Everybody knows about the Gypsies. My mother pointed them out to me once, camped on a fifties backroad, perhaps in Colorado, as we drove by. They were dirty and dangerous; the movies had taught us that, and here they were, right in our backyards.
Fonseca knows something else. She begins her book by dropping us into a Gypsy family in Albania, where we live with them for weeks, learning them as whole people with admirable traits and some not so admirable. And watching them clean their clothes, their children, their kitchens, putting the lie to the most essential reason for our distrust.
The Gypsies don't think of the Holocaust as a special time of persecution. They have always been pariahs and persecuted. Fonseca's grim tour of Eastern Europe documents country after country where the Gypsies are hated by the majority and unprotected by the authorities. We leave the book wondering if the sick orgy of 'ethnic cleansing' in the Balkans was aimed not at religious differences but at the Gypsies.
_Bury Me Standing_ documents the universal plight of the landless and non-technological in a world that defines civilization as property and things. Like the Indians, the Gypsies must compromise their most essential values in order to survive.
Dirty Gypsies. Dirty Indians. The dirty Indians of the Great Plains bathed every morning, unlike the stinking, foul-mouthed soldiers who slaughtered them. Like the Indians, the Gypsies live behind a layer of almost opaque misconception; and like the Indians, their desire for privacy gives them no way to undo those misconceptions.
Wisely structured, thoroughly researched, fleshing history with yesterday's news, illuminating this grim day with the lamps of the past, _Bury Me Standing_ is much more than a book about the quaint and fascinating Gypsies.
Full review at www.dancingbadger.com.
