![](https://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/ypi_lea-012725-900.jpg)
The Great Leap Backward
One late August day in 1985, Lea Ypi climbed a tree in search of peace. Her parents, branded as “intellectuals” in Communist Albania thanks to their bourgeois family histories, were feuding with their closest friends. The object of their contention—like …