Anna’s Dance: A Balkan Odyssey follows a young Jewish-American woman’s transformative journey through the turbulent Balkans of 1968, where love, loss, and history intertwine to help her reclaim her identity and sense of belonging. Author Michele Levy talks to Book Glow about the novel.

Describe the book in one sentence.

At once adventure, road trip, love story, history, and exploration of identity and ethnonationalism, Anna’s Dance follow a young woman alienated from her country and her ethnic roots on a student trip Europe in summer 1968 that abruptly takes her deep into the Balkans, where she finds intrigue, love, loss, and, finally herself.

What led you to write it?

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Balkans began to destabilize. Once the Bosnian War broke out, America championed Croatia, based not on a knowledge of that area’s complex history but on Robert Kaplan’s interesting, popular, yet decidedly imperfect Balkan Ghosts. I wanted more people to understand Balkan history and culture and felt that my trip there in 1968 could provide the perfect scaffolding for a novel exploring both Jewish and Balkan identities. This would, of course, require extensive research and a plot into which I could organically weave elements like marginalized and repressed identities, the “other’s” internalized self-hatred (e.g. Du Bois’ double consciousness), and rebellions against that repression (e.g. our Civil Rights movement, global student and worker rebellions, etc.)

Which authors or books most influenced your voice and why?

I always read, even in middle school, devouring the Brontes and others. Then I found Dostoevsky, D. H. Lawrence, Flaubert, Hardy, Conrad, Mann, and Hesse, later Allende, Marquez, Vergas-Llosa, Mishima, Achebe, and El Saadawi. Aesthetically beautiful, these authors wrote stories of great emotional and psychological depth, as well as socio-historical complexity. I wanted my novel to offer some of this.

How do you organize your writing day—do you have rituals or routines?

In New Orleans, where I worked fulltime at a nearby university while trying to raise three teens, only early mornings and later evenings were available. So, I walked through Tulane’s campus and typed out my thoughts in the early morning and later that night would shape text from my notes. On weekends I often sat in our backyard under a Japanese plum tree and awaited inspiration. In Carolina, I would sit on our deck and deo the same. Now on book two, I stroll around out little “lake” in Chapel hill and see what that brings me.

What does your research process look like (for historical settings, technical details, etc.)?

Scholarship in academia requires sources, notes taken and organized, and notes on those notes. Thus, painstaking hours in the stacks of the USM Holocaust Museum resulted in several chapters on the Balkans, especially the German, Croatian, and Vatican connections. Given its time and setting, my novel demanded additional research.

Which character in your book was the most fun (or challenging) to write, and what made them so?

Anna, so close to me, was both easy and tough to write. Max was my favorite. His identity issues paralleled Anna’s. Smart, charming, and elusive, he was uneducated by street-smart and surprisingly aware in many respects. Still, like Anna, he was clueless about his inner self. An actual “Max” existed, but without the many issues I inflicted on his namesake. He, too, was charming, elusive, a smuggler, apt to disappear and reappear while always leaving me relatively sage and secure. That’s why Max will likely exist in Book Two. 

What themes or questions are you most interested in exploring through your work?

Hybrid identities, “passing,” how colonialism inflicts double consciousness on the colonized these fascinate me. So, too, do ethnonationalism, sexism, racism, and the tie between religion, politics, and capitalism.

Is there any one thing that especially frustrates you about the writing process?

Now, I have writer’s block. I know where Novel 2 must go, but what do I do next? Moments of transition frustrate me. Will my next move work organically or fell forced? Editing, of course, because it never ends. I recall Wordsworth, who changed two tiny conjunctions in a lovely sonnet years after he’d written it. Perfectionism, questions of plausibility, psychological truth, truth of historical sources­—all terrifying.

What’s the toughest hurdle you’ve faced during your writing career, and how did you overcome it?

The toughest hurdle I faced—finding an agent. Presses and agents who liked the novel found it unmarketable. One suggested that I write about the Bosnian War instead (which I am doing now). But I didn’t want to self-publish. I had heard of an indie publisher, sent off the ms, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Any advice for novice writers?

I would tell novice writers: choose the story that compels you; work until it’s as “perfect” as you can make it; forget royalties—compromise for the sake of marketability will mean it’s been “Hollywoodized.” Real writers want readers more than royalties. If you write a good book, trust it to find good readers.

What do you hope readers take away from your book?

I hope my novel’s readers will: develop a deeper insight into what shapes us and how we can transcend the forces that enclose and limit us; note how the complex socio-political history of the Balkans, strongly related to colonialism, mirrors that of many areas globally, including ours; realize how little about being Jewish has really changed; enjoy the place, the characters, and traveling with Anna.

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