The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo is the journal that Paula Huntley kept when she and her husband moved from San Francisco to Prishtina, Kosovo in 2000, right after much of the conflict ended in Kosovo. Paula’s husband was going to work on the legal system and bring it up to par. Paula wanted to find a place for herself while she was there and she ended up teaching English as a Second Language.
Paula’s class consisted of mainly Kosovo Albanians and throughout her course, as she taught the English language, they taught her about their experiences during the war and the resilience that they showed. Her job teaching serves as an anchor for her days in Kosovo and gives her a purpose and a sense of belonging. It is quickly apparent how it grows to be much more than that as she gets close to the students in her class.
She develops an extracurricular reading club to read Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea. She had decided that Hemingway’s short, concise writing style would make it a good choice for her book club. Through this book she also was able to see how closely the struggle, hope and perseverance of the old man mirrored many of her students experiences.
I enjoyed this book and how she included so many personal touches and stories of her student’s lives. The journal style that it was written in was perfect to help the reader go through the journey with the author and bring the emotions of the students closer to the reader. It was clear that Paula Huntley and her students made lasting impressions on one another.
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