Reviewed by: Anna’s Dance: A Balkan Odyssey by Michele Levy Biljana D. Obradović Michele Levy Anna’s Dance: A Balkan Odyssey Texas, USA: Black Rose Writing, 2020. 292 Pp. ISBN 978-1-68433-486-5 Anna’s Dance is the debut novel by the American novelist, Michele Levy, a retired English professor and literary critic, who has spent most of her life reviewing and writing about literature by Balkan writers, including that of ex-Yugoslavian countries, for World Literature Today and other journals. She has been writing this novel for a long time and has based some of it on a trip she took in 1968 to Europe in the midst of US and European turmoil. Later on she visited the Balkans on several occasions. Drawn to its music, she, an American of Jewish decent, has taken part in various US Balkan dance groups wherever she has lived, in DC, New Orleans, and Greensboro. Clearly there are similarities between the novella and her own life, but most of it is historical fiction. The strength of this novel is that she is not afraid to touch upon subjects that others will avoid. Levy’s fascination with the Balkans goes beyond that of a tourist. It reminds one of the travels of the British writer, Rebecca West, but West’s 1941 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was a travelogue of her trip taken before WWII, in 1937 which West dedicated to friends in Yugoslavia who were suffering under the German occupation when her book came out. In the novel, Anna’s Dance, which is set in 1968, Levy manages to intertwine much of her own research. While this novel is not entirely about Serbia, parts of it deal with Serbia, Serbian history and culture. The protagonist, Anna, travels through Trieste to Lake Bled, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Niš on her way East to Bulgaria and Greece, ending up in Istanbul. Levy alludes to many writers and their works: Nabokov, Bowles, E. Bronte, Lermontov, Grimm, Karl Marx, Dostoyevsky, Lamartine, Homer, Conrad, and pays tribute to Serbian epic poetry. She uses snippets of different languages: Italian, Slovenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Turkish. She also shows [End Page 205] the readers the best in each of the cuisines, as well as in their traditional music. The reader learns about the history of the region, which is oftentimes very controversial, as it depends on whose version of history one is considering. One such controversial issue she touches upon is the question of the Macedonians divided between the Serbs, Greeks, and Bulgarians. Levy interweaves Balkan history with the history of Anna, who is a mix of cultures herself, part Jewish, part Irish. So we have references to Bassarabia and the pogroms, the Irish famine intertwined with the WWII Jasenovac concentration camp, in which Croatian Ustasha slaughtered tens of thousands of Serbs, but also Jews and gypsies. She speaks of Tito and the partisans in WWII, but also of the Croatian post-WWII bombings of Yugoslavian consulates in the US. She speaks of the plight of the gypsies. She speaks of Ćele Kula, the Skull Tower, in Niš, and how the Serbs, Greeks, and Bulgarians all suffered under the Turks. She also speaks of the problems with the Macedonian minority population and their treatment in Bulgaria and Greece and the suffering of African Americans in the US, of everyday discrimination against them, but also of the Jews in the US. So many people have suffered in different places, but she primarily concentrates on the minorities suffering under communism. Her parents give Anna money for the trip and she, who is close to graduating from college, at age 23, takes a ship across “the pond,” to learn who she really is, away from the anti-Vietnam war protests and the Civil Rights unrests.… After London, she gets on the Orient Express in Paris, then hitchhikes around Europe with a friend, ending up in Trieste where the story begins. The plot gets complicated when her female friend, with whom she began the trip in the US, leaves her and goes home. She, herself, decides to stay and the story is told in the third person limited omniscience. It takes...
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Jan 1, 2021
Anuj Kumar Pandey + 3
Open Access
