters will not stop us from working towards this goal.

The building of a mass communist party is necessary. We invite all students who feel the same to get in touch with us.

Cal Zeman is a member of Students for Socialist Revolution and submitted the letter on behalf of SSR.

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Letter to the Editor: The Minnesota Daily is against communists ... - Minnesota Daily

FRANKFORT, Ky. -- Kentucky saw growing demands for change in the late 1960s civil rights protests, environmental protests, the anti-war movement, poor people organizing against their own exploitation and the states politicians thought they knew whom to blame.

It was the communists, they said.

This state has become a headquarters for subversion, state Rep. Theron Kessinger, R-Beaver Dam, said during a Kentucky House floor debate in the 1968 legislative session.

We dont realize it, but communists are working all around us, said state Rep. Marge Cruse, R-Louisville.

These hippies and beatniks and assorted reds and pinkos are right in our midst, added state Rep. I.C. James, D-Harrodsburg.

But lawmakers had a plan.

Working with newly elected Republican Gov. Louie Nunn, they established a bipartisan, 10-member legislative panel called the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee.

KUAC pronounced quack by critics was charged with rooting out subversive groups and persons (who), under color of protection afforded by the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution, seek to destroy us and the ideals for which we fought to preserve and to subject us to the domination of foreign powers and ideologies.

KUAC would hunt for Reds in the Bluegrass State.

It focused on Louisville civil rights activists, blaming them for riots in the city in May 1968, and anti-poverty workers who had come to help Eastern Kentucky, several of whom were jailed for sedition because of suspicious books the Pike County sheriff found in their homes.

Politically, both groups were considered to be troublemakers by the leaders in their communities. KUAC would be a way of neutralizing them.

Best wishes to you all, because Im kinda on your side, Court of Appeals Chief Justice Morris Montgomery assured KUAC members as he swore them in June 13, 1968.

Echoes of KUAC still resonate a half-century later in Kentucky whenever politicians rail against groups that express new and different ideas, historians say.

You can swap out the fears of communism in the 60s with fears of political correctness in the 90s with fears of wokeness right now, said Aaron Purcell, historian and director of special collections at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

During times of moral panic, people make quick assumptions and they divide into groups and turn against each other or they are turned against each other, Purcell said.

You get groups like KUAC that look for a boogeyman and harass people who are considered to be threats only because theyre trying to change things.

Purcell wrote about KUAC in 2019 for The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society.

It fell into the typical political trap of pointing fingers rather than looking in the mirror and saying, Hey, we have these two groups, inner-city, poor Black people and mountain, poor white people, and here are the difficult living conditions theyre facing, and here is why they are upset, he said.

This wasnt meant to be a fact-finding mission to learn about conditions on the ground. It was meant to stop people from organizing themselves and being politically active.

Early in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Congress and many states created special legislative committees to uncover communists in public life while also attacking people who either held dissenting views or who were in minorities.

The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, for example, targeted suspected gay educators in the states schools and universities after it failed to find a communist link to the NAACP. The committee ruined the careers of scores of teachers.

The most famous example was the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin.

McCarthy claimed to have here in my hand a list of depending on where he was speaking between 57 and 205 communists employed by the State Department. McCarthyism became synonymous with leveling unfair allegations against people.

Kentucky legislators wanted in on this. But they were thwarted through most of the 1960s by two Democratic governors, Bert Combs and Edward Ned Breathitt, who had no interest in communist-baiting, said Ron Eller, a retired University of Kentucky historian.

Then, in 1967, voters elected Nunn, a staunch conservative. Nunn took a dim view of the street protests by young people demanding reforms in society, Eller said.

In a June 1968 speech at Eastern Kentucky University, Nunn warned an assembly of youths gathered for Bluegrass Boys State that a smog of moral cancer plagued the nation. It must be eliminated by a return to the principles of God and country, the governor said.

By the late 1960s, youre seeing pushback to civil rights and the other movements by the white middle-class, Eller said. A lot of older people in particular are more conservative, and they believe that weve been going too far. Any activist at this point is likely to be accused by someone of being a communist.

