Bury Me Standing

  Acclaim for ISABEL FONSECA’s

  Bury Me Standing

  “Illuminating.… Ms. Fonseca is as impressive for intrepid reporting as for analytical scholarship.… A captivating portrait.”

  —The New York Times

  “Isabel Fonseca’s harrowing portrait of the Gypsies, ‘a people on the brink,’ is a remarkable achievement. With its sure grasp of a bewildering, scattered, complex history, her book renders the Gypsies’ experience and search for identity with profound sympathy and brilliant insight. A gripping, original work.”

  —Edward W. Said

  “Bury Me Standing [is] the superb and unique documentation and history, the vivid and scholarly, the passionate and disciplined, the excruciatingly fair account of a people close to me. The Gypsies and I have waited for this book.”

  —Yehudi Menuhin

  “Layered with lore, history, sharp social analysis and amazingly candid and thoughtful impressions, Bury Me Standing is a rich narrative account of Fonseca’s travels through a number of Romany communities at a time when the Gypsy people have begun to unravel their past and take charge of their future.”

  —The Nation

  “Many books have been written about post-communist Europe, but none displays such selfless commitment to its subject as Bury Me Standing.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Bury Me Standing admirably musters difficult material into a story of vividly sketched individuals and enlightening ideas, told with fellow feeling and clear-eyed wit.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A lovingly researched, finely written book.… Bury Me Standing blends a satisfying combination of demographic, ethnographic, political and historical material with the impressions and anecdotes of personal report.”

  —Washington Times

  “A hugely valuable contribution to the knowledge of what must be the most maligned, misunderstood, despised, secretive, survivalistic, colorful, fascinating group of people in the world.… A compelling history.”

  —Post & Courier (North Carolina)

  “Bury Me Standing is really an anthropological testament, far more intelligent and less self-serving than the average contemporary travelogue.… The book has a plethora of detail, scope and an irresistible humanity at its heart.”

  —Observer (London)

  “One can surely say that Isabel Fonseca has represented the Gypsies—faithfully, engagingly, and with a profound understanding of their life as a nation. Bury Me Standing [is] a genuinely important work for which we should be grateful.”

  —Village Voice

  “Bury Me Standing is a wonderful read. In rich, clear language, and powerful, often surprising images, Fonseca illuminates a world few Americans know anything about. And she does it in a book that bristles not just with images of people and places, but with ideas, questions and connections.”

  —The Boston Book Review

  “Bury Me Standing is a genuine history of Gypsy culture, building on the renaissance of Gypsy scholarship and given life by the author’s repeated journeys into the heartland of Gypsy culture in Eastern Europe.… A real achievement: compassionate, amusing, sardonic and highly intelligent.”

  —Michael Ignatieff, Independent on Sunday (London)

  “From start to finish, Bury Me Standing is an important book, as well as a great piece of literature.”

  —Jerusalem Post

  “Fonseca’s research is always as absorbing as her personal observations are acute. The past and present of Eastern Europe have been inscribed into the very bones of its Gypsies, and only Fonseca has known how to decode these passionate runes.”

  —Edmund White

  “Compassionate and daunting.… Bury Me Standing is a beautifully written, thoughtful and compelling book fueled by a solid moral vision that helps us comprehend a misunderstood people struggling on the wastelands of Eastern Europe.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  ISABEL FONSECA

  Bury Me Standing

  Isabel Fonseca was educated at Columbia University and Oxford University. She was an assistant editor at the Times Literary Supplement and has written for a wide range of publications, including The Independent, Vogue, The Nation, and The Wall Street Journal. She lives in London.

  FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, OCTOBER 1996

  Copyright © 1995 by Isabel Fonseca

  Maps copyright © 1995 by David Lindroth, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Fonseca, Isabel.

  Bury me standing : the Gypsies and their journey / by Isabel Fonseca.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76104-0

  1. Gypsies—History. I. Title

  DX115.F66 1995

  909’.0491497—dC20

  95-14272

  Author photograph copyright © Marion Ettlinger

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  To my brother Bruno

  1958–1994

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the result of many visits, long and short, to East Central Europe—to Albania, Bulgaria, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Moldova, Poland, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia—between 1991 and 1995. I would like to thank (more or less alphabetically) Igor Antip, David Binder, Holly Cartner, Marcel Courtiade, the Duka family, Rajko Djuric, Moris Farhi, Edmund Fawcett, Angus Fraser, Andreas Freudenberg, Nicolae Gheorghe, Gabrielle Glaser, Ian Hancock, Herbert Heuss, Milena Hübschmannová, Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, Pete Mercer, Luminitsa Mihai, Sybil Milton, Andrzej Mirga, David Mulcahy, Ljumnja Osmani, Carol Silverman, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Martine Tassy, Corin Trandofir, Rachel Tritt, Ted Zang, and Ina Zoon. Larry Watts and Livia Plaks of the Project on Ethnic Relations were also helpful.

