Page 15 - AACL 25th anniversary

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MYSLIM KUKA was born in 1937 and raised in a wealthy family in Durres, Albania. Myslim became a
sergeant in the army of Communist dictator Enver Hoxha. In 1959, at the age of 22, he and a fellow officer decided to escape the country. They fled into Macedonia, where they were jailed for a month. Freed, they made it to Serbia, hiding during the day, and walking at night, and then escaped to Austria. Myslim started working in Vienna, where he met and married his wife, Gertrude, an Austrian citizen. Four years later, in 1964, they immigrated to New York. Just one day after arriving in Manhattan, Myslim got a job making parts for an elevator company. In 1966, he and Gertrude moved to Beacon, New York, where he became a cabinet maker and then started a successful construction company, Myslim Kuka Construction. In Beacon, Myslim and Gertrude raised two daughters, Aisha and Manuela, and one son, Sami, who is now an investment banker in Orlando, Florida. Because Myslim had escaped Albania, his family was stripped of their land and reduced to subsistence farming. After the Communist government fell in Albania in 1991, Myslim returned to Durres to build homes for the families of his two brothers and sister. He also built two hotels as investments, which he leases out to others to manage. Myslim is one of the twelve Albanian Americans who formed the first Board of the Albanian American Civic League in 1989.
FAIK LITA was born in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1960. After finishing teachers college, Faik worked as a math
teacher for two years, before immigrating to the United States in 1984. Shortly after arriving in New York, Faik resumed his college education. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s degree in political science at Brooklyn College. In order to support his family, he began work at Dannon Yogurt Company, a business that he is still deeply and successfully involved in to this day. In 1990, he married his wife, Liliana, the daughter of Beqir Marku, a member of the Board of the Albanian American Civic League who passed away in 2010. Faik has been a Board member for the past twenty years. He and Liliana have three daughters and one son: Siana, who graduated with a degree in anthropology in 2015 at William Paterson University and is about to enter law school; Arlinda, who is majoring in environmental science at William Paterson University; Bionda, who is exploring colleges, and Genc who will attend Rutgers University to study math in the fall of 2015. Faik has two brothers and a sister in Macedonia.
GAZMEND LITA was born in Kalaja Dodes, Albania in 1970, and escaped to the United States in 1990
with his brother, Bedri, because his family was among the “politically persecuted” for opposing the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha. In 1945, shortly after Hoxha came to power, the regime murdered eighteen of the extended Lita family and sent the others to prison camps. With Bedri on the East Coast, Gazmend worked very hard to achieve the American dream by opening restaurants and construction companies. Gazmend became the head chef for the Hilton Hotel in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and went on to own a number of restaurants. Today he is the owner of the highly-rated Le Jardin, a restaurant overlooking the Hudson River, in Edgewater, New Jersey, which he opened in 2001. Gazmend has been a strong supporter of the Albanian American Civic League, joining the Board of Directors during the 1999 war in Kosova.
In 2007, he “gave back” to his homeland by purchasing a chromium mine in Albania, which employs sixty people. He and his wife, Shpresa, have two sons, Qamil and Leon, and a daughter, Leonora.
LUAN MAZREKU was born in Prizren and raised in Suhareka, Kosova. In March 1999, he and his family escaped the Serbian genocidal war against Kosovar Albanians by fleeing to Albania, where they lived in a refugee camp in Tirana. Following the end
of the war and upon returning to Kosova, his father, Bajram Mazreku, was kidnapped and murdered. Bajram had worked as a legal secretary for the local healthcare center in Suhareka, which served patients of both Albanian and Serb ethnicity. Although suspects are known to the justice institutions, to this day, Bajram Mazreku’s murder, like many political murders in post-war Kosova, remains unresolved. In 2002, Luan came to the United States as a high school exchange student. He went on to earn a Bachelor's degree in International Political Studies from Drury University in 2007 and then a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Missouri State University in 2009. He currently works as a financial analyst with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Kansas. His wife, Elizabeth, also works for HUD as a grants management specialist. Since 2006, Luan has made important contributions to the Albanian American Civic League as a translator, political analyst, and researcher.
88 Saluting Albanian Religious Tolerance in an Age of Intolerance 15