Un-American activities in Kentucky

Nunn encouraged the 1968 General Assembly to create KUAC. It was assigned to meet during the two-year interim (this was long before annual legislative sessions) and report its findings in 1970.

The governor even selected the panels members and provided its $50,000 budget from his own office so it wouldnt have to compete for funding with other legislative committees.

There was a smattering of opposition.

Several civil liberties and civil rights groups united under the banner Kentuckians against KUAC. They sued in federal court to block the committee as a violation of the constitutional rights to free speech and free association. Their lawsuits were dismissed. Courts said KUAC had yet to call any witnesses, so there was no evidence that anyone was going to be unfairly harassed.

Nunn defended KUAC in a 1993 oral history interview. No harm could come from poking around, he said.

They was just trying to find anyone that was bein disloyal to the country. It wasnt a witch hunt, Nunn said.

Why, hell, just like the wind blowing through the trees it makes some noise today. And tomorrow, theres no wind, he said. So, let it blow through. If rotten limbs fall out, well, thats fine. If there arent any rotten limbs, then nothing gonna fall out.

You cant vote against this

The committees original targets were supposed to be more balanced.

Nearly 70 index cards a sedition suspect file prepared by KUAC staff held the names of Kentuckians on the political right and left, from members of the American Nazi Party, White Citizens Council and Ku Klux Klan to the NAACP, Campus Committee on Human Rights and Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People, which fought the environmentally destructive practice of strip-mining the mountains for coal.

In the end, however, KUAC did not act on this file. Lawmakers only looked to the left.

In particular, the young War on Poverty volunteers who descended on Appalachia in the 1960s were easy pickings because they seemed so strange, with shaggy hair, hippie clothing, weird books and vegetarian diets, Nunn said in his oral history.

They came in from a different lifestyle, the governor said. The things they said didnt fit into the local situation. What was really a mediocre socialist could end up being a full-fledged communist within two weeks, depending on who was saying what about them.

State Sen. Scott Miller Jr., R-Louisville, was a lawyer who privately acknowledged years later that he never felt comfortable having an un-American activities committee in Frankfort. But he didnt dare oppose it, Miller said in a 2006 oral history interview.

I remember it went buzzing through the House and people said, Look, you cant vote against this. Youre voting against the flag, motherhood and the Star-Spangled Banner you know, everything, said Miller, who served as KUACs chairman.

We didnt find any communists, Miller added. Found a few nuts, but no communists.

West End riots in Louisville

KUAC held its first hearings in the Kentucky Senate chamber in September 1968.

Lawmakers investigated fiery riots that took place over four days in May in Louisvilles West End neighborhoods. Violence left two Black teenagers shot to death, by a store owner and a police officer; 474 people arrested; and hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage.

We intend to inquire into the legitimate grievances of the people of Louisville as well as into any groups which may have sought to exploit these grievances, KUAC chairman Miller announced as the hearings opened.

There were plenty of grievances.

On the first night of the riots, several Black community leaders went on WAVE-TV to urge everyone off the streets. They also sympathized with the communitys rage.

Louisville remained openly racist, they said. Housing was segregated and, for Black families, often was slums. Many white-owned businesses neither hired Black people nor wanted to serve them. Police treated Black residents with suspicion and hostility, they said.

On May 8, a white police officer roughed up a Black real estate broker and a Black school teacher during a wrongful arrest. That was the last straw, the community leaders said. The officer was suspended, but a civil service board soon recommended that he be reinstated.

But KUAC never pursued the reasons why people were angry.

Instead, its witness list was dominated by police officers and city officials. They blamed the riots on several Black men who spoke at a protest rally organized May 27 by the Black Unity League of Kentucky, a civil rights group, in response to the wrongful arrests.

The disorders were organized and were not a spur-of-the-moment thing, testified police Capt. John Hampton.

The Black Six prosecution

KUAC learned that a recent visitor from Washington, D.C., James Cortez of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, promised to deliver his friend, Black Panther Party leader Stokely Carmichael, as a featured speaker for the Louisville rally.

Carmichael never arrived. There is no evidence he even knew about the rally.