  I am especially indebted to Donald Kenrick, co-author of the pioneering study The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. Over four years he patiently responded to my ideas and impressions and finally he read the whole book in manuscript. And I am grateful to Mick Imlah, Richard Cornuelle, John Ryle, Martin Amis, and Michael Glazebrook, who also read and improved this book in typescript.

  In the text I have changed some names. I have not always given surnames. Often these were not volunteered for various reasons.

  I changed people’s names if they asked not to be identified and also if I thought that they didn’t really understand that their stories might be read by strangers. I never concealed my notes, or the likelihood that I would reproduce and publish them, but this is one of the dilemmas of writing about a largely illiterate people: What could such declarations of intent mean to many of the illiterate, and isolated, Roma I met? I apologize to anyone mentioned by name who would have preferred anonymity.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Map

  Out of the Mouth of Papusza: A Cautionary Tale

  ONE: The Dukas of Albania

  Kinostudio

  Everybody Sees Only His Own Dish

  Women’s Work

  Learning to Speak

  Into Town

  The Zoo

  To Mbrostar

  TWO: Hindupen

  THREE: Antoinette, Emilia, and Elena

  FOUR: The Least Obedient People in the World

&n
bsp; Emilian of Bolintin Deal

  A Social Problem

  Slavery

  No Place to Go

  FIVE: The Other Side

  SIX: Zigeuner Chips

  SEVEN: The Devouring

  EIGHT: The Temptation to Exist

  Selected and Annotated Bibliography

  Photographic Credits

  Map of East Central Europe

  Out of the Mouth of Papusza:

  A Cautionary Tale

  HER REAL NAME was Bronislawa Wajs, but she is known by her Gypsy name, Papusza: “Doll.” Papusza was one of the greatest Gypsy singers and poets ever and, for a while, one of the most celebrated. She lived all her life in Poland, and when she died in 1987 nobody noticed.

  Like most Polish Gypsies, Papusza’s family was nomadic—part of a great kumpania, or band of families, traveling with horses and in caravans, with the men at the front and the women and children following behind in open carts. Some of the richer families had elaborately carved hard-top caravans with narrow glass windows, sometimes diamond-shaped and set in painted wood frames. There might be as many as twenty caravans in the kumpania. Men, women, children, horses, carts, dogs: until the mid-1960s they moved along, down from Vilnius, through the eastern forests of Volhynia (where thousands of Polish Gypsies waited out the war), crossing into the Tatra mountains in the south. On the road, the silhouette of the Polska Roma would sometimes include the shapes of bears, their living, dancing livelihood. But Papusza’s people were harpists, and from the northern Lithuanian towns to the eastern Tatras they hauled the great stringed instruments, upright over the wagons like sails.

  While it traveled, the kumpania maintained contact with other convoys of the same clan moving along separate routes. They would leave signs at crossroads—a bunch of twigs tied with a red rag, a branch broken in a particular way, a notched bone—the signs called shpera among the Polish Gypsies (and patrin, or leaf, everywhere else, from Kosovo to Peterborough). Fearing the devil’s spawn, villagers stayed clear of these markers.

  This is how Papusza learned to read and write. When the kumpania stopped for more than a day or two—and even nomadic families usually had winter digs somewhere—she would bring to a likely villager a stolen chicken in exchange for lessons. For more chickens she acquired books, a secret library beneath the harps. Even today, around three-quarters of Gypsy women are illiterate. When Papusza was growing up in the 1920s, literacy among Gypsies was almost unknown, and when she was caught reading she was beaten and her books and magazines were destroyed. Equally intolerable to her family was her desire, when the time came, to go with the blackest-eyed teenage boy in the kumpania. At fifteen she was married by arrangement to an old and revered harpist, Dionizy Wajs. It was a good marriage, and she was very unhappy. She bore no children. She began to sing.

  Whatever Papusza lacked in companionship or lost in love, in Dionizy Wajs she at least found an accompanist. Drawing from the great Gypsy tradition of improvised storytelling, and from short simple folk songs, she composed long ballads—part song, part poem, spontaneously “enacted.” Like most Gypsy songs, Papusza’s were wringing laments of poverty, impossible love, and, later, yearning for a lost freedom. Like most Gypsy songs, they were equally plangent in tone and in subject: they spoke of rootlessness and the lungo drom, or long road, of no particular place to go—and of no turning back.

  Papusza lost more than a hundred members of her family during the war. But even this was not the tragedy that would shape her. She wrote at a critical moment in her people’s history, in Poland and (unknown to her) everywhere else: one life—life along the lungo drom, life on the road—was coming to an end and nothing recognizable or tolerable looked like taking its place.

  O Lord, where should I go?

  What can I do?

  Where can I find

  Legends and songs?

  I do not go to the forest,

  I meet with no rivers.

  O forest, my father,

  My black father!

  The time of the wandering Gypsies

  Has long passed. But I see them,

  They are bright,

  Strong and clear like water.

  You can hear it

  Wandering

  when it wishes to speak.

