Peoples of South-Eastern Europe sometimes nurture through their music and poetry a feeling of intense longing that brings them at the same time sadness and happiness. Sevdah, the Balkan version of the famed Portuguese saudade, encompasses nostalgia for a lost homeland, youthful dreams, past loves, or even for things that never were. This autobiographical narrative of a Macedonian woman recreates her beloved South through childhood memories, family portraits and legends, and the history of an ill-fated love with a man from that region. The rich account of a vanished political and cultural world is revealed through sensual reminiscences, tales of homicidal patriarchs, hospitable matriarchs, and existentialist smugglers. The poignant anthropology of displacement that it constructs by weaving together American, Macedonian, Greek, Vlach, and Roma cultures, opens onto a radically different, imagined South: that of her adopted daughter who, in her turn, is destined to leave her roots.