Throughout the evening of May 27, Cortez falsely claimed Carmichaels plane was circling Louisville, prevented from landing at the airport by frightened white city leaders. That aggravated tensions in the crowd.

Cortez went on to say that there should be more unity and that the Jews and the honkies should be made to get out of this end of town. They are selling low-grade meat and taking money to the East End and spending it. They are not putting it back into the neighborhood, police Detective Kenneth Newcomb told KUAC.

As the rally broke up, a police car drove into the intersection. Bottles and rocks rained down from nearby roofs, sparking the days of upheaval that followed.

Police officials told KUAC about a larger plan for chaos among activists tied to the rally. Those activists Cortez, four other men and one woman would be dubbed the Black Six, charged with conspiring to start the riots and also with plotting to use dynamite to blow up oil refineries in the West End.

The Black Six prosecution eventually fizzled.

No proof of a conspiracy behind the riots was produced at trial; no dynamite was found. The dynamite part of the case rested on bizarrely self-incriminating statements that Cortez alone allegedly made to police, statements that were not recorded and that Cortez later denied in court.

However, at the KUAC hearings, lawmakers were assured that police had substantial evidence to prove Cortez and the others were radical leftists who conspired to cause destruction.

Among the recommendations made to KUAC by Louisville officials were allowing the death penalty for anyone committing arson during a riot and providing legal immunity for police officers who kill someone while trying to break up a riot.

In a strange twist, evidence came out during the Black Six prosecution showing that Cortez at the center of the controversy secretly worked for the FBI, not the communists.

The bureau planted hundreds of spies and provocateurs in civil rights organizations during this era as part of its counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO.

During questioning by Louisville police, Cortez said he was assigned by his handler, an FBI agent named Glover, to infiltrate Black Power groups, befriend Stokely Carmichael and report on subversive activities.

In exchange, the FBI gave him $75 a week and an apartment.

Skeptical about this claim, police Detective Melver Tinsley called the FBI in Washington. An FBI agent named John Glover confirmed that Cortez was indeed a paid informant, although he denied that Cortez was on assignment with the bureau while in Louisville.

In his 1979 autobiography, retired FBI assistant director William Sullivan acknowledged that the bureau had an informant in the Black Power community who turned up in Louisville. The FBI informant was part of a group that started a riot in which two men were killed, Sullivan wrote. It was a very sticky situation.

The Appalachian Volunteers

KUAC held its second hearings at the Pike County courthouse in Pikeville in October and December 1968.

The committee targeted the youthful War on Poverty groups working in the mountains, particularly the federally funded Appalachian Volunteers.

Those groups sometimes were supported by Pikeville College, whose liberal new president, 37-year-old Thomas Johns, urged students to get off campus and immerse themselves in Eastern Kentuckys many regional needs. Johns wife even taught a sewing class for the AVs, as they were known.

The AVs started in the mid-1960s by restoring old schoolhouses and planning recreation activities for children.

They became more controversial over the next couple of years as they moved into local politics.

The AVs helped a Pike County man, Jink Ray, prevent a coal company from strip-mining his farm. They assisted people in signing up for welfare benefits. And they organized poor families to demand cheaper rates on a proposed drinking water system in the Marrowbone community that was the Pike County judge-executives pet project.

By the time KUAC organized, courthouse bosses were urging Nunn to evict those long-haired, bearded, hippie-looking people. Allegations of communism put them on the committees radar.

Complaints that communists are working among the poverty program people have been circulating in Pikeville for some time, Pike Commonwealths Attorney Thomas Ratliff told reporters.

Ratliff was a wealthy coal operator and an ambitious Republican politician who unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor on the 1967 GOP ticket with Nunn.

Ratliff prosecuted three anti-poverty workers for sedition in 1967 after the sheriff raided their homes and claimed to find suspicious books and papers proving they plotted to overthrow the government of Pike County. Federal judges swiftly tossed those cases out of court, finding the states sedition law to be unconstitutional.

At the KUAC hearings, Pike County officials nonetheless rehashed the sedition allegations. Local residents said they resented the AVs, who looked different.

