Shadow Partisan:
Ellsberg, Peggy
ONCE IN A BALKAN VILLAGE SHADOW PUTES1M Nadja Tesich New Rivers Press, $9.95, 215 pp. Peggy EUsberg hadow Partisan is an unusual, hypnotic first novel by a Yugoslavian-born author. Its narrator...
...Women pay long, frequent visits and study the future in coffee grounds, knit and embroider, discuss childbirth, make the sign of the cross...
...the women talking, talking, talking...
...Spring is just starting in the leaves, pale green, pale blue sky...
...Shadow Partisan left me less with the feeling that I had read a novel than that I had seen something cinematic, or rather, something like a beautiful, grainy, old movie on a very small screen.y small screen...
...Anna insists repeatedly...
...Atone point, in the randomness of time thaccharacterizes childhood and its narrations, the pictures of Stalin come down fitem the walls, there are no more red flHgs, and the new word around the coffee table is "Cominform...
...the gypsy circus...
...With die eggs ready, run out on the street, take your egg, hold it in your fist, and tap the egg of the person holding his, always with the pointed end...
...The book ends- with Anna, her mother, and her brother embarking on the journey to America "where wars never happen" and where "no one is poor or sick...
...Then there was much light and a roaring sound and screams...
...In this village, saints' days are assiduously observed...
...Avoid TB...
...We hardboil eggs with different plants to get different colors, onion makes them a deep yellow shade, tree bark brown...
...Anna's little brother reads "a comic strip, a new thing since we broke up with the Russians...
...Its narrator is the wise child Anna, innocent, stubborn, hectoring, observant...
...Gypsies are good1 luck-they are colorful and musical, and it is spiritually prudent to leave food for on the graves of the recently de-ceased...
...The "peasant" kids, who make many appearances in this absorbing recital woven of homespun folklorica, strands of overheard talk, and unmatched threads of political events, come to school wearing long thick braids tied with pieces of brightly colored wool...
...She addresses us with conversational familiarity, and we enter quickly the detailed, immediate world of Anna's childhood in an unnamed Balkan village at the end of World War II...
...After that, pictures of Marx and Lenin are hung on the walls of the kindergarten, and the children clench their little fists, shouting slogans...
...Turks," however, are bad-Grandma once defended their home by beaning five huge, mustachioed Turks with an iron skillet...
...Old women say: "Spit three times for good luck...
...As the boys pound on the large, metallic egg, something makes her move away...
...I shall never become a woman, never...
...We build a large fire out of dead wood, and burn winter to death...
...Public signs command: "Don't spit on the floor...
...One day she is playing outside with the boys, near an old house bombed during the war...
...Chedo lost both arms and a leg, Boris an eye, the other two died right away, on the spot...
...An apparently artless stream of everydays, connected only by the voice of the narrator, flows from one season to the next...
...It is for her that we burn the winter doll and eat the food from UNRA and make crowns out of violets and leaves...
...In this, her first novel, she narrates the terrors of war, the arrival and departure of communism, death and birth with the same tone and timing as the memory of a picnic or of washing the clothes...
...They find a remarkable object, "large like the largest goose egg, wonderful colors it had, yellow, green, red...
...Grandma begins by saving the child, clutching her blue baby blanket, from cruel German soldiers...
...old people wrapping their shoes in rags so they won't slipon the ice...
...Then when she is all gone, wedance around the fire and chase each other in the woods, look for violets until night falls...
...The voice seems to tell her what to do...
...If your egg cracks, you lose it...
...Nadja Tesich is currently a professor of film at Brooklyn College...
...You hear it when she kills them on top of the desk with her thumb, it goes' sploush.'" Social reality is relieved, however, by the ancient consolations of folk practice...
...Religious feasts blend with exotic pagan customs: By Easter the sound of bees is everywhere, cherry trees bloom, a new one every morning when you wake up...
...We are celebrating the old Slavic god, Vesna, god of spring, one of many...
...On the other hand, she is immersed in a timeless demotic culture where Slavs are blond (like herself and her missing father) and Turks, who occupied the country for five centuries, are dark (like her mother and baby brother...
...The boys pound on the object with stones, trying to discover what might be inside...
...As a graduate student at the Sorbonne she starred in Eric Rohmer 's film, Nadja a Paris...
...Anna is accompanied throughout the novel by a private, semimystical voice that commands her, "Look, remember, there is nothing but this...
...On the one hand, Anna likes Russian films and stories about the Partisans...
...Anna watches the peasant girl at the desk in front of hers, as lice crawl slowly over the part between her braids...
...Mother saves both Grandma and Anna when the house is bombed and they are buried in the rubble...
...And suddenly, packages containing nylon raincoats, coffee, bathing suits, and fountain pens begin arriving from Anna's missing father, and eventually he pays for then-passage to America...
...Summer out on the farm with Grandpa and the peasants...
...Her technique is a melange of Euro-realism, folk tale, and oral history, and in a story told remarkably without the usual conventions of plot and suspense, Tesich manages to keep the reader engaged with exotic detail and compelling first-person intimacy...
...winter sledding through the main streets of the village, which is buried for months in snow...
Vol. 116 • May 1986 • No. 10