  But poor thing it has no speech.…

  … the water does not look behind.

  It flees, runs farther away,

  Where eyes will not see her,

  The water that wanders.

  Nostalgia is the essence of Gypsy song, and seems always to have been. But nostalgia for what? Nostos is the Greek for “a return home”; the Gypsies have no home, and, perhaps uniquely among peoples, they have no dream of a homeland. Utopia—ou topos—means “no place.” Nostalgia for Utopia: a return home to no place. O lungo drom. The long road.

  Perhaps it is the yearning itself which is celebrated, even a yearning for a past one never had (the most powerful kind). Such yearning is the impetus to travel. But the nostalgia of Gypsy song is weighted with fatalism. “The crack of Doom / is coming soon. / Let it come, / It doesn’t matter,” goes the refrain of a Serbian Gypsy song.

  Many of Papusza’s song-poems fit into this tradition: through hundreds of refinements and retellings, they are mostly faceless, highly stylized distillations of collective experience. You find a few Gypsy Antigones—girls mourning their dead brothers—and sons, far from home or in prison, missing their mothers. Everyone has a brother. Everyone has a mother. Everyone has a tragedy. It is impossible to tell the origin or era of most songs by their words, because they speak of the universal and unchanging cacimos—truth—of a people living as best they can, outside history.

  The collective oeuvre of the handful of Romany poets working today attests to an unresolved tension between a loyalty to lore and the individual’s slightly guilty attempt to map out his or her own experience. Forty years ago, Papusza had already made the complete progression from the collective and the abstract to a private, minutely observed world.

  Her great songs, which she sometimes just called “Song Out of the Head of Papusza,” are in her own singular voice, a style that for the most part is still unheard of in Gypsy culture. Papusza wrote and sang of specific incidents and places. She bore witness. A long autobiographical ballad about hiding in the forests during the war is simply called “Bloody Tears: What We Went Through Under the Germans in Volhynia in the Years 43 and 44.” She wrote not just about her own people, and of the vague threat of the gadjikano (non-Gypsy) world; she also wrote of the Jews with whom her people shared forests and fate; she wrote of “Ashfitz.”

  Karol Siwak, a fiddler from Papusza’s kumpania, 1949 (photo credits)

  By chance, in the summer of 1949, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski saw Papusza sing and immediately recognized her talent. He began collecting and transcribing the stories that she had painstakingly copied out in Romani, written phonetically in the Polish alphabet. In October of 1950 several of Papusza’s poems appeared in a magazine called Problemy, alongside an interview with Ficowski by the distinguished Polish poet Julian Tuwim. There is talk of the ills of “wandering,” and the piece ends with a Romani translation of the Communist “Internationale.” The author of what is still the most important book on Polish Gypsies, Ficowski became an adviser on “the Gypsy question.” The first edition of his book (1953) includes a chapter called “The Right Way,” which—though omitted in subsequent editions and perhaps included only as a condition of publication—gave his backing to the government policy of settlement for the fewer than fifteen thousand Polish Gypsies who had survived the war. Ficowski cites Papusza herself as an ideal, and suggests her poems might be used for propaganda purposes among Gypsies. “Her greatest period of poetry writing was around 1950,” Ficowski noted, “soon after she abandoned the nomadic way of life.” Despite the fact that her poems constitute an elegy for that life—not so much abandoned as confiscated—Ficowski, in his role as an apologist for the government policy of compulsory sede
ntarization, asserted that she was “a participant and mouthpiece” for these changes.

  The new socialist government in postwar Poland aspired to build a nationally and ethnically homogeneous state. Although the Gypsies accounted for about .005 percent of the population, “the Gypsy problem” was labeled an “important state task,” and an Office for Gypsy Affairs was established under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs—that is, the police. It was in operation until 1989.

  In 1952 a broad program to enforce the settlement of Gypsies also came into effect: it was known as the Great Halt (although that goal was not achieved in Poland until the late 1970s, when travel, at least in caravans, was finally stopped). The plan belonged to the feverish fashion for “productivization,” which, with its well-intended welfare provisions, in fact imposed a new culture of dependency on the Gypsies, who had always opposed it. Similar legislation would be adopted in Czechoslovakia (1958), in Bulgaria (1958), and in Romania (1962), as the vogue for forced assimilation gathered momentum. Meanwhile in the West, the opposite legislative trend, one enforcing nomadism, was emerging, though by the late 1960s settlement was the goal everywhere. In the England and Wales of 1960, for example, legislation kept Gypsies on the move—in fact, they were only “legal” while in motion. But within a decade the reverse was true, as the 1968 Caravan Sites Act aimed to settle Gypsies (partially by a technique of population control known as “designation,” in which whole large areas of the country were declared off-limits to Travelers).

  Reformers through time, Ficowski included, no doubt believed that such measures would greatly improve the difficult lives of Gypsies: education was the only hope for the emancipation of these people who lived “outside history”; and settlement would bring education.