Albert T. Belay (born May 24, 1925) is a Gottschee German cultural activist in New York City.[1]
Belay was born in Livold (German: Lienfeld), Slovenia.[1][2] He left the Gottschee region as a teenager, becoming a displaced person in Austria after the Second World War,[3] and then emigrated to the United States in 1951, where he worked as a civil engineer.[2][4] He married a fellow Gottschee refugee, Therese Erker, in 1953.[2] Belay served as the president of the 1960 Gottscheer Volksfest in New York[4] and headed the cultural committee of the Gottscheer Relief Association for many years.[4] He is also the chairman of the Gottschee German Men's Choir in New York.[2][5][6]
Belay authored the cookbook Hoimischai Khöscht (Home-Style Fare), containing 155 traditional Gottschee German recipes,[2][7] and narrated the five-part CD series Eine Reise durch Gottschee 1936 (A Journey through Gottschee, 1936).[8] His son, the Late Roland Belay 1955 - 2020, was a member of the board of Gottscheer Central Holding, which runs Gottscheer Hall in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens, New York City.[9]
Bibliography
Albert Belay. 1993. Hoimischai Khöscht = Heimische Kost: Küchenrezepte aus Gottschee. New York: Author.
Albert Belay, narrator. 2015. Eine Reise durch Gottschee 1936 (five-part CD set).
References
^ abFerenc, Mitja; Zupan, Gojko (2012). Izgubljene kočevske vasi, vol. 2 (K–P). Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani. p. 104.
^ abcPetschauer, Erich (1984). "Das Jahrhundertbuch": Gottschee and Its People Through the Centuries. New York: Gottscheer Relief Association. pp. 152–156.