Tančící medvědi – Szablowski Witold (2021)

In Witold Szabłowski's next book, you will find an unusual story about the last Bulgarian bear trainers and their trained bears, from which they have removed the chains and are teaching them to live freely, without drills. The author finds a surprising parallel between the fate of the animals and the development of post-communist countries in the Eastern Bloc. Through metaphor, he shows us how complicated the path to freedom can be for a society that has lived for many years behind the Iron Curtain, and how difficult it is for many to cope with the new reality. In his reports from Cuba, Poland, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Greece, Ukraine, Estonia, and Georgia, the author discovers that sometimes it is easier to change a regime than the mentality of the people. While traveling to meet his heroes, he examines the reactions of the people in Kosovo to their newly acquired independence, listens to locals in Cuba expressing their concerns about Fidel Castro's life, explores the relationship of Ukrainians to a possible entry into the European Union at Stalin's museum in Gori, spends the night at a London train station with a Polish homeless woman, searches for crumbling Albanian bunkers, and follows the trail of Radovan Karadžić with a Serbian travel agency... It seems that in his stories, which are not lacking in absurdity and dark humor, we are all dancing bears to whom freedom brings...