Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Held Captive to Old Ways of Life in Newly Free Societies

Polish journalist Szabłowski (The Assassin from April) gives a sharply drawn account of people in “newly free societies” who long for life to be the same as it was in the unfree past. His title derives from the centuries-old practice in Bulgaria of training bears to dance, a practice that was outlawed when the country joined the E.U. in 2007, forcing the release of the dancing bears into the wild. To this day, the bears miss their masters and dance for them whenever they are reunited. Szabłowski’s book comes in two parts, first telling a heartrending story of the bears and their keepers, then sketching individual profiles, mainly of Eastern Europeans unhappy with freedom and change. The voices include a Ukrainian priest who thinks the European Union is a satanic temptation and last-gasp Stalin worshippers in the Caucasus. Szabłowski ends with an unhappy Greek railing against German-imposed austerity and capitalism. Connected by the allegory of performing bears, Szabłowski’s melancholy personality studies underscore freedom’s challenges and the seductions of authoritarian rule. [em]Agent: Magdalena Debowska, Polish Rights. (Mar. 2018) [/em]