The young outsiders seemed like atheists and communists, meeting in their Marrowbone Folk School for purposes that couldnt possibly be any good, witnesses said.

When one of the anti-poverty workers sang the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome for children at a program, an angry local man punched the worker in the mouth, Pike County magistrate Foster Bentley told lawmakers.

I think about the second verse, he lowered the boom on him, Bentley said.

We dont need nobody from California or New York or northern states come in and say you shall do this, because he dont know anything about the way we live. People just dont digest the way some of them are dressed, the way they wear their hair long they dont digest that. The mountain folks dont go for it, he said.

Pike County native Edith Easterling was one of the few contrary voices at the hearings. Easterling joined the AVs and allowed them to build their Folk School a community center on her land.

The AVs showed concern for the poor people in Marrowbone, she told KUAC. Thats more than any politician ever did, she said, except for on election days, when they drove out from the county seat of Pikeville to buy votes from her neighbors.

We dont have anything to hide, Easterling testified. Im not ashamed of nothing that they have done, and I am thankful that I am one of them.

Something going on up there

KUAC solicited criticism of Pikeville College, a private school affiliated with the Presbyterian Church.

Its president, Johns, was accused not only of supporting the AVs and sending students their way but also of letting his faculty question the morality of the Vietnam War. That raised hackles around patriotic Pike County, where many young men were in uniform.

An English professor at Pikeville College acknowledged to the committee that he made a selection of anti-war books and magazines available to interested students. A visiting Quaker, a pacifist religious order, also spoke to students about Vietnam at a meeting one evening at the professors Pikeville home, lawmakers learned.

It didnt take long for this relatively mild behavior to fuel wild rumors.

The people up in Pikeville said, You know, theres something going on up here, KUAC chairman Miller recalled years later in his oral history interview. They said, Up there at Pikeville College, theres a bunch of kids running around naked!

Rather than apologize to lawmakers, Johns politely but firmly defended the system of liberty and justice that this country stands for in his appearance before the committee.

Discrediting the Appalachian Volunteers isnt the answer, the educator testified to KUAC.

The people of Pikeville take whatever is said by this hearing as the gospel, and they believe it. As a result, we have gone through a great deal of agony, and it distresses me no end.

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Long before the Kentucky legislature waged war on 'woke,' it ... - The Hastings Tribune

Kidds pieces have been a double illumination. Their intimate domestic lanterns shed light on the dark side of the moon and, exotic and informational interest aside, glow in their own skins, as art. They are simple, graceful, comic, mournful miniatures of an ominous catastrophe, the unprecedently swift death of a uniquely ancient civilization. John Updike

Kidd paints indelible sketches of an aspect of Chinese life gone forever. A finely wrought account. Booklist

For Americans who travel to Beijing or who are interested in the city as it was before the revolution, this book will give a new dimension to their understanding and enjoyment. New York Times

David Kidd (19271996) originally came from Kentucky, studied Chinese at the University of Michigan in 1946, and went to Yenching University on an exchange to study Chinese poetry and teach English. He spent some time living in a traditional courtyard with his Chinese wife. In 1950, Kidd and his wife left for the United States. She pursued a career as a physicist in California and he immersed himself in Chinese art circles in New York.

He taught at the Asia Institute until 1956, when he moved to Japan. There he taught at Kobe and Osaka universities and began collecting Chinese and Japanese art and antiques. He divorced his first wife and settled down in Kyoto with Yasuyoshi Morimoto. Kidd founded the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts. His account of the last days of the ancient Chinese regime was published in 1960 as All the Emperors Horses and was reissued in 1988 as Peking Story. He died in Honolulu in 1996.

For two years before and after the 1949 revolution, David Kidd lived in Beijing. He was married to Aimee Yu, the daughter of an aristocratic Chinese family, and was living in some comfort and seclusion on a hutong alley. With Yu, he came to see one of the last traditional families of Beijing in situ. Peking Story was serialized by the New Yorker in 1955, first published as a book in 1988, and then reprinted in the early 2000s as a New York Review of Books classic.

