From The Peopling of New York City
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| Name:
| Alessandro Alempijevic
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| Location:
| Brooklyn, New York
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| Birth Date:
| February 25, 1989
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| Height:
| 6' 2"+? (not so sure)
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| Ethnicity:
| Italian and Albanian
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| Education :
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Brooklyn Tech (HS),
Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College
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| Major:
| Computer Science?
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| Interests:
| Programming, Tennis and many other things that I am not good at doing.
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How I Became a New Yorker
What does it mean to be a New Yorker? To me this just means that I happen to inhabit the wonderful city of New York. How can I really understand what it means to be a New Yorker if I never experienced what it is to be something other? I have lived here in New York my entire life. Therefore, the story of how it came to be that I am a New Yorker is not a story of mine but one of my parents. Both of them immigrated here as teenagers only a few years younger than I am today. Because of their age, moving to New York wasn’t exactly their choice either. The story then gets passed down once more to my grandparents. It was their lives that placed me where I am today.
My mother, Paula, was born in a small town in Sicily. Her parents were named Maria and Luciano. Luciano built the house they lived in and Maria kept it clean and cooked. Their lives were simple. They lived in a place where my mother would have to bring a basket of chicken eggs with her to pay the dentist when she got a tooth pulled. They decided to come to America in search of opportunities for their children: my mother, her sister, and her two brothers. When they moved here my grandfather found work wherever he could, were it laying bricks or fixing plumbing. They managed to scrape by and send their kids to school.
My father, Nicholas, has a somewhat more interesting family history than that of my mother’s family. His mother, Lula Mirakaj, led an amazing life, which eventually brought her to New York with her children. Her story starts with her father, Kola Mirakaj. Lula was born in 1925 in Albania. Her mother died 3 years later in 1928. Kola was working as a teacher but was begining to get involved in the country’s politics. Albania’s government was a monarchy at this time and the Mirakaj family was a prominent one amongst the clans of Albania. However, in 1939 Mussolini successfully invaded Albania. The king of Albania was exiled from the country and Albania’s parliament eventually voted to have Albania united with Italy. An autonomous Fascist government was set up in Albania. The government was set up from clan leaders and Kola became the minister of internal affairs as well as the leader of the Albanian Fascist Party.
Two years later when Lula turned 16 she was arranged to marry the prefect of police of their town, Shkodra. She had been in love with another man at the time and did not want to marry. In protest of this my grandmother threw herself off a balcony and broke her leg. This, however, did not get her out of her marriage. She had her first son, Victor with her new husband, Mark.
Towards the end of the war the Albanian government fell to the Albanian Communist Party, led by Enver Hoxha. The new government persecuted members of the old government as well as their families. Kola escaped Albania and went into Italy. Mark was imprisoned and Lula stayed with his family. It was reported by the government that Mark went insane in prison and committed suicide; however, my grandmother believed that this was a lie and that Mark was tortured to death. Many of her relatives were being put into internment camps and jails. One of her brothers was killed.
Lula did not want to end up in an internment camp or let anything bad happen to her son, Victor. So when her husband, Mark, died she took some gold coins that she had hidden from her family and searched for a guide to lead her through the mountains and out of Albania. She was successful in finding one and escaped to Yugoslavia with her son. She remained there in a refugee camp for two years. She then reunited with her father in Rome.
In Italy, Lula got a job as an interpreter for refugees like herself because she was able to speak Italian, Albanian, and Yugoslavian. Through her job she met who would be her next husband as a refugee. His last name was Alempijevic. He was Serbian but lived in Yugoslavia before coming to Italy. Once they were married they moved to France together. He was an architect and had hoped to find work there. They had a hard time in France. Her husband could only find work at a factory. She got pregnant with my father and her husband became an alcoholic. He began to beat her. He told her that her baby would not be born and he would hit her in the stomach in attempts to kill it. She was worried about her unborn child. Lula found her husbands gun and brought it to his work place so that she could threaten him with it. When she encountered him things did not go as she intended and she ended up accidentally shooting and killing him. This was two days before my father was born. She named him Nikola (Nicholas). She was put in jail for two years. She was found guilty of manslaughter and not murder because it was in defense of herself and her child.
Later on my grandmother met her third husband. They moved to Germany after being married. However, this marriage soon came to an end as well as she found out that he had another wife in Yugoslavia. When she learned of this she had their marriage annulled and returned home to her father with another two fatherless children. These were her daughters, Donika and Tina.
In the mid-60’s Kola Mirakaj moved to the United States with Victor. In 1968 he was found to have cancer and Lula came to the U.S. to stay with him. He died one year later and Lula returned home to her children and in 1973 she moved to New York with all of them.
Some years later, my parents both enrolled here at Brooklyn College. They met each other and eventually got married. My father worked as a substitute teacher and my mother as a physical education teacher. In 1989 I was born here in New York and that is the story of how I became a New Yorker.
