In the title story, for example, the main characters are a pair of star-crossed lovers (and cousins) whose villages are separated into East and West by a river that has submerged an ancient church. This leads to many of his stories taking on a primitive folk-tale or even fairy-tale quality, with lots of fairly obvious symbolism. (Not surprisingly, in Western eyes, specifically those of a loudmouthed Texan in the story “Devshirmeh,” Bulgarians are still seen as “Russians” and “commies.” Bulgaria doesn’t even share a border with Russia.)įor Penkov the past, in the form of letters and legends, rituals and superstitions, frequently impinges on the present.
Rumsfeld was, in this as in so many other ways, full of it.īulgaria in this book is decidedly Old School, as full of memories of Ottoman rule as of the Communist yoke.
It will come as no surprise that Penkov’s New Europe doesn’t look or sound very new. East of the West is his first book, a collection of short stories dealing with the lives of Bulgarians in Europe and America. His writing career has since progressed from an MFA in creative writing to a job teaching creative writing at the University of North Texas and a position as the fiction editor of the American Literary Review.
Penkov was born in Bulgaria - then still very much Old Europe - in 1982 and came to the United States as a student in 2001. At which point, as an old woman in one of Miroslav Penkov’s stories says, Bulgaria came to an end. In a famous comment made in the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took a dig at countries such as France and Germany as representing “Old Europe.” “New Europe,” we later learned, designated the (allegedly) more pro-American, post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe: new members of NATO and the European Union - countries such as Bulgaria.īulgaria entered NATO in 2004 and the EU three years later.
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