I used to hope that some bright young scholar on a research grant would write about us and our Chinese friends before it was too late and we were all dead and gone, folding into the darkness the wonder that had been our lives. Ultimately the task fell to me.

Late January of 1949, Peking surrendered gracefully to the ever victorious Communist Army, and one day soon after, my fiance a Chinese girl telephoned me to say that her father, who had been ill for a long while, was dying. We must marry immediately, Aimee said, or face the prospect of waiting out at least a year of mourning, as Chinese custom demanded. It seemed unfeeling to hold a wedding at such a time, and there was no way of guessing what the Communist authorities would say to a marriage between the daughter of a bureaucratic-capitalist Chinese and an American teacher, but the future was so uncertain that we decided we must go ahead. Aimees family, when consulted, agreed. However, since we could not be sure we were not bringing some sort of trouble on them, we planned to keep the marriage a secret, at least for a while.

Peking was a great walled and moated medieval city through which pulsated a life in what was considered the worlds largest empire. Within its walls lay the Forbidden City, the center from which imperial power reached out to all of China, and from there, the world.

Aunt Chin often spoke cryptically, alluding to some old Chinese saying or myth, but she was truly a wise person. As they saw their friends and neighbors degraded by the reform of the New China, as the only life they had known crumbled and blew away like dust, as the Yu family had to relocate from the home that had been theirs for four centuries, as Aunt Chin faced being homeless but would eventually find shelter in a temple, she would postulate: Houses and people and tables and chairs move and change of themselves, following destinies that cannot be altered. When things change into other things or lose themselves or destroy themselves, there is nothing we can do but let them go.

Kidds Peking Story is one of the best accounts we have of the crucial interregnum period between the end of the Chinese Civil War and the consolidation of Communist rule. Revolutionary consolidation is not instantaneous, it doesnt happen overnight. It takes a while. This was true of the Bolshevik Revolution the NEP, War Communism, etc. So too it took the Chinese communists some time to consolidate their revolution, even in their new capital of Beijing. So we see Kidd and his wifes family still living a largely traditional life in terms of their routines, tastes, clothing, and style. Yet the authoritarianism that would become the leitmotif of the Peoples Republic of China is creeping into their lives. Radios seized, restrictions on foreign nationals, spy mania, local cadres nosing their way into peoples lives. So we have the contrast of the sprawling hutong courtyard, visits to ancestral temples, moonlit picnics, servants, opulent ceremonies, lavish entertainments, and cherished antique heirlooms and the new communist regime.

But perhaps what most stays with the reader is the cast of characters Kidd encounters a cast at a time of change and whose fortunes will be starkly different: The disheveled Reverend Feng, who performed his wedding ceremony in unintelligible chants, whose beliefs are now highly problematic; the familys once-trusted cook who turns into a street beggar after being sued in court; a Mongolian prince dressed as a Mongolian princess; Kidds in-laws, including Aunt Chin, who traces her Manchu roots to an empress of China.

Despite his intense attraction to the aesthetic of old Peking, Kidd was not wholly unsympathetic to the revolution and its broad aims of bettering the lot of the ordinary citizen. But the final portion of the memoir recalls when Kidd returned to Beijing in 1981: the city was unrecognizable, and the living conditions of the remaining Yu family were depressing.

Kidd could have made his book far darker, more morose. Yet he tries to keep a positive attitude, often satirical, to look at the cohesion of the Yu family, held together by their former status and traditions even when brought low by the communist revolution. However, even the most ardent supporter of the revolution would perhaps find a tinge of sadness at the passing of so many rituals and observances, a loss of Chinas collective memory through fear. Kidds book can be accused of nostalgia for a time when many people in China lived awful lives of desperate and inveterate poverty, but there were bright spots weddings, parties, celebrations and he recalls these, too, in minute detail.

Barely 30 years after Kidd left China, a young American arrived to head inland to an uncertain posting. The country had changed beyond belief in many ways a new name, new leaders, periods of turmoil and chaos not so far behind it, an era of supposed advancement and new brighter horizons ahead. And so, a book about learning from China by another Westerner, this time in the 1980s, in the hinterlands

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All the traditions lost after the Communists entered Beijing The China Project - The China Project